There are moments when your body reacts before your brain can catch up. A tightening in the chest. Heat behind the eyes. The terrible recognition that you are not simply watching a tragedy being reported. You are watching it become entertainment. Before a jury could decide what Lindsay Clancy understood on the night her children died, the media had turned her trial into a series and the internet had assembled its cast.

Millions watched the deaths of Cora, Dawson, and Callan become serialized content. Viewers scrutinized their mother’s expressions, searched testimony for clues, and elevated lawyers, witnesses, and spectators into recurring characters. Clancy’s attorney acquired the aura of a celebrity. Commentators built audiences by interpreting each courtroom exchange.

Now, some news organizations appear shocked by the public’s obsession. But they livestreamed the proceedings, extracted dramatic clips, and treated deliberations as appointment viewing. They created the spectacle, profited from its audience, and then positioned themselves as disapproving observers of the public they cultivated.

But, why this trial? Why this mom?

Lindsay Clancy is not a celebrity. This was not O.J. Simpson. She was not the first mother accused of killing her children, and her case does not represent the most common form of lethal family violence.

So let’s be honest about this case’s commercial architecture: young victims, a white suburban family, disputed psychiatric evidence, an insanity defense, and a mother who allegedly violated one of society’s most sacred expectations. As Latina Media Co.’s analysis of Elize observed, men who kill often get a verdict, a sentence, and eventually silence. A woman who kills receives a second act. The recurring question is not merely what happened, but “what kind of woman does this?”

The Clancy trial allowed a difficult inquiry to be packaged as an emotionally legible contest – monster or victim, calculation or psychosis, punishment or absolution. It’s the stuff of true-crime obsession and reality TV.

Sadly, postpartum psychosis is the stuff of real life. It is not extreme postpartum depression. It is an emergency that can involve hallucinations, delusions, disorganized thinking, and a ruptured relationship with reality. Expert consensus estimates it occurs after approximately 0.1 to 0.2 percent of deliveries among women without prior psychiatric illness. It can carry risks of suicide and infanticide, but those risks do not make people experiencing psychosis broadly dangerous.

What the Spectacle Displaced

After 21 days of testimony and seven days of deliberation, jurors could not unanimously determine whether Lindsay Clancy was criminally responsible.

Trial testimony revealed repeated warnings. Lindsay Clancy reportedly saw a psychiatrist 14 times, tried 13 medications, called a suicide hotline, and entered an inpatient program. She also told her mother and then-husband Patrick Clancy that she had thoughts of harming herself and the children. Nineteen days after leaving psychiatric hospitalization, the children were dead.

Where was the safety plan? Who assessed the danger to the children? Who coordinated her medications? Why was a family left to distinguish frightening intrusive thoughts from escalating psychosis without adequate professional guidance?

Expert witnesses disagreed about Clancy’s accounts. One found no psychological evidence that she fabricated symptoms while others cautioned that command hallucinations are difficult to verify. 

When it comes to Patrick Clancy, the public has reasons to be wary. Scott Peterson performed the role of concerned husband after his pregnant wife Laci disappeared, only for the public to find out later that he killed her. Chris Watts pleaded publicly for his family’s return after killing his pregnant wife and daughters, initially blaming Shanann for the children’s deaths. Mark Hacking reported Lori Hacking missing after murdering her to prevent the exposure of years of lies. Those cases do not implicate Patrick Clancy but they explain why the public does not treat a surviving husband’s account as the final say.

The courtroom drama, powered by a sick woman unable to get adequate help, gripped the nation at time when women are losing access to reproductive care, Medicaid coverage, and maternity services.

The Violence Outside the Frame

The data tells a story strikingly different from the one produced by the spectacle.

Among children murdered before age five from 1976 through 2004, mothers accounted for 30 percent and fathers for 31 percent. Familicide is different. One national study found men committed 92 percent of familicide-suicides involving children and another adult relative. A U.S. sample found 96 percent of familicide perpetrators were male.

While Lindsay Clancy was on trial, men killed at least 14 children in three documented attacks. A Michigan father killed his wife and six children. A Kansas father killed the children’s mother and four children. In Montana, a man killed eight relatives, including four children. All three men then killed themselves.

Those cases did not become national dramas. Partly because dead perpetrators cannot provide weeks of courtroom content. Also, men killing their entire families is no longer shocking. It is tragically common in the U.S. Their violence is a local headline, a press conference, and then silence.

Meanwhile, more than 60 reporters gathered at the courthouse. One reporter’s Instagram following grew to nearly 9,000. A TikTok creator reported as many as 25,000 daily viewers. ABC devoted a special edition of 20/20 to the Clancy trial. Yet the less sensational questions – about maternal healthcare, the investigation, media ownership and the political uses of misogyny – remained largely outside the frame.

The Frame as Violence

The individuals controlling this media environment also matter. David Ellison oversees CBS and selected Bari Weiss to lead its newsroom. His father, Larry Ellison, has supported Trump. Sinclair remains controlled by David Smith and his family. Research found that Sinclair acquisitions shifted coverage rightward.

This does not prove coordination, but it does document concentrated power operating beside algorithms that reward gender conflict. For the Clancy trail, the message moves from “this is a tragedy” to “some women misunderstand this trial” to “women are irrational.” From there, it’s quickly on to “women cannot be trusted with rights.” The manosphere converted one woman’s prosecution into an argument that women should lose the right to vote, withe one man writing in The Federalist, “if you’re too hormonal to know you shouldn’t kill your kids, you’re probably too hormonal to vote.”

It is tempting to dismiss such statements as trolling, political theater, or internet nonsense. We have been conditioned to believe that outlandish ideas are harmless because they sound too absurd to become real. Trump’s second tenure should have cured us of that assumption.

Cretinly, media spectacle is not separate from political power. It tests language, measures resistance, and makes once-unthinkable ideas familiar enough to enter policy. Political rhetoric does not become meaningless because it is theatrical. The theater is part of how the meaning is produced.

When people use the Clancy case to argue that women should lose the vote, dismiss maternal healthcare, or surrender authority over their bodies, they are not merely making offensive jokes. They are rehearsing the logic required to make inequality appear protective and domination appear reasonable.

Journalism must interrupt that normalization. It must investigate institutions as aggressively as individuals, treat political spectacle as politically consequential, and expose the machinery turning tragedy into ideology.

We can condemn an act and seek to understand it. We can mourn children and question every system that failed them. We can admit what the evidence does not establish.

We can say, “I do not know.”

In a media economy built to monetize certainty, that is not weakness. It is resistance.