There is a point where a movement becomes so committed to protecting one person that it loses sight of everyone else harmed along the way.
The public conversation surrounding the Lindsay Clancy case has exposed a divide that goes far beyond one courtroom, one mistrial, or one family’s unimaginable tragedy. It has exposed how quickly some people will abandon evidence, accountability, and basic decency when the person at the center of the case is a woman they have decided must be protected at all costs.
This was supposed to be a serious conversation about postpartum mental health, medication, maternal support, criminal responsibility, and failures in care. Those are important subjects. Women who are struggling after childbirth deserve to be heard. They deserve competent medical care, family support, affordable treatment, practical help, and the ability to say “I am not okay” without being dismissed or shamed.
But somewhere along the way, a part of this discussion stopped being about those things. It became a campaign in which the only acceptable conclusion was that Lindsay Clancy could not be accountable, Patrick Clancy had to be the villain, and anyone who insisted on evidence was supposedly anti-woman.
It becomes a space where some women would rather support a woman who admitted to killing her children than acknowledge that sometimes women can be the problem.
That is not feminism. It is the abandonment of accountability in the name of feminism.
Three Children Cannot Be an Afterthought
Cora, Dawson, and Callan Clancy should have remained at the center of this story. They were not props for a political argument. They were not evidence for someone’s TikTok theory. They were not characters in a social-media fandom. They were three children who had a father, grandparents, relatives, friends, routines, personalities, and futures that were taken from them.
Yet too much of the online conversation treated their deaths as secondary to the urgent project of defending the adult at the center of the criminal case. People spoke endlessly about justice for Lindsay while treating concern for the children as cruelty, or treating any discussion of accountability as proof that someone did not care about maternal mental health.
People say they are fighting for justice for Lindsay, but where is the same energy for the three children who cannot speak for themselves? Where is the demand that their lives matter just as much as the feelings of the adult who killed them? Where is the outrage when their father is turned into a villain for grieving, trying to rebuild his life, or protecting himself from vicious lies?
Many things can be true at once. A woman can be suffering. A woman can be failed by medical providers. A woman can deserve compassion. A woman can have serious mental-health needs. And a legal system can still be required to determine whether she was criminally responsible for what happened.
Compassion does not require pretending that accountability is misogyny.
There is nothing feminist about centering an adult woman so completely that the children who died become an inconvenience to the narrative. The refusal to hold those ideas together is the problem. It reduces a complicated legal and medical question into a loyalty test: either you affirm every claim made by Lindsay’s supporters, or you are declared heartless. That is not how serious conversations work. It is not how justice works, and it is not how women are helped.
Equality Requires Accountability
One of the hardest statements for some people to make appears to be the simplest: sometimes women are the problem.
That does not mean women are inherently bad. It does not mean women should be denied compassion, dignity, due process, healthcare, or equal treatment. It does not mean postpartum mental illness is not real, or that every woman accused of wrongdoing is guilty. It means women are full human beings. Full humanity includes intelligence, judgment, bravery, love, leadership, compassion, mistakes, misconduct, good choices, and bad choices. Women have agency, and agency includes accountability.
Postpartum depression and postpartum anxiety are real. Mothers deserve support, treatment, compassion, appropriate screening, and access to care. These conditions can involve sadness, fear, irritability, guilt, exhaustion, intrusive thoughts, and profound overwhelm. They do not mean a mother is dangerous, incapable of parenting, unable to make decisions, or incapable of controlling every action she takes.
But some people online are taking the reality of postpartum mental health struggles and turning it into a blanket excuse: that postpartum women cannot regulate their emotions, make sound decisions, or be expected to take responsibility for their actions.
Do you hear how dangerous that is?
For generations, women have fought the claim that we are too emotional for leadership, too hormonal for important jobs, and too irrational to be trusted in government, medicine, business, law, or the boardroom. Women fought for a seat at the table, only for people online to repeat the oldest misogynistic stereotype in the book: that hormones make women unable to control themselves.
