If A Father Did This, Nobody Would Be Raising Money For Him - What the sympathy around the Lindsay Clancy case reveals about how we judge parents differently, and how far it's gone

A mother in Massachusetts strangled her three young children. Cora was 5. Dawson was 3. Callan was 8 months old. She doesn't deny doing it. Her defence isn't disputing the facts, it's arguing she shouldn't be held criminally responsible, because she was in the grip of postpartum psychosis at the time.

Let me be completely clear about where I stand before I say anything else. What happened to Cora, Dawson, and Callan is disgusting. I would say exactly the same thing, with exactly the same weight, if a father had done this instead. An explanation for someone's state of mind doesn't erase what was done. Those three children didn't deserve what happened to them, and nothing about their mother's mental state changes that fact.

Postpartum psychosis is real, and it's severe, and it deserves to be taken seriously as a medical condition. That's not in question. What I want to talk about is everyone else's reaction to it, and it's gotten worse since I first started writing about this case.

The Sympathy

An online fundraiser has aimed to raise $2 million for her parents, who are funding her defence. Commentary and legal figures have publicly described her as “not a criminal.” A psychologist testifying for her defence described the killings as “altruistic filicide,” the act of killing your children out of love, telling the court she “did not like to leave her children, whether for work, school or a date night.”

Read that back. A defence expert stood in court and reached for the word altruistic to describe three children being strangled.

Three children are dead. Their own father found the scene, and later found each of them, in the basement, with exercise bands around their necks. And a significant portion of the public response has been sympathy, fundraising, and a determined effort to see her as a victim of her own biology rather than someone who ended her children's lives.

Then It Got Worse: The Attacks On Patrick

Here's what's developed since, and it's the part that made me need to rewrite this piece.

Patrick Clancy, the father, the man who came home to find his children dead and his wife having attempted suicide, has spent the trial being accused, online, by strangers, of having done it himself. Because Lindsay Clancy's team agreed to a stipulation of facts, meaning prosecutors didn't have to present every piece of evidence in open court, a gap opened up in the public trial coverage. A significant number of content creators and commenters have filled that gap not with facts, but with invented theories: that he drugged her, that he pushed her out of the window, that he strangled his own children and let his wife take the blame.

One TikTok user said, publicly, “I do not believe that Lindsay Clancy committed these crimes. I fully believe that Patrick convinced her that she did.” Another said, “I didn't doubt anything that happened until this man opened his mouth.”

His own lawyer, Howard Cooper, has now had to respond directly, calling these claims “patently false and defamatory” and warning of real-world consequences for the people making them. In his own words: “The facts are indisputable: Patrick Clancy has suffered an unspeakable and unimaginable loss.”

Sit with that for a second. A man lost all three of his children in a single afternoon. He is now also fighting off an online conspiracy theory accusing him of murdering them himself, built on nothing but the fact that a courtroom procedure left a gap for people to fill with speculation.

This is a false allegation happening in real time, against a grieving father, while the public conversation simultaneously reaches for words like “altruistic” to describe what actually happened to his children.

The Question Worth Asking

Here's what I can't stop thinking about. If a father had strangled his three young children in the family basement while his wife was out of the house, would there be a $2 million fundraiser for his parents right now? Would a defence expert call it “altruistic”? Would anyone be accusing the surviving mother, the actual victim's other parent, of secretly being the real killer, based on nothing?

I think we both already know the answer. He'd be vilified, immediately and universally, and there would be no ambiguity, no search for a softer word, no online movement insisting he must be innocent and someone else must be to blame.

If that's the right reaction for a father, it has to be the right reaction for a mother too. Instead, what we're watching, in real time, is a framing that reaches for sympathy and alternative explanations when the person responsible is a woman, while directing outright false accusations at the innocent father standing next to her.

Why This Matters Beyond One Case

This isn't about relitigating Lindsay Clancy's defence, that's for a jury to decide, not me, and not a TikTok comment section. It's about a pattern that shows up again and again: the same act, judged by two entirely different standards, depending on who committed it, and now, apparently, an innocent man made to carry false allegations on top of unimaginable grief simply because the truth left an uncomfortable silence that strangers decided to fill.

If we genuinely believe severe mental illness can override someone's responsibility for their actions, that principle has to apply consistently, not selectively, based on gender. And if the public's instinct, faced with the same facts, is to protect the woman and suspect the innocent man standing beside her, then what we're actually seeing isn't about mental illness, or about evidence, at all. It's about who we're culturally willing to extend grace to, and who we're willing to accuse of anything, including murdering his own children, with no evidence whatsoever.

Cora, Dawson, and Callan deserve to be remembered as three children who were failed. Not as a footnote in a debate about their mother's diagnosis. Not as a prop in a stranger's conspiracy theory about their father.

I write about exactly this kind of pattern every week, the places where the same act gets judged completely differently depending on who did it. If you want more of it, straight to your inbox: https://jwhitakerauthor.beehiiv.com/