The Female Insanity Defense

GONZO

Talking to women in pink at the Lindsay Clancy trial

By Jack Ludkey · August 28, 2026 · 6 min read

There is no real dispute over whether Lindsay strangled her three children to death with exercise bands. This trial surrounds Lindsay’s mental state, specifically whether she was experiencing psychosis during the hour her husband went to pick up takeout. The killings are so insane it seems obvious only an insane person could do it, but by that circular logic, every serial killer (of which most are men) would be set free. This is the core of the female insanity defense: the more monstrous a woman’s crime, the less responsibility she bears for it.

On August 20th, hundreds gathered outside the Plymouth Superior Court in support of Clancy. Many took off work. They wore pink and held their hands in the shape of hearts above their heads.

I went to Plymouth expecting these women to be crazy, but found them to be eerily normal. Nurses, mothers, and wives who identified with Clancy despite the fact that she murdered her own children. Whether by elaborate conspiracy or mundane rationalization, they couldn’t accept someone so much like themselves had done something so evil. One woman’s supposed psychosis had spread to the general female population.

I spoke with only one protestor who was there to support the victims. She held a sign that simply said, “Justice for CORA DAWSON AND CALLAN.” Like many high-profile cases, it seems as if the actual victims have become minor characters in their own tragedy. I asked her why she was the only one protesting. She told me she was with a group that promised to show up but didn’t. To her credit, she stood there, alone in the allocated demonstration zone, for a good three hours while every possible media outlet came up to ask her the exact same questions.

A despondent wigger sat in the courtyard smoking a cigarette, his black snapback hanging low as the ash built up on the edge of his Newport.

“Are you here for the trial?”

“No man, I’m here for my own shit. I don’t want to talk right now.”

Fair enough. I made friends with a content creator named Cam, who flew here from Kansas. He had a ZYN container bulging from his khakis as he angrily scrolled through Clancy content on his phone. He sells clips to major news networks, so he spends a lot of time capturing on-the-street videos of people at their most insane.

I expected the Clancy supporters to have too much time on their hands, but most were valuable contributors to society. One nurse told me she only regretted she couldn’t take more than a day off to support Clancy, even though she had requested more. Clancy was a birth and delivery nurse, and many of her supporters are nurses.

Some defend Clancy on her own terms; others do it based on conspiracies. I pass a black woman named Kara in a minivan looking at her phone, who’s been there all day. Her window is open, and I ask her if she’s with the media.

“No, I’m here with myself.”

She’s a mother of five, a registered nurse, and that she believes the husband committed the murders, framed his wife, and threw her out the window. One common refrain from Clancy supporters is that their identity as a women, mothers, or nurses, for some reason, draws them to Clancy.

“So this is like a reverse Gone Girl situation going on?” I ask Kara.

“Yes. One thousand percent.”

She reminds me that Clancy’s husband reviewed a hiking trail on the site AllTrails in Costa Rica only a month after his children’s funerals.

“This hike was amazing. It is short, but LOTS of stairs. You will be dripping sweat. I’m not sure about the $17. I was the only one there with no one else in sight. There’s also zero cell service.”

To Kara, this exonerates Clancy completely.

For many other Clancy supporters, the real “smoking gun” is the fact that Lindsay crushed up the pills in her attempted suicide. They simply can’t believe a registered nurse would crush pills in a suicide attempt. It came up with every single Clancy supporter I spoke to, particularly the nurses. To be fair, Lindsay was on an insane amount of psychiatric drugs prescribed to her by multiple practitioners and seemed to not be taking any of them correctly.

But regardless of her mental state, I can’t imagine any amount of medication exonerating a man from an equivalent act of infanticide. And further, I can’t imagine a crowd of other men showing up to defend him from the charge. He’d likely be killed in prison by other inmates. Whatever is happening here is exclusively a phenomenon of female solidarity.

The other major news networks stick to themselves. The vibe is akin to a slow day on movie production. Empty cans of Diet Coke pile up. Tents, vans idling, AC blasting, a hot Australian reporter standing on a box.

Inside the courtroom, defense attorney Kevin Reddington has the jury eating out of the palm of his hand. One of the jurors wears a pink dress. The state-appointed witness gets tricked by Reddington’s yes-or-no questions. Reddington appeals to emotion, which works against the two particularly uncharismatic female lawyers on the prosecution. At the end of the day, the media swarms Reddington like a celebrity.

In the parking lot, there’s a black truck with a decal that says, “Dead Pedofiles Don’t Reoffend.” The man driving it gets out wearing a matching shirt.

Across the street, “The Plymouth County Sheriff’s Departments Horticulture Farm-Petting Zoo” has a sale on mums, the flower. The petting zoo is busy with both children and mothers wearing pink.

The actual crime is a strangely self-contained one. Three children murdered by their own mother. No one will mourn you more than your own mother. No one loves you more too. Clancy tried to kill herself after the act, so in a sense she may have found herself more guilty than many of her defenders do. Whether Lindsay will spend her remaining days in a mental institution or a federal prison seems irrelevant to me. The real trial is nationwide. A circus of banal evil which has caught millions of normie women in its darkness.

I ask a lady at the front desk of the courthouse if it’s been a busy week.

“Oh yeah,” she says. “Plymouth has the best weather in the world right now, that the West Coast is burning and everywhere else is flooded and that the weather is why everyone and their mother is in Plymouth right now.”

I can’t tell if she’s joking.