Not One Dollar

Lindsay Clancy is on trial in Massachusetts for strangling her three children — Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, 8 months old — in the basement of her Duxbury home in January 2023, one by one, after sending her husband out on an errand. Commentator Matt Walsh laid out what that means in the plainest terms anyone has: three small children, each aware enough to understand what was happening to the sibling before them, waiting their turn, calling for the one person who was supposed to protect them, only to discover she had become the danger itself. I won't improve on that description, and I won't try. If the facts are what prosecutors and Walsh say they are, there is no gentler way to say it.

Her defense is built on a claim of severe postpartum psychosis — nearly 20 medical visits in the months before the killings, testimony from her own mother that Lindsay described becoming psychotic and having thoughts of harming her children. The prosecution counters that she skipped prescribed medication and knew exactly what she was doing. A jury will decide which version the law recognizes. That's their job, not mine.

But here's what doesn't require a jury to sort out. While that trial plays out, a GoFundMe called the Musgrove Family Fund — set up for Lindsay's parents, Mike and Paula Musgrove, who relocated from Connecticut to be near her during the proceedings — has raised more than $850,000 toward a $2 million goal, verified by GoFundMe itself, with over 27,000 individual donors contributing so far. The page insists it isn't asking anyone to take a side on Lindsay's guilt. It just wants help covering three years of hotel rooms, travel, and living expenses for two parents who never left their daughter's side.

I understand the instinct behind that framing, and I even understand the parents' devotion. A mother and father showing up for their child, whatever she's accused of, isn't automatically a moral failure — plenty of parents sit through their children's worst chapters because that's what parenthood demands. I'm not interested in attacking Mike and Paula Musgrove as human beings grieving a catastrophe from every conceivable direction: grandchildren gone, a daughter facing life in prison, a family fractured beyond anything most of us will ever have to imagine.

What I can't get past is the money. Twenty-seven thousand strangers did not need to open their wallets for this. Nobody is entitled to a stranger's cash to subsidize the personal cost of standing by a family member, however sympathetic the instinct behind doing so might be. There is no shortage of parents in this country quietly bankrupting themselves to support children who did far less than what Lindsay Clancy is accused of, and none of them have a verified GoFundMe pulling in seven figures because a national outlet decided to feature it. The difference here isn't need. It's notoriety. This fund exists and has raised what it's raised specifically because the case is horrifying enough to generate headlines, and headlines generate donors.

There's also a detail in the fine print that deserves far more attention than it's gotten. Mike and Paula Musgrove are the sole named beneficiaries of this fund, and they retain full control over how the money is used. Nothing in the fundraiser's terms restricts them from sharing it with Lindsay herself, should a jury find her not guilty by reason of insanity. If that verdict comes down, there is nothing stopping two loving parents from taking a portion of nearly $2 million in stranger-funded goodwill and handing it directly to the daughter who killed their grandchildren, to help her rebuild a life on the other side of that acquittal. Donors clicking "donate" today, believing they're covering a hotel bill for two grieving grandparents, may in fact be bankrolling Lindsay Clancy's fresh start. Nobody warns them of that on the way in.

That should bother everyone, regardless of which side of the aisle you're standing on when you read this. A fund built on true-crime notoriety turns unimaginable grief into a spectator event, and it invites exactly the kind of engagement that shouldn't exist around three dead children: strangers scrolling past a fundraiser thermometer between other posts, tapping "donate," and moving on with their day, having converted a family's darkest catastrophe into a small transaction of feel-good participation. That's not compassion. That's consumption dressed up as compassion.

And I'd feel this way regardless of the politics attached to it, because the politics are almost beside the point. This isn't really a left-right argument, whatever a caption calling donors "unhinged lib women" wants to make of it. It's a question of whether proximity to tragedy should come with a payout, and whether we've built a culture so comfortable monetizing horror that even the parents of an accused child-killer can end up with a seven-figure fundraising goal while families quietly drowning in ordinary hardship get nothing at all.

I don't doubt that Mike and Paula Musgrove love their daughter. I don't doubt they've spent themselves thin standing by her. But love doesn't obligate the rest of us to pay for it, and grief, however real, isn't a fundraising strategy I want any part of normalizing. Not one dollar of mine is going toward this. I'd ask you to think hard before yours does either.

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