What Lindsay Clancy's Trial Exposed About True Crime Fans

There's a version of this conversation where somebody says it's just the internet and none of it matters. Patrick Clancy would disagree. He's getting death threats from strangers who've never been inside Plymouth Superior Court. Creators with audiences in the hundreds of thousands are calling him a child killer. A Boston University researcher told the press that the social media response to this trial represents a failure of public discourse.

Psychotherapist Shavaun Scott joins Tony Brueski for the final part of their conversation about the Lindsay Clancy culture war — and this one is about the audience. Not the case. Not the conspiracy theories. The people consuming the case and what it's doing to them.

Shavaun explains how the Clancy case gives people something most daily life doesn't — permission to feel absolute moral certainty. The fury feels righteous. The engagement feels like justice work. The two-in-the-morning posting feels productive. She identifies this pattern as displacement aggression — rage that belongs elsewhere in your life finding a target that feels noble. The person doing it can rarely see it.

She covers the moment when healthy engagement with a case tips into something a clinician would recognize. She addresses what sustained online hatred does to someone carrying the kind of grief Patrick carries. And she answers whether someone locked in can come back.

Tony Brueski and psychotherapist Shavaun Scott, author of Nightbird, discuss what the Lindsay Clancy trial exposed about the people watching it.

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This publication contains commentary and opinion based on publicly available information. All individuals are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Nothing published here should be taken as a statement of fact, health or legal advice.

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