In January of 2023, a nurse named Lindsay Clancy sent her husband out of the house.
Patrick Clancy drove less than a mile to pick up two things his wife asked for: medicine and dinner. He was gone under an hour. He rocked the baby on his way out the door. He kissed his five-year-old daughter on the head. Surveillance cameras, phone records, a CVS receipt, and a restaurant timestamp put him exactly where he said he was for every minute he was gone.
When he came home, his wife was bleeding in the backyard after jumping from a second-story window. Their three children were in the basement. Cora was 5. Dawson was 3. Callan was 8 months old. Their mother had strangled all three of them with exercise bands while their father was picking up her prescription.
Fast forward to this month. The trial is live in Plymouth Superior Court. The defense rested on Friday. And here is the number I want you to sit with:
More than $1,000,000
That is what a GoFundMe has pulled in for Lindsay Clancy’s family during her murder trial, with a stated goal of $2 million. Verified by the platform. Covered by USA Today and Fox News. Thousands of donors, some of them sending messages of support to a woman who admitted, through a stipulation of facts her own lawyers agreed to, that she killed her children.
And the comments sections? They are not asking hard questions about her.
They are asking questions about him.
The Case Is Not Actually Complicated
Let me be precise here, because precision matters before we get to the circus.
Lindsay Clancy pleaded not guilty to murder. But her defense team did something unusual: they agreed to a stipulation of facts. That means they are not contesting that she strangled Cora, Dawson, and Callan. What they are arguing is that she should not be held criminally responsible, because she was suffering from postpartum psychosis at the time. Her psychiatrists testified that she experienced command hallucinations, including hearing a male voice telling her to kill the children and herself.
Whether that defense works is a question for the jury. The courts will sort it out. Mental illness, medication, malpractice by her treatment providers, all of it belongs in that courtroom and I am not going to pretend to be the judge.
What happened in that house on January 24th, 2023 is a horror. Nobody with functioning wiring celebrates it. A healthy response to this case looks like grief. It looks like demanding better postpartum psychiatric care so this never happens again. Those are legitimate conversations.
That is not the conversation happening online.
The Mob Chose Its Villain, and It Is Not the Woman Who Did the Killing
CNN ran a piece about this exact phenomenon while the defense was resting its case. The headline says it all: Lindsay Clancy admits to killing her children, so why is there an online groundswell blaming her ex-husband?
Read what these people are actually saying. From the comment sections and social media posts documented by CNN’s coverage:
“I didn’t doubt anything that happened until this man opened his mouth.”
Sit with that first one. This woman’s own lawyers stipulated that she killed the children. And the response from the armchair jury is that the husband did it, or framed her for it, or brainwashed her into confessing to it. There is no evidence for any of it. None. Police ruled Patrick out early because his alibi was airtight. The prosecution’s own timeline depends on him being at a pharmacy and a restaurant while the murders happened. If there were any path to reasonable doubt through him, his wife’s defense attorneys would have driven a truck through it. They did not, because there isn’t one.
Patrick Clancy’s lawyers put out a statement addressing the harassment directly. From minor influencers to major celebrities, they said, people making false and defamatory statements about their client should be on notice, because those statements have caused real-life consequences to his health and safety.
The man lost three children. He found them. He has sat through four weeks of testimony about how they died. And the internet’s contribution is to decide that maybe he is the one who should answer for it.
Now Watch the Pattern, Because This Is the Lesson
Here is what I want you to see, gentlemen. Forget the details of this case for a second, because the case is just where the pattern happens to be on public display right now.
When a woman does something unforgivable, watch what a certain segment of women do. They do not hold her accountable. They relocate the accountability. There is always a search for the man who must really be responsible. He pushed her to it. He drove her to it. He must have done something. And if there is no evidence he did anything? Then the crime itself gets denied, and he gets accused of manufacturing the evidence.
It is the same sequence every time. First she is a victim. If the victim story strains credulity, then she is an avatar of everything women suffer. If that strains credulity, then some man becomes the hidden author of her actions. The one thing that never happens is the simple thing: she did it, and she owns it.
You saw a version of this in the Johnny Depp trial. You have seen it in every high-profile case where a woman’s behavior became indefensible. Accountability flows away from the woman like water off glass, and it pools around the nearest man. In this case the nearest man is the one who spent months begging doctors to help his wife, who told police about her thoughts of harming the children, whose own mother, Susan Clancy, testified that Lindsay was “begging for help” and that Susan had offered repeatedly to assist with the kids. Patrick Clancy bent over backwards trying to get this woman care. His reward is a TikTok detective corps suggesting he got away with murder.
The Fundraiser Tells You Everything
Back to that $1,000,000.
Money is the most honest signal human beings have. People talk cheap. Donations cost something. So when thousands of people open their wallets for the woman who strangled three kids, that tells you where the sympathy actually lives.
To be fair to the fundraiser itself: it is designated for her parents, Michael and Paula Musgrove, who relocated to Massachusetts and burned through savings staying near their paralyzed daughter. Parents helping their adult child is understandable. I will even grant that donating to grandparents in a nightmare is not the same as endorsing the crime.
But look at the ecosystem around it. The same week the fundraiser crossed $800,000, the online movement behind Lindsay produced conspiracy theories about the husband, fan edits of her looking sympathetic, and comment sections full of women declaring her absolute innocence against a wall of physical evidence. The Boston Globe covered the conspiracy machine, Boston.com asked how the theories spread like wildfire, and Slate dug into what the TikTok sleuths are really doing. The groundswell is real, it is large, and its energy points one direction: at Patrick.
