On September 7, three days after a Massachusetts jury deadlocked in the trial of Lindsay Clancy, a YouTuber named Rachel Fiori recorded a message for the woman who strangled her three children. “You are a hero,” Fiori told her. “You are a f-ing hero. You are divine feminine rising. Your soul came here for a massive f-ing mission. You are goddess incarnated woman.”
She continues:
“You are an inspiration. You are elevating the level of consciousness on this planet… F- patriarchy. The matriarch, the divine feminine is rising and you are witnessing it in real time.”
Clancy, she added, had not killed anyone. Her husband had.
Most people who followed the case from a distance will hear that as noise from the far edge of the internet, the kind of thing a sane person scrolls past. They came away with a gentler story: a tragedy, a mother destroyed by postpartum illness, a jury that nearly did the merciful thing, and one stubborn man who refused to let it. That story is wrong in almost every particular, and Fiori is the key to seeing why. She did not invent a position. She said out loud what a movement had spent two months saying politely, in jury interviews and fundraising pages and comment sections, and the polite version came within one vote of a verdict.
What happened in Duxbury
On the evening of January 24, 2023, Clancy opened the maps app on her phone and checked how long a round trip to a local restaurant would take. Then she texted her husband, Patrick, who was working in his home office, and asked him to pick up takeout. Prosecutors say the errand was chosen to keep him away for about twenty-five minutes. While he was gone, she strangled Cora, five, Dawson, three, and Callan, eight months, in the basement with an exercise band. Killing a child that way requires holding the child down for at least four minutes. When it was done, she jumped from a second-story window. She survived, paralyzed.
Twelve minutes, at minimum, of holding her children down.
The diagnosis the public assumed
If you believe Clancy had a documented history of psychosis, you absorbed it from coverage, not from the record. She was depressed, seriously so. In the months before the killings she went to multiple providers for insomnia, intrusive thoughts, and suicidal ideation, and she was prescribed a shifting set of medications. Postpartum psychosis is a different condition, and it typically strikes in the first weeks after birth. Callan was eight months old. The case that she was psychotic that night was built afterward, in litigation. The prosecution’s psychiatrist testified that she had major depression, not postpartum psychosis, and that a reported hallucination does not by itself establish a psychotic disorder. A second prosecution expert testified that she planned the deaths and was in control that day, able to drive and to speak normally with her daughter’s pediatrician. A defense psychiatrist disagreed, and one prosecution psychologist allowed that psychosis had crossed his mind. The medical question was contested. It was never the settled fact the public took it to be.
Days before the killings, Clancy searched online for psychosis and hallucinations. Set aside what that says about her diagnosis and consider what it says about her duty. A mother who fears her own mind has turned against her children knows the one thing that matters: the children cannot be left alone with her. She could have told her husband. She could have called anyone. She could have walked out the front door. She calculated a drive time instead, and sent away the only adult in the house who could have stopped her.
The jury room
Nine women and three men deliberated for seven days and split eleven to one for finding her not criminally responsible. Massachusetts put the burden on prosecutors to prove her responsible beyond a reasonable doubt, and a juror could honestly conclude they had not. What the public never absorbed is how several jurors said they reached that conclusion, because they said it on television.
The foreperson, Roni Carlson, explained that the evidence proved Clancy loved her children, so she must have snapped. Her proof of the snapping was the love: the journals, the testimony of a loving mother-in-law. That argument proves far too much. If love is evidence of madness, then every mother who kills a child she loved is insane by definition, and nothing about her mind on the night itself can matter. Carlson described signing the verdict forms in excitement when she believed the last juror had come around. Another juror, Paula Devlin, said the panel had let Lindsay down, and that the jurors knew they had a chance to start a conversation that could change something. Jurors faulted the prosecutors for a lack of compassion. And they said of the one dissenter that he “had the hardest time getting off the fact that Lindsay viciously killed her children.”
The holdout, who reportedly faces domestic violence allegations of his own, is nobody’s hero, and the case against the majority needs nothing from him. It rests entirely on their words. A prospective juror who announced during selection that she hoped to start a national conversation, that she felt a duty not to let the defendant down, and that she would hold it against a fellow juror if he kept dwelling on three strangled children would never have been seated. Said afterward, on camera, it was received as compassion.
The movement outside
The jury room was the polite version. Outside it, supporters gathered at the courthouse, and a GoFundMe for Clancy’s parents passed $1.1 million after the mistrial, drew more than 35,000 donors, and raised its goal to $3 million. The fund says it asks no one to take a side on the case. Its organizer told reporters she started it because she felt she needed to help Clancy’s case in some way.
