Making sense of the surreal storm of the support for Lindsay Clancy

Lindsay Clancy, the Massachusetts mother charged with murdering her three young children, had become a rallying point for thousands of women who believed she was the true victim. During her trial, more than 300 women gathered outside the courthouse to support her. For these women, Clancy is the true victim of a patriarchal justice system that did not understand women’s needs, and an overburdened medical system that refused to properly treat the postpartum depression that allegedly led Clancy to kill her 8-month-old baby, her 5-year-old daughter, and her 3-year-old son.

Clancy admitted that she killed each of her children by strangling them to death with the stretch bands she once used for exercising. She was charged with murder, but her attorneys claimed that she was not responsible for the murders because of her impaired mental state. Her uniformly pink-clad supporters agreed and converged on the Plymouth, MA, courthouse like modern pilgrims in their matching bows and pink shirts designed to shape the emotional atmosphere around the courthouse and subtly sway the jury toward mercy.

While these women in pink certainly supported Clancy, it’s clear that many of these women came seeking something deeper than simply witnessing a trial. They will never acknowledge it, but many of them appear to have come for a sense of purpose, a feeling of belonging, and moral clarity in a world that no longer seems to provide it for them.

Their coordinated display of empathetic solidarity, replete with handmade signs stating “Believe” and “She Needed Help,” provides a textbook case of mimetic identification as they were attempting to imitate Clancy’s suffering—elevating her into a kind of martyr whose pain gave shape to their own diffuse anxieties. With sorrowful faces and tear-rimmed eyes, the women in pink appeared to mirror her grief, acting as if her pain were coursing through their own bodies.

In doing so, they ignored and eclipsed the three precious children whose lives she ended. The narrative redefined Clancy as the victim, but her children have been forgotten, just as the distraught father of these children, who discovered the lifeless bodies of his children—murdered by his own wife—has become invisible in this trial, except for the social media posts of a few unhinged celebrities who are trying to suggest that he actually killed his own children.

Fanning their faces with their homemade signs, the women in pink stood shoulder to shoulder in solidarity. Whenever the media camera lenses found them, they would drop their signs to raise their fingers in identical—and well-practiced—little heart gestures. On the many days that followed, the courthouse steps became a kind of pilgrimage site as the women, dressed in their coordinated pink outfits, became its worshipers. In some ways, these women became a mimetic congregation drawn to Clancy’s suffering as if it were a source of meaning in their own lives.

Over fifty years ago, the great Southern author Walker Percy (1916-1990) saw where we were heading: a culture slipping out of meaning and grasping for it in moments of tragedy and even in the strange exhilaration of hurricanes. In the 1975 collection of essays titled Message in a Bottle, Percy asked, “Why does a man often feel better in a bad environment? Why is a man apt to feel bad in a good environment… Why is the same man apt to feel good in a very bad environment, say an old hotel on Key Largo during a hurricane?” Percy’s fictional characters repeatedly discover that the very conditions meant to make life comfortable—safety, stability, and predictability—also hollow them out.

But in a hurricane or a crisis, we are suddenly called to pay attention. The world becomes alive again as people who have been just drifting through their days find themselves alert, even strangely happy. Percy’s hurricane theory is about seeking meaning. In an interview with Walter Isaacson published posthumously in 2015 in the New York Times, Percy recalled his theory of hurricanes and said that there is a “redemptive power of hurricanes…When a hurricane is about to hit, we no longer feel uncertain about our role in the world. Everyone is focused, connected, and engaged. We know what we’re supposed to do and we do it.” In his 1977 novel Lancelot, Percy applies his theory of the redemptive power of hurricanes. As Isaacson writes, “people help each other in catastrophes… they don’t feel good because they help each other. They help each other because they feel good. The hurricane blows away our alienation.”

Percy understood that we often feel most alive when life becomes most fraught. As Isaacson concluded, “Percy’s diagnosis was that when we are mired in the everydayness of ordinary life, we are susceptible to what he called the malaise, a free-floating despair associated with the feeling that you’re not a part of the world or connected to the people in it. You are alienated, detached.” In his first novel, The Moviegoer (1961), Percy’s emotionally volatile character, Kate Cutrer asks the question: “Have you ever noticed that only in time of illness or disaster or death are people real? I remember at the time of the wreck, people were so kind and helpful and solid. Everyone pretended that our lives until that moment had been every bit as real as the moment itself and that the future must be real too.” As he put it in The Moviegoer, “Everydayness is the enemy…nothing breaks it—but disaster.”

These basic insights, I think, can be applied to the Clancy courthouse drama, which did not occur in a vacuum. It was simply the next mimetic formation in a recent three-part social media-driven sequence that began with the sacralization of Luigi Mangione, the 28-year-old man who shot and killed United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson outside an investor conference in Manhattan on December 4, 2024. Mangione traveled to New York with a 3D-printed gun and stalked Thompson before ambushing him. Mangione developed an online following of supporters who presented him as a kind of anti-corporate avenger, projecting their own rage onto him against the healthcare system. Like Clancy, his court appearances drew crowds of admirers—especially young women who mythologized him—declaring their love for him.

The women in pink are yet another sign of a futile search for meaning through proximity to tragedy. The Clancy drama followed the same pattern as the Mangione murder, yet another Massachusetts murder trial that unfolded a few years earlier involving Karen Read, a Massachusetts woman charged in the violent death of her boyfriend, Boston police officer John O’Keefe. Prosecutors claimed Read intentionally hit O’Keefe with her car, causing his fatal injuries on a snowy Boston night. And although she denied it, the evidence against her was strong. Yet, this did not stop the trial from becoming a kind of public theater. Crowds gathered daily outside the Massachusetts courthouse as the mostly female audience formed alliances, traded gossip, and performed their loyalty, as though Read’s trial was a communal ritual replete with livestreams, fan groups, alliances, and a rotating cast of courthouse regulars.

Providing a powerful model for the Clancy trial, Read’s female supporters also wore pink clothing, custom pink buttons, and ribbons to protest outside her Dedham, MA, courthouse. According to media reports, Karen Read personally suggested that her supporters wear pink when her defenders sought a unifying visual theme.

Percy provides a powerful framework through which to view this dilemma. When institutions fail to form us, when culture no longer provides purpose, people begin to crave the intensity of rupture. Disaster—and murder trials—become a substitute for meaning. We seek transcendence in tragedy. A murder trial feels more real than yet another ordinary Wednesday afternoon. It feels more authentic than a life lived in quiet comfort.

Percy’s insights anticipate our hunger for drama and apocalyptic narratives. This is because, at their core, so many people are starving for significance, meaning, and purpose. In a world where institutions have collapsed, many people, oddly enough, are craving catastrophe or disaster. In some ways, the courthouse crowds are more like a mirror that reveals what happens when institutions fail to offer purpose and when communal life disappears, enticing many to construct their identity from fragments of online narratives.