Lindsay Clancy’s Lawyers Grill Her Psychiatrist — Hours Of Questioning Over The Drugs Prescribed Before The Trag3dy… And The Testimony Leaving Everyone Stunned
Lindsay Clancy’s lawyer spent hours Monday grilling the shrink who treated Clancy in the months before she strangled her three kids — ripping the doctor for only having a month on the job before she started treating the troubled mom.
Dr. Jennifer Tufts took the witness stand for the second day at Clancy’s Plymouth, Mass., trial and was subjected to a relentless and blistering cross-examination by Kevin Reddington.
“If you advertise as an expert in postpartum and you have a month of experience, plus a residency, would you consider that to be negligent or misrepresentation?” Reddington said.
“I do not believe that I’ve been negligent,” Tufts responded.
“You really want this jury to believe you were an expert?” the attorney pressed.
“I don’t believe that’s the wording that I used. I said it was an interest of mine … I don’t believe I called myself an expert,” Tufts said.
The 35-year-old Duxbury mother first saw Tufts on Sept. 15, 2022, four months before she killed kids Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and 8-month-old Callan and then tried to kill herself on Jan. 24, 2023.
Clancy appeared emotional at times as Reddington forced Tufts to dissect every action she made in Clancy’s case.
Tufts, 36, admitted that she had only been with a private practice Aster mєntal Health — her first job out of her residency — for one month before she started treating Clancy.
“I was practicing independently … for about a month, but the training is immense,” Tufts said of her four-year residency through Boston Medical Center, which included a year working with a postpartum specialist.
Reddington also questioned Tufts about the fact that Clancy and her then-husband, Patrick Clancy, had both filed medical malpractice lawsuits against Tufts and other providers for allegedly misdiagnosing and overmedicating Clancy.
“You’re a defendant in a very large lawsuit, right?” Reddington asked.
The prosecution objected, but Judge William Sullivan allowed Tufts to answer.
“Yes,” Tufts admitted.
“You know the outcome in this case is major to the outcome in your lawsuit, right?” Reddington asked.
“I don’t actually know that,” the shrink responded.
Reddington also laid into Tufts for allegedly prescribing Clancy antidepressant medication Zoloft which has a known side-effect of insomnia — one of Clancy’s major postpartum symptoms. And the lawyer repeatedly questioned why Tufts only saw Clancy over video and never in-person.
“Why would prescribe Zoloft to a young woman who is postpartum, who is telling you she has anxiety and telling you she can’t sleep? She has all of these symptoms and you prescribe a medication with a side effect of trouble sleeping?” Reddington said.
“Individuals have very varied responses to medications,” Tufts replied. “Some have no side effects, some have one or two. It’s impossible to predict.”
“Zoloft is a top-choice, a first-line medication for people with anxiety,” the psychiatrist continued.
Clancy only took Zoloft for eight days after experiencing a slew of intolerable symptoms after increasing her dosage on the eighth day.
Tuft wrote in her notes she was “crying all day” the day before seeing her on Oct. 20, 2022, she had brain fog, racing thoughts, anxiety and she was “paranoid of getting suicidal thoughts,” the jury learned.
The labor and delivery nurse — on maternity leave after giving birth to her third child, son Callan, in May — was also “terrified to start” a new drug, the doctor said.
Tufts told Clancy to immediately stop the medication and discussed alternative options for her, the doctor testified.
“That must have made you pretty concerned?” Reddington asked.
“I was concerned, yes. I gave her some therapies,” Tufts said, noting she also discussed Clancy’s options.
Tufts admitted she was only seeing Clancy in person for the first time when she began testifying on Friday.
“Did you give her a hug? Oh no, you were on telehealth so you couldn’t, could you?” Reddington said.
“I couldn’t give her a hug but that’s not something psychiatrists normally do with patients,” Tufts answered.
Tufts continued to see Clancy in the coming months as she spiraled downwards, switching medications multiple times, going to the hospital twice for suicidal thoughts, and seeking treatment from multiple providers who all prescribed various psychiatric medications, the jury has learned.
But Clancy insisted during all of her sessions that she wouldn’t harm herself or her kids, though she did admit she had thought about sᩚuᩚiᩚcide.
Reddington asked Tufts if she knew Clancy had opened up to Patrick around mid-December 2022 about having thoughts of harming the kids.
“No,” Tufts said. “If I heard that I would have been very concerned.”
“You would have called DCF, right?” Reddington asked, referring to the Department of Children and Families.
“I might have,” she responded.
Tufts also maintained she never saw signs of psychosis in Clancy and she didn’t believe Clancy had bipolar disorder because she never showed signs of mania.
Reddington wants to ask the jury to find Clancy not guilty by reason of insanity on the grounds she was in the throes of severe postpartum psychosis, partially caused by the medications that would worsen Clancy’s alleged bipolar disorder. He has also claimed she heard a voice telling her to commit the heinous acts.
