It’s not until the end of Shutter Island that the audience is truly disturbed. Those familiar with Martin Scorsese’s acclaimed thriller won’t easily forget the gut-punch of learning the backstory of our unstable protagonist: his wife killed their three children. An eerily similar horror is making waves from a US courtroom—except this time, women are rushing to the killer’s defense.

Lindsay Clancy, a Massachusetts mother who strangled her three children, is the name on everyone’s tongue. Clancy doesn’t contest the facts; her defense doesn’t dispute that it was her own hands. It is not the fact of her actions, but the fact of her guilt that is being battled out in court—and, of course, on social media. The defense attributes the tragedy to postpartum psychosis, arguing Clancy was in a break from reality when it happened. Plenty of onlookers—women included—find that defense hard to swallow. But a vocal subset of platform feeds have been flooded with sympathy for Clancy, framing her as an extension of themselves. “That could’ve been me” and “this is a landmark case for women’s health” circulate in content captions, culminating in yesterday’s demonstration outside the courthouse: strings of women in pink lined up to thank the defense and protest… something.

At first glance, Clancy’s shift from murderer to victim in these women’s eyes seems unprecedented. No one dared excuse the acts of Andrea Yates, the Texas mother who drowned her five children in 2001, earning her place in psychology textbooks. Even her 2006 retrial, which found her not guilty by reason of insanity, wasn’t built on widespread empathy. Although, perhaps that verdict inspired the defense’s decision to pursue the same outcome for Clancy. The psychiatrist who aided Yates’ acquittal has reportedly testified in Clancy’s trial as well.

To be fair to the defense, postpartum psychosis is real and rare. It is a documented break from reality, distinct from the garden-variety exhaustion every new parent knows. If Clancy genuinely didn’t understand what she was doing, that’s a meaningfully different case than that of a mother acting on rage or resentment while fully lucid. The law has a category for that, and it exists for good reason. But that clinical question—was she psychotic?—is not the argument playing out in the pink-clad crowd outside the courthouse. Their argument is broader and looser: not that Clancy specifically lost touch with reality, but that any mother pushed far enough deserves the benefit of the doubt.

It is not so much that the world has changed as it is that one moral world has broken into many, each with a different code for a different group. The umbrella of “women’s issues” is a space that culture has deemed only women fit to speak about. Modern feminism has progressively taken old symbols of oppression and turned them into empowerment. The “femme fatale” traces back to ancient mythology, through 18th-century European literature, into 19th-century film noir. Historically a warning against the “temptress” and “deadly woman,” she was rebranded by feminist film theory: female scholars argued that these characters, despite their downfalls, were usually the most compelling on screen. Smart, ambitious, and alluring, the femme fatale became a symbol of empowerment disguised as vice—qualities that made women “dangerous” were reframed as strengths, once demonized by a threatened patriarchy. As the archetype was reclaimed from the late ’90s through 2026, female audiences increasingly cheered on fictional characters who put their own needs and desires first. Whether virtue or vice, it was “#goodforher.” Embracing the femme fatale as heroine never rode on an assumption of what is moral, only of what is justified.

With that framework, it’s easier to understand how Clancy’s supporters read the words “guilty” or “not guilty.” For them, it’s not a question of whether she did it or whether it was wrong—only whether it was justified. Women who claim to “see themselves in Clancy” treat the case as a failure of the people and institutions around her, not something she should feel guilty about. Framed as a case for women’s health, the trial becomes a relatable scenario where women can apply their own grievances about motherhood, which is one of the few arenas where only women get to pass judgment. The logic is that if she seems at fault, it’s only because we don’t know the whole story; it must be someone else’s failure.

In the court of female public opinion, there is little difference between the mother who has intrusive thoughts during momentary exhaustion and the one who acts on them, so both get filed under the same explanation. Just as it’s become popular to see marriage as a constraint, many now view motherhood as an imposition; between pregnancy, breastfeeding, and childcare, even basic biology looks unfair from this vantage point. It is thought that no one has the right to judge a mother’s actions because they’ll never carry the same burden. That’s the grievance the Clancy trial channels: no matter how unimaginable the crime, she must have had a good reason—she must’ve been pushed to her breaking point.

When women defend Clancy, they are declaring her actions justified, just as they believe themselves justified in whatever thoughts, feelings, and behaviors they experience. Belief in the “justified woman” is strong enough to overpower a crime that, by any other metric, would be inexcusable. With the “guilty” standard increasingly out of sight, modern feminists raise the stakes for what prioritizing their own needs is worth. Until the winds change, there’s no reason a woman can’t view the femme fatale as her authentic self.