Lori Vallow, Lindsay Clancy And When Diagnosis Collides With Criminal Responsibility (9/7/26)

0:00What's up everyone and welcome back to the program. For the better part of seven years, we've spent an enormous amount of time on this show talking about children, children who were exploited, children who were manipulated, children who were failed by adults who should have protected them. Children who crossed paths with Jeffrey Epstein, Glean Maxwell, and a constellation of powerful people who either participated, enabled, looked the other way, or somehow managed to convince themselves that what was happening around them was somebody else's problem. And through all those years, one principle has remained pretty damn simple for me. Adults are supposed to protect children. That's the deal. That's the bare minimum. You don't get a medal for it, you don't get applause. You don't get some special recognition for doing the most fundamental things society expects from a parent, a teacher, a doctor, a prosecutor, a police officer, or any other adult who finds themselves responsible for the safety of a child. You protect them.

1:01And if you've listened to me talk about Epstein all these years and somehow came away believing that my empathy begins and ends with children he prayed upon, then you have not been paying attention, not even close. I don't care who the perpetrator is, I don't care whether that person has money, I don't care whether they have a famous last name, and I don't care whether they come wrapped in some carefully constructed public image. I certainly don't care whether their story is emotionally complicated. When children are hurt, my instinct is not to immediately begin searching for reasons to make the adult at the center of it more comfortable. My instinct is to look at the children because they're the ones who didn't have the power, they're the ones who didn't make the decisions. They're the ones who depended on the adults around them to keep them alive. And there is something especially dark to me about a parent becoming the source of the danger. There is a special place in hell for people who are at their own children in my opinion, that may sound harsh, I'm pretty comfortable with it.

2:03Because a child should be able to believe that home is the safest place in the world. A child should be able to believe that the person tucking them into bed is not the person they need to fear. A child should be able to trust that the arms holding them belong to somebody who would die protecting them, not somebody from whom they need protection. And once that boundary is crossed, I have a very difficult time allowing the conversation drift so far toward the adult that the children become scenery. And we do that far more than people want to admit. I covered the Lori Valokas extensively, anyone who followed the case knew almost immediately that we're not dealing with a woman operating from a healthy, rational understanding of reality. Yo, those beliefs were bizarre, the religious delusions were extreme. We're talking about zombies, dark spirits, supernatural classifications, apocalyptic prophecy, and an entire worldview that had detached itself from what most of us would recognize as reality.

3:04You didn't need to be a psychiatrist to recognize that something was profoundly wrong. And yet, I don't remember a massive cultural movement demanding that everyone center Lori Valos suffering before discussing what happened to our children. I don't remember armies of people lecturing the public that we needed to be more compassionate toward Lori before we were permitted to say the names of Tile Ryan and JJ Valo. I don't remember being told that criticizing her meant I didn't understand mental illness. I don't remember being told that talking about the children somehow stigmatized people suffering from psychiatric disorders. The overwhelming focus was exactly where most people instinctively believed it belonged, on the children, on what happened to them, on who was responsible, and how something so horrific was allowed to happen. Now we arrive at another case involving dead children, and suddenly the rules of the conversation seem to have changed. Now I'm told I need to understand nuance. I'm told that I need to understand the medical history.

4:06I'm being told that I need to understand postpartum depression, postpartum psychosis, medication changes, psychiatric treatment, and whether the medical establishment failed Lindsey Clancy. Yo, maybe they did. That's a legitimate question. If doctors failed her, investigate that shit. If medications were mishandled, examine it. If warning signs were missed, let's determine why. If a medical system left a severely ill mother without adequate support, then that system deserves scrutiny. None of that bothers me. What bothers me is the enormous leap some people make immediately afterward. Because explaining how somebody arrived at a horrific act is not the same thing as declaring the act acceptable. Understanding is not absolution. Diagnosis is not innocence. And sympathy is not a verdict. And compassion for mental illness does not require us to rearrange the entire immoral universe until the person accused of killing children becomes the central victim of the

