Dorothy

The fundraiser is called “The Musgrove Family Fund” and lists the beneficiaries as Mike and Paula Musgrove to make their support of their daughter easier, but the comments attached to donations almost unanimously understand it as a support fund for Lindsay Clancy. The fundraiser itself notes that it was established with the parents’ explicit knowledge and consent and that Clancy’s attorney, Kevin Reddington, is “aware of it,” implying the parents are at least partially paying for Clancy’s legal defense costs in the high-profile case.

The case has garnered extensive publicity between drawing attention to postpartum mental health and sparking widespread conspiracy theories.

Insanity defenses, which are premised on the idea that people are not fully blameworthy for criminal acts that could be seen as outside their control, have existed since ancient Greece and Rome and have been a feature of jurisprudence for hundreds of years. The legal definition of guilt typically requires both action and intention, which means committing a crime while in a reckless, negligent, purposeful, or knowing state of mind. An insanity plea is premised on the assumption that people who are insane at the time of their crimes do not have the capacity for criminal intent, so they cannot be considered entirely guilty.

Clancy, Musgrove testified to the court in Plymouth, Massachusetts, had asked if she could sleep in her mother’s bed and told her she felt the medication she had been prescribed for postpartum depression were “destroying” her mind.

The defense, on cross-examination, argued that Clancy was overmedicated and demonstrated that her care was disjointed, with doctors not speaking to one another, conducting appointments with her over Zoom and not sharing their notes. Despite her efforts to seek treatment, the defense also showed she was discharged from one facility after a day and denied a higher level of care at another when she couldn’t show that she had a suicide plan.

One stupid response to this from people who either have no experience with women, let alone pregnancy, or are mentally broken in some way is to claim some variant of “postpartum depression is fake.” It’s true that, as social rewards for playing the victim have risen in our Marxist culture, people have increasingly sought to label themselves whatever victim status they can claim, including adopting mental disorders.

The effect of true crime on women’s psyches goes well beyond seeing conspiracies everywhere; the rot has seeped far deeper. The favorite pastime of millions of American women has become listening as someone recounts, often in graphic detail, the rape, murder, and abuse of real people. It is naive to believe that consuming a steady barrage of brutality as entertainment would not eventually shape both how women see the world and how they respond to the suffering of the people in it. True crime is not simply a mindless distraction; it transforms the worst moments of real families’ lives into serialized entertainment, complete with heroes, villains, plot twists, and fan theories. The danger is not merely that it poisons the mind; it also poisons the soul.