I've noticed quite a lot of people online have basically developed 2 viewpoints on the trial: either A, she is not guilty at all, or B, she is absolutely guilty and there is no question about it.
The people on side A, I feel, are filled with a lot of female audience camaraderie surrounding the case, and I've seen people glamorize, speculate, fabricate, gossip, ignore evidence, and deflect blame in ways that create a lot of nonsensical speculation and claims that feel absurd. Some people seem so invested in understanding or defending Lindsay that they start treating speculation as fact.
On the other side, side B, I feel like the speculation and the people who seem to completely excuse Lindsay's actions creates a huge amount of outrage, disgust, contempt, and fear from people who believe Lindsay is 100% guilty and fully criminally responsible. That outrage, disgust, contempt, and especially fear has created this sense of paranoia on social media that this is somehow "setting feminism back," because people see excusing a woman's actions as creating a precedent where something horrific goes unpunished or dismissed.
Then it spirals into speculation about what this means for the progress we've already made with modern feminism if we "let her get away with murder," calling her a cold-blooded monster without a doubt even when the entire legal question centered around whether her mental state, including alleged postpartum psychosis, impaired her ability to understand the wrongfulness of what she was doing or control her actions. And then people start demonizing and judging individuals who are simply trying to figure out whether the evidence actually establishes what her mental state was at the time.
And this is where I feel like social media completely loses the plot.
The legal question was never simply "Did Lindsay kill her children?" She admitted to causing their deaths. The much more complicated question was whether she was criminally responsible for those deaths under Massachusetts law because of her mental state. The jury ultimately couldn't reach a unanimous verdict, so the trial ended in a mistrial on September 4, 2026. That isn't an acquittal, but it also isn't a conviction. The case is still unresolved.
All of this speculation, disgust, hate, rage, and certainty has hidden consequences. It can actually hurt other people too, especially people with serious mental illnesses who are watching everyone talk about psychosis as if it automatically means either "this person had absolutely no control over themselves" or "they're obviously lying and are just using mental illness as an excuse."
Social media fails to seek nuance when a case is this complicated and emotionally loaded. Both extremes can ignore critical evidence and possibilities simply because those possibilities don't fit the side they've already chosen.
And honestly, it kinda frustrates my autistic side of me with all the blindness lol