5:07story. That's where I start having questions. Because I watch the language surrounding this case become increasingly strange. People speak about Lindsey Clancy and tones, normally reserved, for somebody to whom something happened, rather than somebody accused of making something happen to three children. They speak about the medical system, medication, psychological suffering, about pressure, exhaustion. They speak about everything surrounding those children, except those children themselves. And when somebody doesn't assist on bringing the conversation back to them, suddenly that person is accused of lacking compassion? No, I have compassion. I simply refuse to ration all of it to the adult. I have compassion for children who are small enough to trust completely. I have compassion for children who had no ability to diagnose the mental state of the adult caring for them. I have compassion for children who had no emergency exit from their own home. I have compassion for children who couldn't call a psychiatrist, change of prescription,

6:08request a second medical opinion, or move themselves somewhere safer. That vulnerability matters too. In fact, it matters enormously. If severe mental illness changes how we talk about responsibility, then we should be willing to apply that principle consistently. If distorted thinking changes its culpability, then let's examine exactly how far we believe that principle extends. If a profoundly sick mind demands that we reinterpret a horrific act, then we need to be willing to ask what happens when we encounter another profoundly sick mind. Because principles aren't really principles if they only apply to defendants, we find sympathetic. They are preferences. And preferences are dangerous foundation for deciding who receives moral accountability, and who receives an explanation. So before we go any further, I want to conduct a little experiment. Not because mental illness isn't real, it is. Not because postpartum psychiatric disorders aren't serious. They absolutely are. And certainly not because medical failures should be ignored.

7:11They shouldn't. I want to test the argument itself. I want to strip away the personalities, the social media campaigns, the emotional investment, and the instinct of loyalties that have formed around the case. I want to see whether the standard people are demanding here still make sense when we apply it somewhere else. Because if the argument sound, it should survive that test. And if it doesn't, then maybe the problem isn't that some of us lack empathy. Maybe the problem is that somewhere along the way. Empathy stopped being something we extended to everyone involved and became something we use selectively to excuse the person whose story made us feel the most uncomfortable. Because if mental illness is enough to transform an intentional killing into legal innocence, then Lori Valow deserves the same indulgence. Valow is not merely a centric, emotionally distressed, or struggling through an ordinary period of instability. She was consumed by an elaborate religious delusional system involving chosen beings, zombies, dark

8:12spirits, apocalyptic missions, and supernatural classifications of the people around her. By any ordinary understanding of severe psychological disturbance, her beliefs were far more removed from reality. She reportedly believed that certain human beings had effectively ceased to be themselves because evil spirits had taken control of their bodies. Her own children became incorporated into that distorted worldview. If the decisive question is simply whether a defendant was profoundly mentally ill when children died, then the defense should practically write itself. High-examine planning, concealment, motive, consciousness of guilt, or participation when a psychiatric explanation can simply swallow the entire crime. Declare the delusion, announce the diagnosis, and apparently the criminal law is supposed to pack its bags and head home. That's the logic we're testing, and Lori Valow is where the logic immediately begins to look disgusting. Under this theory, the more bizarre Valow's beliefs become, the stronger her claim to

9:16innocence supposedly becomes. The zombies help her rather than hurt, because they demonstrate just how detached her thinking had become from objective reality. The apocalyptic prophecies help her because they provide evidence that she was operating within a distorted mental framework. The supernatural hierarchy helps her because it shows that ordinary moral reasoning had allegedly been displaced by delusional conviction. Every increasingly disturbing belief, therefore, becomes another brick in the wall, protecting her, from responsibility. We would be instructed to stop asking whether children were knowingly placed in moral danger and start asking whether Valow sincerely believed the universe demanded it. We would be told that sincerity matters more than consequence. We'd be asked to substitute psychiatric explanation for legal accountability, and once that substitution is accepted, conduct that would ordinarily establish culpability becomes merely another symptom of the disease.

10:17At that point, the courtroom is no longer deciding whether a person committed a crime with the legally required state of mind, but whether the defendant can produce a sufficiently powerful psychological narrative afterward. Consider how extraordinarily forgiving this standard would have to become. Valow's children did not simply disappear into some instantaneous fog of psychosis while everyone around them immediately called for help. Their disappearance were followed by lies of agents concealment and an extraordinary campaign of deception. Questions about where the children were produced, false explanations, rather than frantic demands for police, doctors, rescuers, children's whereabouts, became something to hide. Their absence became something to explain away. And their deaths existed within a broader pattern of conduct involving secrecy in self-proclaimed self-preservation. Yet the expansive mental health defense would have us discount all of that because delusional people can also conceal things. Of course they can, but that observation proves far less than advocates sometimes for

