As mistrial declared and GoFundMe tops $1.1M, a racial double standard emerges in postpartum empathy

The Scene Outside Plymouth Superior Court

Three hundred women in pink shirts. Hands forming hearts. The Lord's Prayer recited in unison. Applause for the defense attorney as he walks past.

They came from Rhode Island, from Massachusetts, from across the country. They wore slogans that read "Believe," "She Needed Help," and "Peace For Lindsay." They stood silently for over an hour before proceedings began. When Kevin Reddington emerged, they erupted.

Their cause: Lindsay Clancy, the 36-year-old former labor and delivery nurse who admitted to strangling her three children — Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, 8 months — with exercise bands in their Duxbury, Massachusetts home in January 2023.

Their argument: A broken mental health system failed Clancy. She suffered from postpartum psychosis and undiagnosed bipolar disorder. She cannot be held criminally responsible.

Their demographic, as multiple outlets and lawmakers have noted: overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly liberal, overwhelmingly female.

And their financial support has been staggering.

The Money Trail

Clancy's GoFundMe, organized by Brandee Mulligan, has raised over $1.1 million — and counting. The goal was recently raised to $3 million as the legal process drags on.

"For supporters, Clancy is a symbol of postpartum mental illness and medical failure, a woman who should be believed — and forgiven," Newsweek reported. But the outlet warned that the movement risked "making a serious legal defense look like an article of faith."

A USA TODAY columnist and mother of four, Nicole Russell, framed the dissonance plainly: "Millions of women give birth, endure exhaustion and physical pain, juggle the demands of raising multiple kids and don't kill our children."

Yet the donations keep coming.

The Racial Double Standard

Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) went further, accusing Clancy's supporters outright.

"Oh, nobody would be supporting her if she were Black," Mace told TMZ DC. "Liberal white women aren't going to support a Black woman who murdered her kids."

Mace's charge landed against a backdrop that makes it difficult to dismiss.

Enter Latarsha Sanders.

Sanders is a Black mother from Brockton, Massachusetts — the same county, tried by the same district attorney (Tim Cruz), presided over by the same judge (William J. Sullivan). She was convicted of killing her two children and sentenced to two life sentences without the possibility of parole.

Her severe mental health records were excluded from trial.

Clancy's were not.

In August 2026, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ordered a new trial for Sanders, noting the court had improperly excluded her medical records. By then, Sanders had already spent years behind bars. A GoFundMe page for her legal expenses? It exists, but carries nowhere near the seven-figure sum Clancy's supporters have raised.

"It exposed that for white liberals, systemic empathy is a selective privilege reserved for those who look like them," wrote Emerald Book in an analysis of the case.

'The Liberal Fox and the Conservative Wolf'

Black feminist scholars have documented this pattern for generations.

During the suffrage movement, white leaders like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton traded away solidarity with Black women to win over white segregationists. At the 1913 Woman Suffrage Procession, white organizers ordered Ida B. Wells to march at the back. When the 19th Amendment was ratified in 1920, Jim Crow laws barred Black women from voting for another 45 years.

During the second wave of feminism, white feminists fought for the right to leave the home and enter the workforce — while Black women had already been working outside the home for generations, often as underpaid domestic workers for those same white feminists.

The Clancy case is simply the latest chapter in that history.

"White liberal women have rallied behind Clancy — a white, suburban nurse who killed her three children — under the banner of maternal mental health and systemic healthcare failure," the Emerald Book analysis continued. "Yet they have never extended that same grace to Black women in identical circumstances."

The Problem With 'Believe'

The trouble for Clancy's defense, legal analysts note, is that the movement may actually be hurting her case.

"The more the case is surrounded by slogans and theories, the easier it becomes for skeptics to dismiss a serious argument about mental illness as fandom or excuse-making," Newsweek observed.

Clancy's defense rests on a narrow legal question: Did postpartum psychosis leave her unable to appreciate the wrongfulness of what she did? That is a question for psychiatrists and jurors, not the court of public opinion.

But the "Pink Mob" — as Mace dubbed them — has turned that question into a culture war flashpoint.

Online, amateur sleuths have promoted theories implicating Clancy's husband Patrick, despite no evidence and even though Clancy herself does not deny killing the children. Social media users have parsed temperatures, heart rates, and family behavior searching for alternative explanations.

"None of this strengthens an insanity defense," Newsweek concluded. "If anything, it adds noise around one."

The Verdict That Wasn't

On September 4, 2026, after a week of deliberations, a 12-person jury announced it was deadlocked. The judge declared a mistrial.

Supporters celebrated on social media. The GoFundMe surged past $1.1 million.

Prosecutors must now decide whether to retry the case. Clancy remains hospitalized, paralyzed from the waist down, in a state mental facility.

Outside the courthouse, the women in pink continue to gather. They hold signs. They pray. They believe.

The question that lingers: Where were they for Latarsha Sanders?

The answer, documented across decades of American feminist history, remains uncomfortable: They weren't anywhere near her.