Link: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/08/lindsay-clancy-trial-women/688470/

On one of the final days of the trial, dozens of women streamed into the back of a Plymouth, Massachusetts, courtroom, filling two long rows of wooden benches. They stood and watched the judge and jury take their seats. Then they strained for a view as a nurse wheeled in the defendant, Lindsay Clancy, who has admitted to strangling her three young children to death in her suburban Boston home in January 2023, before swallowing prescription pills, slashing her wrists and neck, and throwing herself out of a bedroom window headfirst.

https://archive.ph/K606B

“I can’t imagine what’s going through her head,” one woman was saying to her friend.

“It’s not just cold-blooded murder,” the friend said.

“I had suicidal thoughts, clear as a bell,” a retired teacher named Dottie Kiley told another woman in line, explaining her experience with antidepressants. “So bad I called the police and told them, and they had a cop come down and sit with me. It was a small town, and they had time to do that.”

The woman behind her nodded. “She could be any one of us,” she said as the courtroom doors opened.

“With my first daughter, because it was so difficult breastfeeding, I had insomnia and anxiety—I was worried the baby is hungry,” Quijano told a woman she had just met. “I remember one time—she was a cranky baby—and I remember not so much shaking her but going like this,” she said, demonstrating how she squeezed her daughter’s shoulders and screamed. “They are called intrusive thoughts because your brain says something, and you don’t recognize it.”

“I had been planning to run away,” Rizzo said, referring to a moment after her first child was born. “I liquidated all my 401(k) and squirreled the money away. I was going to go without the baby. I figured everyone was better off without me. I had delusions. I couldn’t tell wake from sleep. I didn’t confide to anyone. I wrote a note.”

“My cousin had a plan,” Quijano said, not needing to finish.

“I was just going to start driving,” Rizzo continued. “Stay in hotels.”

“My daughter had a moment,” Lisa, who didn’t give her last name, told the woman standing behind her, referring to postpartum depression. “I’ve been there, trying to get psychiatric appointments.”

“I had a miscarriage in the second trimester and drifted into depression,” Sheila Sullivan replied, explaining that she’d wound up committed to a psychiatric facility in the 1970s. “They gave me shock treatment. Back then, they didn’t know.”

“I can relate to all of this,” Jodi Fournier said as she stood in line later that afternoon. “Not at the extreme, but I can understand.”

“The other thing is, when you work in health care, you learn not to trust the doctors,” her friend Susan Hatfield said. “She was questioning her doctors. She didn’t trust them, and neither did I.”

“I had a miscarriage, then depression, then thoughts of suicide,” she began, retelling her story, and soon they went inside.

These quotes stood out to me. Women want to be listened to, we need to be heard, we are fucking drowning.

Initially, as I was reading the article, I thought maybe this author was going to shed a light on the popularity of true crime for women, but no.

There's too many women that see ourselves in Lyndsey Clancy.

It's so true. I hear this story and it just makes me angry and frustrated with the institutions that failed to help her.

It gives me hope that so many other people see this story the same way. Society is changing if people can empathize with a woman who killed her children.

There’s too many women that see ourselves in Lyndsey Clancy.

Mega yikes

The state of post-partum and health care for women is abysmal. So yes, mega yikes that we're abandoning women in their time of need and then persecuting them when they break.

How would you feel if I said:

"There’s too many men that see ourselves in Chris Watts."

Thankfully this isn't true though and zero men supported chris watts

https://abc7news.com/post/women-are-sending-love-letters-to-convicted-killer-chris-watts/4928963/

I'd say you're using whataboutism to justify ignoring women bringing the issue of post-partum care to the forefront.

She killed her kids, this is so cut and dry it's beyond baffling to me

If she is mentally ill that's even more grounds to lock her up

It sounds like you're using mental illness as an excuse for murder

She killed her kids, this is so cut and dry it’s beyond baffling to me

So cut and dry that the jury is dead-locked and can't come to a decision after 4 days of deliberating.

This topic caused so much division between men and women, seriously fuck this I'm a man and this thread is only for cunts, got it

Considering you're comfortable calling women "cunts", I don't think your opinion on this carries any weight at all.

Do you even realize what is going to happen next if she is found not guilty? There is going to be massive societal changes undoing decades of feminism, and your maga government is already rubbing their hands together hoping for this verdict

This trial is very important and y'all are really fucking it up

Do you watch tiktok if I may ask?

Do you watch tiktok if I may ask?

No I don't and trying to compare me to people making TikToks about the case is misguided at best.

You're repeating the same talking points circulating on tiktok and it's a really bad look

The belief that women need more support in their post-partum care and mental health does not live on TikTok alone.

Would you rather leave your kids with a bear or Lindsay

Women need support yes. But why does this not really happen in impovished nations where mental health support doesn't exist and women are treated as objects? Why is it just an American problem?

It does happen.

I'd leave them with both over leaving them with you.

This case has done a great job at showing how vile people really are. You're nuts!

You know everything you say is on the internet permanently and you live in a five eyes nation yes?

Oh really? Well in that case my opinion is completely swayed