The Lindsay Clancy Trial, Day 26: Breaking News & Everyone's Lost Their Damn Minds
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders has a formal diagnosis for caffeine withdrawal.
It does not have one for postpartum psychosis.
That's where this episode starts, and it turns out to explain almost everything about the six weeks that followed.
As I record this, the jury in Plymouth has told the judge for the second time in two days that it cannot agree on whether Lindsay Clancy was criminally responsible. Five weeks of trial. More than eighty witnesses. The judge has now read them the Tuey-Rodriguez charge, the last instruction he has, and under Massachusetts law he can't read it again without their consent.
Twelve people who saw every exhibit can't get there. The internet got there in nine minutes.
This episode is not about whether she's guilty. It's about the machine that spent August turning three dead children into content, and it hits everybody.
The women who made this their entire personality: the pink shirts, the "Same, Lindsay" trend, a hundred and sixty-four thousand TikToks, twenty-five Etsy designs, a crowd cheering a defense attorney like he'd walked out of Selma, and a fifty-six-year-old woman arrested in a courthouse parking lot.
And the men who decided the correct response to a psychiatric emergency was a constitutional amendment. A retired UFC champion who was calling to repeal the 19th two years before he'd ever heard her name. A podcaster on episode 1,825. A commentator who looked at a stranger holding her own baby and asked where CPS was.
Also in here:
Why parasocial defendant worship is a format and not a female pathology, and what ten thousand people mailing $290,000 to Luigi Mangione proves about that.
The Andrea Yates conviction that got overturned because an expert witness testified about a Law & Order episode that had never been filmed. All 269 episodes were searched. It did not exist. Twenty-five years later, a major podcaster covering this case said out loud that he didn't need his story verified.
The nine murder-suicides a week that nobody is holding a rally about, and why there is no federal database counting them.
Three fathers who raised the exact defense Clancy is raising. Nobody proposed taking anyone's vote away.
And the number that ends the argument: the UK has around 21 psychiatric units where a woman in this emergency is admitted with her baby. France has 15. The United States has four million births a year and zero.
Six weeks of the loudest people in America screaming about dead children, and not one of them proposed a bed or a solution.