Highlights
- Lisa Rinna claims her therapist told her Patrick Clancy, not Lindsay, killed the three Clancy kids.
- Investigators say phone records and footage already prove Patrick wasn’t home during the killings.
- Boston Globe reporters call the frame-up theory baseless as Lindsay Clancy’s trial continues in court.
Forget the reunion couch. Lisa Rinna has appointed herself lead detective on the Lindsay Clancy murder trial, and her star witness is her own therapist.
Clancy, the Massachusetts mother on trial for strangling her three young children — 5-year-old Cora, 3-year-old Dawson, and 8-month-old Callan — has never denied doing it. Her defense is severe postpartum psychosis. That hasn’t stopped Rinna from deciding the whole thing was somebody else’s crime.
That somebody, according to Rinna, is Patrick Clancy — Lindsay’s ex-husband and the children’s father. Her evidence isn’t forensic. It’s a vibe check that happened in a therapist’s office.
“[My therapist] looks at me and she goes, ‘He did it.’ I was like, ‘Wow, yeah,'” Rinna said, in a clip that’s since ricocheted across X.
Case closed, apparently. Rinna’s entire theory rests on one gut-check line: “women don’t strangle.”
Actress Lisa Rinna says she and her female therapist agreed that Patrick Clancy killed his children, not Lindsay Clancy, because "women don't strangle."
"[My therapist] looks at me and she goes, 'He did it.' I was like, 'Wow, yeah.'"
I've never seen so much brain rot. pic.twitter.com/bFuOnf29EB
— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) August 17, 2026It’s a tidy thesis. It’s also nonsense, per the people actually investigating the case — surveillance footage and phone records already corroborated that Patrick wasn’t home when the children were killed, and that Lindsay was.
Rinna isn’t out here alone. The Daily Wire flagged her as the most famous example of a broader true-crime obsessive who claims to have solved the case from her couch.
The Boston Globe was less generous. Reporters there flatly described the frame-Patrick theory as baseless, noting the case’s actual questions are about mental illness and psychiatric care, not whodunit.
Even the internet’s peanut gallery seems tired of it. One viral post reacting to Rinna’s theory summed up the vibe: “I’ve never seen so much brain rot.”
Local reporters who’ve covered the trial since day one are even blunter about the stakes. As one researcher told Boston.com, baseless theories like this one are “hurtful to people” who’ve already survived the unimaginable.
None of that seems to register in Rinna’s corner of the internet, where a therapist’s hunch apparently outranks a criminal investigation. She’s not new to headline-chasing, either — this is the same Lisa Rinna who recently claimed she was drugged at a premiere party, so armchair forensics is clearly having a moment for her.
Meanwhile, an actual jury is doing the actual work: sitting through weeks of testimony about psychiatric records, medication, and a mother’s breakdown, trying to reach a verdict grounded in evidence instead of astrology.
Rinna, for her part, gets to log off, hug her Emmy-adjacent resume, and let her fans debate “he did it” versus “she did it” in the replies. Somewhere in Plymouth County, actual grief is still waiting on actual facts.