Every man who has mocked women for being “too emotional” during their periods hears that and feels validated. Every man who has claimed pregnancy makes women irrational thinks he was right. Every person who believes mothers should be treated with suspicion in positions of power, custody disputes, or after a postpartum diagnosis is handed more material to use against women.
Severe postpartum psychosis is a separate, rare psychiatric emergency that can involve delusions, hallucinations, mania, paranoia, or a serious loss of contact with reality. Whether it existed in any particular case is a medical and legal question that must be decided by evidence, not hashtags, internet loyalty, or a desire to turn every discussion into a referendum on feminism.
I never thought I would see the day that feminism started doing the heavy lifting for misogyny, but here we are.
Patrick Clancy Was Not the Defendant
Patrick Clancy was not on trial. He was not charged with killing his children. The prosecution did not accuse him of doing so. The defense did not advance a theory that Patrick killed the children. The legal dispute centered on Lindsay Clancy’s mental state and whether she could be held criminally responsible.
Yet social media turned Patrick into a target, the villain, the murderer, the abuser, the rapist. “Because Patrick said so.”
People demanded his phone records as if a civil lawsuit would give them unlimited access to every text, call, photograph, medical document, private conversation, and intimate detail of his life. They claimed that records not released to the public were “hidden.” They suggested that privacy itself was proof of guilt. Some went much further, making or repeating allegations that he murdered his children, framed Lindsay, sexually abused his daughter, drugged his wife, or participated in a cover-up.
This is where the conversation moved from discussion to defamation.
There is a difference between asking a good-faith question about the public evidence and presenting an accusation of murder or sexual abuse as fact without evidence. There is a difference between expressing an opinion about a court case and telling an audience that a private person committed specific crimes. The fact that someone frames an accusation with “allegedly” or says “it is my opinion” does not automatically transform a serious factual claim into a protected opinion.
People are allowed to discuss a public trial. They are allowed to criticize attorneys, judges, prosecutors, the medical system, the media, or the court process. They are allowed to advocate for maternal mental-health reform. They are not entitled to invent crimes and then pretend they are being censored when the targeted person objects.
Defamation is the umbrella term for false statements of fact that harm another person’s reputation. Libel is generally written or recorded defamation, including posts and captions; slander is generally spoken defamation. False accusations of serious crimes are particularly damaging because the reputational harm is obvious.
Discovery Is Not a Fishing Expedition
Another widespread fantasy is that if Patrick Clancy brings defamation claims, the people he sues will get to search his entire phone, all of his communications, and every private record in hopes of finding something incriminating.
That is not how discovery works.
Discovery is not an internet reward for people who made accusations first and went looking for proof afterward. A civil case would concern the statements at issue: what was said, who said it, how it was published, whether it was presented as fact, whether it was false, and what basis the speaker had for asserting it. If a defendant relies on truth as a defense, they need evidence that actually supports the truth of the claim—not a hunch that a grieving father’s private phone might contain a secret answer.
Courts may allow discovery of nonprivileged information relevant to the claims and defenses in the particular lawsuit, but they can limit material that is irrelevant, overly intrusive, protected by privilege, or sought as a fishing expedition. They can redact sensitive information, enter protective orders, and restrict the disclosure or filing of private materials. Discovery records are not automatically handed to the public or posted online merely because a lawsuit exists.
The idea that strangers online are entitled to rummage through a father’s private communications after accusing him of horrific crimes is not accountability. It is entitlement.
The Impossible Standard Imposed on Patrick
The online narrative about Patrick Clancy has made him wrong in every imaginable version of events.
If he had stayed beside Lindsay twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, monitored every appointment, watched every medication, controlled every outing, and never left her unattended, critics would call him controlling. If he had forced inpatient treatment, they would call him abusive. If he had insisted on medication compliance or attempted to manage her care, they would say he controlled her mind and autonomy.