Later Monday, jurors heard from nurse practitioner, Julie Paul, who briefly treated Clancy at a clinic at South Shore Hospital that specialized in treating women with postpartum.
She tried one med for three days and Clancy had bad side effects so she prescribed some others during a weeklong span. She then passed Clancy off to another practitioner because she was leaving the practice.
Paul is expected to be cross-examined by Reddington Tuesday morning.
After strangling her kids, Clancy slit her wrists and neck and threw herself out of the upstairs window of her home. She partially paralyzed herself in the fall and is now wheelchair bound.
If you or someone you know is affected by any of the issues raised in this story, call the National sᩚuᩚiᩚcide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-TALK (8255) or text Crisis Text Line at 741741.
💔 STELLA PARTON BREAKS HER SILENCE — What She Said About Dolly’s Health Has Fans Looking Back
Dolly Parton’s Sister Breaks Silence What Really Happened - GMT - G1
Stella Parton was born May 4, 1949, the sixth of twelve children raised by Robert Lee and Avie Lee Parton in Sevierville, Tennessee — a household defined by noise, limited money, and almost no privacy, the kind of environment that produced strong, determined personalities.
Stella was one of them.
By seven, she was appearing alongside her older sister Dolly on a Knoxville television program; by her teens, she was writing her own songs, though marriage and motherhood pulled music to the margins of her life for a stretch.
The dream never fully disappeared.
In 1967, she recorded a gospel album with her mother and sisters, and later worked clubs in Washington, D.C., before founding her own record label in 1975 and releasing “I Want to Hold You in My Dreams Tonight,” which climbed to number nine on the country charts.
Long before any of that commercial success, Stella had already shown a willingness to take positions others avoided.
At 26, amid backlash against Australian singer Olivia Newton-John for winning recognition in country music, Stella recorded “Ode to Olivia” in her defense — a stand that offered her no career benefit and real risk of criticism, but one she took anyway simply because she believed staying silent was the wrong choice.
That instinct defined the rest of her career: hits like “The Danger of a Stranger” and “Steady as the Rain” (written by Dolly) built a genuine, independent following, including in the U.K., while Stella also worked in New York theater and spoke openly, often controversially, about poverty, domestic violence, and the treatment of women in the music industry.
She was named the Christian Country Music Association’s Female Vocalist of the Year in 2004.
Through all of it, she remained defined publicly, more often than not, as simply “Dolly’s little sister” — a label she spent five decades quietly proving didn’t tell the full story.
That same directness is why her comments in the fall of 2025 carried real weight.
Stella had never positioned herself as the family’s image manager or spokesperson; she was, by reputation, someone who believed difficult truths shouldn’t stay hidden indefinitely.
What she described wasn’t dramatic or accusatory — it was a portrait of a woman who had spent years prioritizing everyone else’s needs over her own.
The context mattered.
Carl Dean, Dolly’s husband of nearly sixty years, died in March 2025 at 82, after a long illness during which Dolly had devoted herself almost entirely to his care.
She later acknowledged that in the process, she’d neglected her own health significantly.
The loss reverberated through the whole extended family — the Partons had lost three brothers in the years surrounding this period, compounding grief that, for a family that had once crowded twelve children into a single small home, meant losing pieces of a shared childhood one after another.
Stella herself went seven years without releasing new music during this stretch, later describing the period simply as one shaped by sorrow, while still speaking about the importance of finding moments of laughter within it.
Looking back, one moment reads very differently in hindsight than it did at the time: in late September 2025, Dolly postponed her planned Las Vegas residency, citing health challenges — a rare cancellation for a performer whose six-decade career had included very few of them.
At the time, most fans treated it as a minor, temporary setback.
Stella’s later reflections suggested the signs had actually been building for some time, visible to family in ways the public smile made easy to miss.
That concern crystallized publicly not long after, when Dolly’s younger sister Frieda posted a simple request on Facebook asking fans to pray for Dolly.
What looked at first like an ordinary, well-meaning gesture spread rapidly, sparking widespread speculation about how serious Dolly’s condition actually was.
Dolly herself responded directly within days, appearing in a video from a Grand Ole Opry commercial shoot, insisting with her familiar humor that she wasn’t finished yet — the now widely remembered “I ain’t dead yet” moment that briefly quieted public concern.
In the months that followed, the pattern repeated: reassuring updates about kidney stones, dehydration, and treatment, paired with continued work on new projects, right up until Dolly Parton’s death on August 25, 2026, at 80.
Looking back across that full timeline — the postponed residency, the family’s public worry, Stella’s own account of a sister who consistently deprioritized her own wellbeing — it becomes easier to see what the people closest to Dolly understood well before the rest of the world did: that the warmth and resilience the public saw every time she appeared on camera came at a real, largely invisible cost.
