Lindsay Clancy Trial Begins Monday: Judge Bars Postpartum-Psychosis Survivors, Patrick Clancy to Testify for the Defense, and Baldoni Fights

0:03 Caalaroga Shark Media. Good morning. You are listening to Daily Crime and Justice. I'm Garrett Fisher and it is Wednesday, July fifteenth, twenty twenty six. Three stories Today. A mother in Massachusetts who does not deny she strangled her three children is one week from trial, and a judge has just decided what her jury will and will not be allowed to hear. Then the loudest legal war in Hollywood grinds toward its end. Except the fight now is not about who did what on a movie set. It is about a bill. And then we will land in North Carolina, where a very famous last name just picked up an order for a rest over of all things, a speeding ticket.

0:48 This is Daily Crime and Justice. We start in Plymouth, Massachusetts, and I'm going to say their names before anything else else, because they are the reason any of us are paying attention. Cora Clancy was five years old, Dawson was three, Callen was the baby seven months old. In January of twenty twenty three, in the basement of the family home in Duxbury. All three of them were strangled with exercise bands. Their mother did it. She has never said otherwise. You know this case we have been with it through the pre trial fights, and it is one of the hardest we ever have to cover. Lindsey Clancy, now thirty five, is charged with murder. After she killed her children, she tried to take her own life. She went out a second story window. She survived the fall, but it left her paralyzed and she has been in a wheelchair and in a state hospital ever since. Here is what makes this trial different from almost any other murder trial you will hear about. The defense is not going to argue that she didn't do it. They are going to argue that she was not criminally responsible. When she did that. She was in the grip of postpartum psychosis, hearing a voice that told her she had one last chance and that she had to take her children with her. That is the fight, not what happened, whether the law can hold her responsible for it. Jury selection starts Monday, July twentieth, and yesterday, in what was supposed to be the last hearing before that, Judge William Sullivan handed down a series

2:21 of rulings that will shape everything the jury sees. Let me walk you through them, because each one tells you how this trial is going to go. First, ruling, and this is the big one. The defense wanted to call a group of women to the stand. Not doctors, not expert witnesses, ordinary women who have themselves survive postpartum psychosis, who have heard command voices, who have lived through the exact affliction, the defense says, gripped Lindsey Clancy. The idea was simple and honestly human. It is very hard for twelve strangers on a jury to believe a person can hear a voice ordering them to kill unless they hear it from someone who has been there. Her attorney, Kevin Reddington, said he had been contacted by roughly fifteen such women, all willing to come and testify. The judge said no, and his reasoning was not that postpartum psychosis isn't real, just the opposite. He said, there is no real dispute that it is real, that the experts agree it is real, and that these women, whatever they have carried, have no evidence to offer about what was happening inside Lindsay Clancy's mind.

3:32 On that specific day, the prosecutor, Jennifer Sprague put a sharper point on it. She said the women the defense wanted to call are women who suffered the same illness and did not kill their children. Women who locked themselves in a room to keep from harming their kids, women who got in the car and drove away. Bring them in, she argued. And you don't have one trial anymore. You have a trial inside a trial. The judge agreed the ex Furtz can explain the illness, the survivors stay home. He also turned down the defense's request to sequester the jury, to lock them away from the outside world for the length of the trial. Instead, he is going to see eighteen jurors, six more than the twelve you actually need, because he expects to lose some along the way. This trial is expected to run four to six weeks, possibly as long as eight, and he says he plans to ask the jurors every single day whether they have seen anything about the case, and to tell them every single day to stay off the articles and off the social media.