But when he supported her, worked from home, took paternity leave, arranged childcare assistance, involved family, and treated her as an adult capable of participating in her own care, those same critics call him negligent. If he traveled for work, he abandoned her. If he showed emotion, he would be accused of performing for the cameras. If he appeared composed, he was allegedly cold and therefore guilty.
It is an impossible standard, because the conclusion was chosen first: Patrick must be the villain.
Public reporting and testimony described Patrick taking twelve weeks of paternity leave after Callan’s birth, working from home, and the family using help that included a nanny for a period of time. Those facts do not prove that any spouse is perfect, and no one should claim a tragedy this profound can be simplified into a checklist. But they do undermine the simplistic portrait of a man who did nothing, cared about nothing, or simply left a struggling wife alone without support.
Patrick also publicly expressed compassion toward Lindsay after the deaths, and reporting has described separate civil claims concerning the medical treatment she received. That does not answer every question about their private family life. It does make it dishonest to portray him as someone who was indifferent to her care or eager to harm her.
The people who insist Patrick must be guilty, negligent, controlling, uncaring, deceptive, or somehow responsible no matter what the evidence shows are not doing analysis. They are protecting a narrative.
A Defense Attorney Is Not a Feminist Icon
The internet’s decision to turn Kevin Reddington into a feminist icon is another example of how far this discourse drifted from reality.
Reddington is a veteran criminal-defense attorney. He is skilled at what he does. His job is to humanize his client, challenge the prosecution’s theory, expose weaknesses in the state’s evidence, argue reasonable doubt, and seek the best legal outcome available. His closing argument and courtroom strategy were advocacy for Lindsay Clancy.
That is the job.
It was not a feminist TED Talk. It was not a declaration of women’s rights. It was not evidence that he is some unique moral beacon for women. He was representing a client in a criminal proceeding, just as he has represented many defendants throughout a long career that has included people accused of serious violent offenses and homicide. A defense lawyer’s work does not endorse every client’s conduct. It also does not turn the lawyer into a feminist savior whenever the client is a woman.
You can acknowledge that he is a capable attorney without pretending every word he said in court was an ideological statement about women. It is possible to respect the constitutional right to defense counsel without turning an attorney into a mascot for a movement.
The Pink Shirts and Selective Compassion
The women wearing pink shirts outside the courthouse became a visual symbol of the deep social divide around this case. For many, the shirts were intended to communicate support for mothers, better postpartum care, and the belief that women in crisis deserve to be heard. Those are not unreasonable goals.
But symbols become hollow when they are used to demand empathy for one person while denying it to everyone else.
Support for maternal mental health cannot require erasing the children who died. It cannot require treating a grieving father as the default villain. It cannot require treating evidence as an obstacle. It cannot require turning anyone who disagrees into an enemy of women.
A movement that cares about mothers should care about mothers before a crisis, when they ask for help, when they need medication reviews, when they need an inpatient bed, when they need sleep, when they need childcare, when they need support from family and community. That is where advocacy has the greatest chance to prevent suffering.
But after a tragedy, advocacy cannot become immunity. It cannot demand that every legal question be pre-decided in favor of the woman at the center of the case. It cannot insist that accountability itself is proof of hatred toward women.
“It Was Fun While It Lasted”
The moment cease-and-desist letters began appearing, the response from some content creators, such as Jacqueline Farris, revealed just how unserious their conduct had been.
Public reports and posts described creators acknowledging that they had received cease-and-desist letters from Patrick Clancy’s legal representatives. One creator said she had to stop discussing Patrick because she had a family and did not want her family pulled into “drama” involving someone else’s family. Another indicated she had removed some content but still believed that calling accusations “alleged” or labeling them as opinion protected her. A second woman appeared to say she had received a letter as well.
Then came the phrase, from Jacqueline Farris, that should make everyone stop: “It was fun while it lasted.”