Meanwhile, where is Patrick’s fundraiser? Where are the twenty thousand strangers organizing for the man who now visits his wife’s trial alone because his three children are in the ground?
They do not exist. Nobody held one.
Because here is the asymmetry nobody wants to say out loud: a suffering woman activates sympathy across the entire culture. A suffering man gets told to process it quietly and stop making it weird. I wrote before about what boys lose when their fathers disappear (Boys Without Fathers Don’t Become Men) - but here is the other side of that coin, what the culture does to a father while he is still standing. Patrick Clancy’s grief has no fundraising infrastructure. It has lawyers writing cease-and-desist letters to try to slow down the mob accusing him of killing his own kids.
The Code in the Matrix
I have been telling you for years that female nature runs a protection program, and that the program activates for her own kind regardless of the facts. Most of the time it operates on small stuff. The friend who cheated. The sister who torched a marriage. The coworker who sabotaged a colleague. In group chat after group chat, the verdict comes back the same way: she had her reasons, and somewhere in the story there is a man who made her do it.
The Clancy case just stripped all the small stuff away and ran the program on maximum difficulty. A triple child murder, confessed, documented, undisputed by her own counsel. Surely here, of all places, the program fails and accountability lands where it belongs.
It did not fail. Twenty-something thousand donors and a wall of “I stand with Lindsay” later, the program ran perfectly. When the facts could not support her innocence, the facts themselves became the enemy, and the man became the conspirator.
That is the code. See it once at this scale and you will never unsee it at the small scale, which is where it will actually touch your life. The divorce petition where the court never asks what she did to earn it. The HR complaint where her narrative arrives finished and yours arrives under investigation. The friend group that hears her side and closes ranks without ever asking for yours. Same program, lower stakes.
The Counterweight
Now, the part I always give you, because despair is a luxury and black pills are just another way to check out.
First: this trial is also proof the system can work. Prosecutors charged her. The evidence process has been transparent, livestreamed, dissected. The stipulation mechanism forced her own team to concede the facts. The truth came out despite the noise. Slow, ugly, but real.
Second: notice that the mob is loud, not large relative to the silence watching it. Millions of people are following this trial and find the conspiracy theories grotesque. The lesson is not that everyone is against you. The lesson is that the ones who will coordinate hardest are the ones defending the indefensible, and you should know who they are. Every woman in your life commenting “she’s a victim” on this case is giving you information. Free of charge. Take it.
Third: the men’s job remains what it has always been. Vet carefully. Watch how the women around you talk about other women’s failures, because that is your preview. Build a life where your value does not depend on anyone’s sympathy. Document things. Keep receipts. Not because you expect your wife to strangle the kids, but because the accountability-transfer instinct shows up in custody battles and divorces at a fraction of this scale every single day.
Information is power. This case is a masterclass delivered to your doorstep.
The Cold, Hard Truth
NEVER FORGET:
On January 24, 2023, Lindsay Clancy strangled her daughter Cora (5), son Dawson (3), and infant son Callan (8 months) with exercise bands while her husband picked up her prescription and takeout, then jumped from a second-story window in a failed suicide attempt that left her paralyzed.
A verified GoFundMe for Clancy’s family has raised more than $1,000,000 toward a $2 million goal during her murder trial, while no comparable fundraising effort exists for Patrick Clancy, the surviving parent of all three victims.
Despite a stipulation of facts in which her own defense conceded she killed the children, online communities have produced conspiracy theories blaming Patrick, including claims that he “convinced her that she did it,” with zero supporting evidence, prompting his lawyers to warn of “patently false, defamatory, and injurious public statements” causing real harm to his family.
Patrick Clancy did everything a husband could do. He noticed her decline, told police about her suicidal and harmful thoughts, sought treatment alongside her, supported a psychiatric admission weeks before the killings. His own mother testified that Lindsay was “begging for help” and getting it from him. His reward from the internet is suspicion.
The accountability-transfer program is real, observable, and runs at every scale. When a woman’s actions become indefensible, a segment of women will deny the facts before they will condemn her, and if denial fails, they will locate a man to blame. Watch how the women in your life react to cases like this one. They are telling you exactly who they are.
Peace.
Watch It Yourself
No summary matches hearing it straight from the courtroom. The Law&Crime Network has been carrying the trial gavel to gavel - Patrick on the stand, the psychiatrists, the cross-examinations. Watch how the story lands when nobody is paraphrasing it for you.
GET THE BOOKS
Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
If this piece did something for you, the School of Unplugging is where the men doing this work gather. The books are where the framework lives.
If you found your way here by a woman’s reaction to this case, you are not the first. Start here: What Studies on What Women Say vs What Women Do Actually Reveal. Then read Boys Without Fathers Don’t Become Men.
I told my GF, if I found out she contributed to bullshit like this, supported this woman, her shit would be on the curb in exactly 3 minutes.
Sadly, this in no way shocks me (the trial), and come to expect this sort of thing.
Maybe I'm just becoming as Pink Floyd suggested... 'comfortably numb'
Yes Rich, women have donated over a million dollars to a woman who murdered her three children and donated a total of EUR15 to me for saving the lives of 60+ women. Let that sink in just how hateful of men that is. A man can save the lives of 60+ women and one woman donates EUR15 to me. A woman can murder three adorable innocent little children, one an 8 month old baby, and women will donate a million dollars to her. This is who women are today. This is why we must subjugate them. There is no alternative other than Islam and Sharia Law to subjugate women to save the lives of the children they will kill if we don't. Any man or woman who is not supporting the implementation of Sharia Law to subjugate women has the blood of these three little children on their hands, as well as the blood of the children that women will murder in the future. That's my position and I am sticking by it.