A viral social media video has entered the Lindsay Clancy murder trial.
Clancy’s defense attorney Kevin Reddington is requesting an extra witness to testify in the case: A former social worker at McLean Hospital who blasted the Belmont psychiatric facility for “failing” the Duxbury mom in a video that has generated over a million views on TikTok.
Reddington filed a motion on Friday seeking to bolster the defense’s witness list with Emily Thorndike, a Massachusetts-licensed social worker who worked for nearly eight years in McLean’s short-term unit.
“Ms. Thorndike was incensed over the cross-examination of Patrick Clancy,” Reddington wrote, “wherein the prosecutor intimated that McLean Hospital was one of the best hospitals in the country.”
The defense attorney added that Lindsay Clancy is “entitled to present rebuttal evidence” to the government’s portrayal of McLean as a “five-star facility, bending over backward to, in effect, provide Lindsay with appropriate counseling, therapy and treatment.”
If Judge William Sullivan approves the request, Thorndike would testify on her observations during the seven years and seven months she worked in the short-term unit as a mental health specialist and clinical social worker from May 2014 to December 2021, per Reddington’s motion.
Thorndike left McLean over a year before Clancy was admitted into McLean’s psychiatric unit for a days-long stay in early January 2023 to start her own business, Wise Mind Therapy.
At the beginning of her TikTok video, the social worker says that she felt compelled to “correct the misinformation that this prosecutor is saying about McLean and what the stay there is like.”
“I am watching this case, literally listening to this prosecutor just lie and gaslight,” Thorndike later says, “and I am enraged by the lies … specifically at McLean, I’m like, ‘I know what you’re saying isn’t (expletive) true,’ because I did it.”
“I don’t care that I worked there,” she adds. “I respect a lot of the clinicians there, but no program is immune from clinicians who aren’t doing their job properly.”
As Plymouth Assistant District Attorney Jennifer Sprague cross-examined Patrick Clancy, the prosecutor painted a picture of McLean providing patients daily appointments with doctors as well as group and one-on-one therapy sessions with licensed social workers.
Sprague asked the husband whether he knew that his wife declined group therapy and treatment on one of the afternoons during her stay and that she asked to be discharged early so she could attend her daughter Cora’s birthday party.
The series of questions came after Patrick Clancy testified that his wife told him about the treatment she was receiving as he visited her at the hospital.
“It didn’t really seem like she was getting any treatment,” Patrick Clancy said. He added it took three days from her admission on a Saturday to see a doctor on a Tuesday, “so until then, she was coloring and playing with clay and going for walks.”
In her video, Thorndike explained that while patients legally must see a doctor every day, weekend and holiday doctors are spread thin covering all 23 patients. During the week, patients are clustered into groups, she said.
“It’s not a lengthy meeting by any means,” Thorndike clarified. “She saw a doctor; she didn’t see her doctor.”
Thorndike then stressed that one-on-one therapy is not offered on the unit. The prosecutor, she said, is referring to “check-ins” conducted by unlicensed individuals who ask basic questions and do not provide clinical therapy.
Lindsay Clancy is on trial for strangling and killing her three children Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, who hadn’t reached his first birthday, at their Duxbury home the night of Jan. 24, 2023.
Reddington plans to present an insanity argument that his client was suffering from postpartum psychosis at the time. After killing the children, Clancy tried to kill herself and was left paralyzed from a fall out of a second-story window.
Clancy has admitted to killing Cora, Dawson and Callan.
Alia Goodheart, a psychiatrist at McLean Hospital, testified Friday that Clancy had no signs of psychosis in their first conversation on Jan. 3, 2023, two days after the mom was involuntarily admitted into the psychiatric unit.
Goodheart said she initially diagnosed Clancy with insomnia with a mental health condition, and that it seemed realistic for the patient to start tapering her medication.
She added that while she did not have access to Clancy’s previous medical history, she had no reason not to trust Clancy’s word, ultimately granting the patient’s request to be discharged early.
“She was invested in her children … like a caring mother,” Goodheart said of Clancy.
But to Thorndike, the early release is exactly where the system broke down.
“You are a well-trained mental health professional,” she says, “you know when you are assessing a woman with postpartum mental health, you need to be doing a damn good job of making sure that she’s not going to go hurt her kids…”
“This woman doesn’t want to be alive,” she adds of Clancy, “and all that this case is doing is further traumatizing … The only positive reframe is this better be a marker in history: (Expletive) needs to change with women’s mental health.”