Fun.
What was fun? Was it fun to publicly speculate that a grieving father killed his children? Was it fun to imply that he framed their mother? Was it fun to turn the deaths of Cora, Dawson, and Callan into a series of content opportunities? Was it fun to invite strangers into a campaign of suspicion against the one parent left alive?
The creators who now invoke their own families seem to have forgotten that Patrick has a family too. The fact that his children are gone does not make his remaining family unworthy of protection. It does not make his wife, his expected child, his relatives, his work, his safety, or his privacy less important. He does not have to accept lies about himself because the people spreading them now claim they have something to lose.
Patrick Clancy’s attorney, Howard Cooper, publicly described the online conduct as a “relentless, escalating and destructive defamation campaign.” He warned that baseless claims accusing Patrick of involvement in the deaths or of framing Lindsay had created threats to Patrick’s reputation, livelihood, and life, and he said legal and law-enforcement remedies were being considered.
This is not about silencing criticism. It is about consequences for false factual allegations.
The Cost to Women
The damage from reckless accusations does not stop with the man being targeted. It damages women too.
Every time people casually accuse a man of murder, abuse, trafficking, or a cover-up without evidence, and then double down after being challenged, they make it easier for bad-faith people to dismiss women who report real abuse. Every time someone says “believe women” but means “believe any allegation against a man I dislike without evidence,” they turn a serious principle into a weapon.
Women’s voices matter. Women who report abuse deserve to be taken seriously. Women with postpartum depression, anxiety, OCD, psychosis, or any other mental-health condition deserve care without stigma. Those truths are strengthened by accuracy, honesty, and accountability—not by conspiracy theories and false claims.
A movement cannot credibly demand that women be believed while excusing women who use allegations recklessly. It cannot claim to oppose misogyny while repeating the same idea misogynists have promoted for generations: that women are too emotional to be accountable for their choices.
The real standard should be simple. Support women. Protect children. Demand better medical care. Respect the presumption of innocence. Do not manufacture crimes. Do not exploit a family’s tragedy for clicks. Do not turn a grieving parent into a villain because a theory performs well on social media.
There Is No Closure
Patrick Clancy may move forward. He may try to rebuild a life. He may remarry, welcome another child, work, laugh, find moments of peace, and try to survive what most people cannot imagine surviving.
But moving forward is not the same thing as moving on.
A new marriage does not erase the marriage and family he once had. A new child will never replace Cora, Dawson, and Callan. A verdict, a mistrial, a retrial, or a decision by prosecutors will never answer every question that follows a parent after a loss like this.
What if I had not gone to the pharmacy that day? What if I had called one more doctor? What if I had stayed home? What if I had done this? What if I had done that?
Now imagine carrying those questions while people online add more: What if you did it? What if you hurt them? What if you caused it? What if you are lying? What if you were negligent?
There is no closure in that.
There is no court result that returns children to their father. There is no social-media theory that creates justice. There is no content series, livestream, comment thread, or hashtag that can make this family whole.
There is only survival—and the obligation of everyone watching from afar to stop making that survival harder.
Conclusion
Women deserve compassion. Mothers deserve serious mental-health care. Children deserve protection. Men deserve not to be falsely accused.
These principles are not in conflict. They belong together.
The version of feminism that refuses to admit women can cause harm is not equality. It is immunity. The version that treats accountability as misogyny, treats children as a footnote, and treats a grieving father as a target without evidence is not advocacy. It is cruelty dressed up as righteousness.
The point is not that women should be punished more harshly. The point is that women should be treated as fully human: capable of needing compassion and capable of being accountable. That is what equality actually requires.
And for those who thought false accusations were fun until the legal consequences became personal: the rest of us are done pretending that lies are harmless just because they are posted by women, repeated by women, or wrapped in the language of supporting women.
Facts matter. Evidence matters. Accountability matters.
