A controversial TikTok trend in which mothers film themselves crying, sometimes while holding their children, and declare ‘Same, Lindsay’ has erupted around the murder trial of Lindsay Clancy, the Massachusetts woman who strangled her three young children in 2023.
The videos began spreading widely as Clancy’s trial entered its final stages in August. Some creators have used audio from the courtroom or excerpts from Clancy’s journals describing anxiety, exhaustion, insomnia, and a desire for a mental break. One widely circulated video showed a mother holding her baby while Clancy’s words played, accompanied by the message: ‘This could be you. We need to support each other. And fight for a better system.’
Supporters present the videos as an attempt to raise awareness of postpartum mental illness and failures in maternal mental-health care. Critics, however, say the trend crosses a line from discussing psychiatric illness into public identification with a woman who killed her children.
Clancy, a former labour and delivery nurse, killed five-year-old Cora, three-year-old Dawson, and eight-month-old Callan at the family home in Duxbury, Massachusetts, on 24 January 2023. Prosecutors say she strangled them with exercise bands while her husband, Patrick, was out collecting medicine and takeaway food. Clancy then jumped from a second-storey window in an apparent suicide attempt and was left paralysed.
The central question of the trial is not the murders themselves, but whether Clancy was criminally responsible. Her defence says she was suffering from postpartum psychosis and bipolar disorder, had repeatedly sought psychiatric help, and experienced command hallucinations. Prosecutors argue that she acted deliberately and also created an opportunity to be alone with the children by sending her husband out.
The trend began after testimony and Clancy’s personal writings circulated on social media, and has since exploded. More than 164,000 TikTok videos had been posted under the #clancy hashtag by 21 August, according to CT Insider, although that figure includes criticism, commentary, and conspiracy theories as well as support. On 20 August, hundreds of Clancy supporters, many dressed in pink, also gathered outside Plymouth Superior Court carrying messages including ‘She Needed Help’ and ‘Peace For Lindsay’.
In one particularly interesting video, a woman said that her new first-date screening question is, ‘Do you think that Lindsay Clancy should go to jail?’, treating a prospective partner’s answer as a test of compatibility. ‘My new vetting process for if I wanna date a man, first date question I’m always going to be asking him is, do you think that Lindsay Clancy should go to jail for what she did?’ she said in a TikTok video. ‘And if that man says yes, I’m getting up and walking out right then and there. I cannot spend the rest of my life with someone who thinks that that woman is guilty and deserves jail.’
The controversial sympathy campaign has produced a fierce conservative backlash.
Dutch right-wing activist Eva Vlaardingerbroek said mothers posting ‘Same, Lindsay’ content should ‘immediately be paid a visit’ by child protection services. ‘As a mom I can’t fathom how any mother could post something like that. Even if they never end up hurting their kids physically, imagine your children seeing that one day,’ she continued, adding that ‘murdering your children is evil’.
US conservative commentator Matt Walsh described Clancy’s online defenders as ‘psychotic women on the internet’ who were in some cases ‘outright exalting or celebrating’ her, calling the phenomenon evidence of a ‘deep sickness in our culture’.
Libs of TikTok reacted to one mother holding a baby by asking, ‘Where’s CPS?? This woman is likely a danger to her child.’ Conservative commentator Dana Loesch, responding to the courthouse demonstration, stressed that supporters were ‘not standing for her three kids, whom she killed, but for her’.
Clancy’s defence rested on Friday, 21 August, after forensic psychiatrist Phillip Resnick testified that she had been psychotic and influenced by a command hallucination. Prosecutors called rebuttal witnesses who disputed that diagnosis. Closing arguments are expected early next week, possibly as early as Monday, 24 August.
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