PLYMOUTH, Mass. (Court TV) — Prosecutors are fighting a request from Lindsay Clancy‘s attorney to bring in a TikTok creator to testify about conditions at a mental hospital where the defendant was treated.
Lindsay Clancy appears in court on Aug. 11, 2026. (Court TV)
Clancy, who turned 36 on Tuesday, has admitted to killing her three young children with exercise bands before cutting her own wrists and neck and jumping from a second-story window at her family’s home. She is charged with murder in the case, but maintains she is not criminally responsible for her actions because she was suffering from postpartum psychosis at the time.
Clancy’s attorney, Kevin Reddington, filed a motion midtrial asking to add a witness he found through a TikTok post. “Her involvement in the case came about after one of the prosecutors, I don’t recall which, made it out on direct examination that McLean is some kind of five-star institution where the doctors, the psychiatrists, the psychotherapists, the counselors, were all just banging into each other in the hallway trying to interview Ms. Clancy, who was just blithely refusing care and treatment, which is not the case,” he said on Tuesday.
Dr. Alia Goodheart, who treated Clancy at McLean Hospital after the defendant had checked herself in for help with postpartum depression and anxiety, emphasized the multidisciplinary team approach used at the facility. That testimony prompted a licensed social worker named Emily Thorndike, who previously worked at McLean, to post a video on TikTok.
“We need to correct the misinformation that this prosecutor is saying,” Thorndike said in the video. “Let me tell you how it actually works. … There is absolutely no one-on-one therapy offered on that unit.” Thorndike said that there are usually 23 patients at a time in the unit where Clancy stayed, split among four to five doctors. On weekends and holidays, when Clancy was treated there, a single doctor is responsible for all 23 patients. Thorndike said the “one-on-one therapy” prosecutors referred to was actually check-ins from unlicensed individuals called “mental health specialists.”
Prosecutors had pointed to Clancy’s choice to check herself out of McLean as evidence that she was not taking her mental health seriously. “Why would she want to stay on the unit any longer when she wasn’t getting help?” Thorndike asked in her video. “McLean needs to be held accountable.”
Prosecutor Shanan Buckingham opposed allowing Thorndike to testify, emphasizing that Thorndike watched testimony in the case, which witnesses aren’t typically allowed to do. “This person, who says that she cares about Lindsay in this video,” Buckingham said, “this person who said that the prosecution of this case is an ‘abomination,’ this person who said that the health profession needs to be held accountable for their care of the defendant, that’s not a witness that presents facts to this jury.”
Judge William Sullivan, who said he would take the issue under advisement, suggested that the defense try to find another person to testify whose time at McLean overlapped with Clancy’s stay and who hasn’t watched the trial. “Just so everyone knows where I’m going, I can’t imagine that witness would be allowed to give her, in a sense, review of McLean,” Sullivan said. “If it’s a five-star and she may say it’s a two-star, you know, this is not TripAdvisor. I wouldn’t allow that.”
McLean Hospital is one of the defendants listed in Clancy’s civil lawsuit alleging that malpractice by her psychiatrists led to her psychosis and failed to prevent her children’s deaths.