Then the movement found its villain. Patrick Clancy came home to his three children strangled in his basement. Within the movement’s logic, a man in that position cannot be a victim, so he became a suspect. Conspiracy theories about him spread far enough that national outlets covered them, and his attorney has publicly demanded an end to what he calls a defamation campaign. Fiori’s “he murdered them” was not a fringe deviation from this. It was the conclusion, stated without the manners.
While the jury deliberated, an Illinois mother named Corie Walsh was charged with strangling her two-year-old son. Witnesses told police she had become very invested in the Clancy trial and had been texting friends about it until hours before. She has been charged, not convicted, and no one can say what the trial did inside her head. Everyone can see what the movement was broadcasting to every mother in crisis who was watching: kill your children and a crowd will call you a hero.
What they believe
The belief under all of this deserves to be stated the way its adherents would state it, because stated fairly it is persuasive.
For thousands of years the world has been ordered by a masculine principle of control, hierarchy, and conquest, logic cut away from feeling. What that order could not control, it suppressed, and it suppressed the feminine most of all: intuition, the body, the rhythms of birth and care, a way of knowing that no institution bothers to measure. Mothers carry the heaviest share. They are expected to bear children, recover on schedule, and smile. When they say they are drowning, doctors hand them pills and husbands hand them back the baby. So when a mother breaks, her breaking is the system’s violence surfacing through the body it has been crushing. To call her a murderer is to side with the order that broke her. To stand with her is to stand with every woman who was never believed. And the rising of the divine feminine, women trusting their own knowing over male institutions, is the healing the world has been waiting for.
A great many decent women will read that and recognize something true in it: the dismissal, the exhaustion, the doctor who did not listen. That recognition is how the belief recruits. Now carry it down the basement stairs in Duxbury.
Why it fails
It cannot be wrong. Every fact confirms it. The timed errand proves how deep the illness ran. The husband’s grief is cover. The dissenting juror is the patriarchy in a chair. The medical experts who found depression rather than psychosis are the system protecting itself. A belief that absorbs every piece of contrary evidence as further proof has stopped being a theory about the world. It is a faith, and it has the defining trait of a fanatical one: nothing that happens can count against it.
It erases the woman it claims to exalt. The only thing that makes a person more than an event is authorship of her own acts, and this belief takes that away. Clancy becomes a vessel the system acted through, a body the violence surfaced in. That is the oldest argument ever made against women. Massachusetts seated its first women jurors in 1950, admitted on the premise that women are rational citizens who can weigh evidence and answer for their judgments. Seventy-six years later, in Plymouth, jurors reasoned that a woman who timed an errand and held down three children in succession could not have meant it, and the movement called that reasoning a victory for women.
It has room for one victim. The children appear in this belief only as something that happened to their mother. Their deaths are the evidence of her suffering, the proof of the system’s cruelty, the scenery for her awakening. Fiori told Clancy she had sacrificed so much. Cora, Dawson, and Callan did not sacrifice anything. They were killed.
And it needs a man to blame. Patrick, the holdout, the prosecutors without compassion, “the patriarchy.” A worldview that can only locate evil in one sex has decided the verdict before anyone opens the file.
Change the tribe
Run the test honestly. A father studies a map, times his wife’s errand, and strangles their three children while she is out. A religious or ethnic movement rallies to him. Millions of dollars flow to his family. His followers accuse the grieving mother of the killings. A preacher calls him chosen by God. Jurors explain on television that he loved his children, so he must have snapped, and complain that the one dissenting juror could not get past the fact that the children were dead.
No one would call that a conversation about men’s mental health. Everyone would recognize it instantly as a tribe declaring its members incapable of guilt, and everyone would understand why no functioning society can tolerate it. Courts rest on a single premise: a person answers for what she did, whoever she is. Every movement that assigns innocence by identity attacks that premise directly, whether the identity is race, faith, party, or sex. Once innocence is assigned by identity, a trial becomes a census.
This movement has earned no exemption because its members speak softly about healing, or because the identity it serves has real grievances. Grievance is what every such movement runs on.
And unadulterated hatred.
Prosecutors will decide this fall whether to try Lindsay Clancy again. The movement has already reached its verdict. It has a goddess, and it has a villain. It never had a place for Cora, Dawson, and Callan.