4:36 And then there is the part of this that stops you cold. The father is testifying for the defense, Patrick Clancy, Lindsey's husband, the father of Cora and Dawson, and Callen, the man who came home from picking up dinner that night found his wife broken on the ground outside and then went in and found his three children in the basement. That man is on the witness list, and he is on it for the defense. He is going to take the stand and in effect ask the jury to spare the woman who killed his children. He has been consistent about this for a long time. On a fundraising page started after the children died, one that has raised more than a million dollars, he wrote that he had forgiven Lindsey, and he asked others to forgive her too. He has said the woman the public thinks it knows is not the woman he married. He has his own lawsuit, a wrongful death claim against her medical providers, arguing that the people who were supposed to be treating her instead loaded her up with a stack of psychiatric medications and missed what was happening right in front of them. I want to be careful here because this is exactly the kind of moment where it is easy to tell you how to feel, and I am not going to. You can hear Patrick Clancy's forgiveness as one of the most extraordinary acts of grace you will ever come across. You can also hear it as a shattered father who has decided the only way he survives this is to believe his wife was not herself. Both of those can be true at the same time. What is not in dispute is

6:07 that a jury is about to look at the father of three dead children and hear him testify on behalf of the person who killed them. There is no playbook for that. The last time a case like this reached a jury and gripped the whole country, it was Andrea Yates in Texas who drowned her five children while in postpartum psychosis. Her first jury convicted her, her second jury found her not guilty by reason of insanity, and she went to a state hospital instead of a prison. That is the road this defense is trying to walk. It is a narrow one, and juries do not walk it often. Jury selection starts Monday. We will be here for it when we come back. One of the ugliest legal wars Hollywood has produced in years is nearly over, and the last thing left standing is an eight million dollar invoice.

6:57 Justin Baldoni Blake Lively and the fight over who pays for the fight Story two Baldoni versus Lively, The Fight over the Bill. Welcome Back if you were with us for the season one countdown. Baldoni Versus Lively was number three, and we have come back to it more than once since, most recently when a federal judge threw out ten of Blake Lively's thirteen claims in one hundred and fifty two page ruling. We have collectively spent hours inside this case. So let me give you the shape of it fast, and then tell you what is new. Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni start in the twenty twenty four film It Ends with Us. Baldoni also directed it. In December of that year, Lively accused him of sexual harassment on set and accused him in his studio of running a coordinated campaign to wreck her reputation. After she complained, Baldoni denied all of it, and he swung back hard a four hundred million dollar defamation suit against Lively and a separate two hundred and fifty million dollar suit against The New York Times. Here is where all of that landed. Baldoni's defamation case was thrown out. Most of Lively's claims, including the sexual harassment claims, were also dismissed. And I want to be precise about why because it matters. They were not dismissed because a jury weighed them and found them false.

8:28 They were dismissed largely on legal and jurisdictional grounds, some of it tied to a workplace contract that was negotiated but never actually signed. Then this past May, two weeks before it would have gone to trial, both sides settled the rest. No payment, nothing proven in a courtroom in either direction. Everybody went home, everybody except the bill. When the judge tossed Baldoni's defamation suit, he ruled that Lively was entitled to recover the legal fees she spent defending against it under a California law built to protect people who report sexual misconduct from getting buried under retaliatory lawsuits. So at the end of June, Lively's lawyers submitted their number, and the number is a little over eight million dollars to be exact, about seven and a half million in attorney fees plus another five hundred and thirty nine thousand in costs. Yesterday, Baldoni's side filed its response, and look, I am going to be honest with you, watching one very rich person's legal team complain about another very rich person's legal bill is not the fight for the soul of the republic, but there are some genuinely eye opening numbers buried in this thing. Baldoni's lawyers call the request excessive and say it should be denied outright or slashed to a fraction. Their argument, Lively's team build more than seven thousand hours spread across and I am not exaggerating eighty two different timekeepers to beat back a single defamation claim.

9:56 They point to multiple lawyers billing for the same meetings, lawyers billing just to confer with other lawyers, and what they describe as an enormous pile of research and online investigation. And then they hand the judge a yardstick. When The New York Times beat back the same kind of defamation claim, The Times asked for about one hundred eighty one thousand dollars in fees, not eight million, one hundred eighty one thousand use that. Baldoni's lawyers say that is what beating this claim is worth. Lively side is not backing down. A source close to her points out that the California statute talks about the successful defense of the litigation, not one single claim, and argues Baldoni's team is quietly counting on the judge to read it their way. That is a fair legal point. So this is what it comes down to now, two sets of lawyers fighting over the meaning of one word in a statute, with a lot of money writing on the answer. I would gently remind everyone that this is a civil matter, not a criminal one.

10:57 Nobody in this story stands convicted of anything. The harassment allegations were denied and never tested at trial. The smear campaign allegations were denied and never tested at trial. What is left is a judge, Lewis Lyman, deciding how big a check one Hollywood star has to write another Hollywood stars lawyers. So a movie about a toxic relationship ends the way a lot of them do not, with a verdict, with an invoice and an argument about the invoice. And when we come back, something a little lighter to send you out on a famous football family, a jeep doing eighty eight in a seventy and a court date, nobody bothered to keep welcome back, and we are going to land this one a good deal softer than we started it.

11:54 Down in North Carolina, a judge signed in order for arrest on Monday. The name on it is is Belichick, not Bill the coach, his daughter in law, Jen Belichick, who is married to Bill's son, Steve, the defensive coordinator on his father's staff at the University of North Carolina. So what did she do? Here is the entire criminal saga start to finish. Back on May twenty first, the North Carolina State Highway Patrol clocked her jeep doing eighty eight miles an hour in a seventy That is a misdemeanor speeding citation. She was told to appear in Brunswick County Court this past Friday, July tenth. She did not appear. And when a court tells you to show up and you don't, a judge signs an order for your arrest.

12:39 That is what happened. As of yesterday morning, that order had not been served. And she has the same options anybody would have, hire a lawyer, ask the court to recall the order, or turn herself in and deal with it. That is it. That is the whole thing, a speeding ticket and a missed court date. It happens thousands of times a week to people whose last name does not come with a headline. Now the reason this is a story at all, and I am going to be honest with you about the machinery. Here is the last name in the soap opera attached to it. The Belichick family has been tabloid oxygen for a while, ever since the coach, who is in his seventies, started dating a woman in her twenties, and Jen Belichick made headlines last season when she reportedly went off on that girlfriend after a game.

13:28 I am not going to relitigate the family drama because it has nothing to do with a speeding ticket, and I try very hard not to let gossip put on a trench coat and pretend to be justice news. I will give you the one genuinely interesting civic wrinkle in the whole thing. The reason we all know so much about that family's grievances is a fight over public records. People filing freedom of information requests and then other people filing requests to see the first people's requests. It sounds absurd, and it is a little absurd, but but it is also a reminder that in this country, a lot of what public institutions do is on the record. If you know how to ask that part. Is the system working exactly is designed. The speeding ticket is not the system working, and it is not the system failing. It is a Tuesday.

14:17 If your last name weren't Belichick, nobody would call it news. The lesson, as always, is smaller than the headline show up to court. That is the show for today. Two quick things before you go. If something in here stuck with you, send it to one person who would want to hear it. Word of mouth is how this show grows, and it is just about the only marketing we have. And if you are listening on Spotify, drop a comment because I want your answer to this one. The judge said, Lindsay Clancy's jury cannot hear from other women who survive postpartum psychosis and live to describe it. Should they would hearing from someone who has been inside that illness help a jury judge fairly? Or would it turn a murder trial into a debate about a diagnosis? Tell me on Spotify and you can leave a comment on YouTube too.

15:08 And before we close the names, because a trial about their mother's mind is still underneath all of it about them. Cora Clancy was five, Dawson was three, Callen was seven months old. Jury selection starts Monday. We will say their names again. When it does, I'm Garrett Fisher. This has been daily crime injustice from Calaruga Shark Media until tomorrow. Do better.