11:21intended proves a person can be mentally ill and still understand that other people regard and act as criminal, dangerous or morally unacceptable. If concealment automatically becomes part of the illness whenever illness is present, then consciousness of guilt can be explained out of existence in virtually every psychologically complicated homicide. Now, apply the same generosity to Chad Debel and the entire world they built around themselves. Their extraordinary beliefs did not occur in a vacuum, divorced from practical interests romantic desire, financial considerations, and the elimination of inconvenient people. The theology in the world believes, manages to coexist remarkably well. People designated as spiritually compromised had a peculiar tendency to become obstacles whose disappearance benefited the believers, making that designation. Under the maximalist mental health theory, however, that coincidence should apparently trouble us very little. We could simply say delusional systems often absorb personal desire into supernatural

12:25explanation. We could say the mind rationalizes conduct through the architecture of illness. We could say they're apparent, self-interest does not disprove psychiatric impairment. All of those statements can clinically be plausible while still being legally incomplete. The question is not whether mental illness can help explain monstrous behavior because sometimes it unquestionably can. The question is whether explanation itself should be transformed into exoneration because once that happens, nearly every severely disturbed murderer acquires a ready-made road to innocence. Imagine presenting Valos case using the broad rhetoric sometimes heard whenever a horrific family killing intersects with mental illness. We would begin by demanding compassion before discussing evidence. We'd warn people not to stigmatize psychiatric disease. We'd emphasize that untreated delusions can radically distort judgment. We'd remind everyone that mentally ill defendants are still human beings.

13:27Look, every one of those statements is true, and none of them establishes innocence. Compassion is not a men's area standard. Stigma reduction is not a affirmative defense. A diagnosis is not a judicial eraser that removes planning, assistance, deception, or knowledge from the evidentiary record. The criminal law can recognize mental disease while still asking whether the defendant knew what she was doing, understood its wrongfulness, under the governing legal test, intended particular consequences or deliberately helped bring those consequences about. Collapsing all of those questions into the single sentence she was mentally ill is not sophisticated psychiatry or sophisticated law. In fact, it's the abandonment of both. Mental illness may contribute to why a person behaves in a particular way without legally absolving that person of the behavior. Anger contributes to crimes without excusing them. Trauma can shape conduct without automatically eliminating responsibility.

14:31Addiction can influence decision-making without making every resulting act involuntary. Personality disorders can alter relationships without a racing criminal intent. Psychosis can become legally decisive in some cases, but only where the jurisdictions actual insanity standard were another relevant doctrine is satisfied. That requires far more than demonstrating that the defendant held irrational beliefs. If irrationality alone were the test, that load supernatural worldview would place her near the front of the line for acquittal. Yet, most people instinctively understand that something critical is missing from that conclusion. What is missing is the legal bridge between this person was severely mentally ill, and this person was therefore not criminally responsible. So let us carry that argument all the way to its uncomfortable destination. If a mother kills or participates in the killing of her children while experiencing profound illusions and profound illusions are sufficient to establish innocence, then

15:33Lori Valow becomes a model defendant for the doctrine. Her beliefs were not subtle. Her worldview was not merely depressive for thinking involved allegedly supernatural enemies, spiritual possession, prophetic missions, and a cosmic battle between light and darkness. The children themselves were absorbed into that belief system. If psychological distortion overrides accountability whenever it substantially colors a parent's perception of her children, Valow's distortion was enormous. One could therefore argue, following this logic, that she did not perceive her children as ordinary children at all. One could say she perceived corrupted vessels, spiritual threats, or beings whose physical deaths carried a meaning radically different from the meaning understood by everyone else. And if subjective distorted perception is all we require, then the moral horror of the act becomes the very evidence used to excuse the person connected to it. But that is precisely why criminal law does not ordinarily operate through unlimited psychiatric

16:35storytelling. Violence distinguishes competency from insanity, diagnosed, from legal incapacity, and diminished judgment from the absence of legally required intent. A defendant can believe bizarre things while still appreciating that police will arrest her if they discover what happened. A defendant can suffer delusions while still lying strategically, a defendant can be mentally ill, while still remove evidence, mislead relatives, coordinate stories, profit financially, or protect a romantic partner. These facts do not magically prove sanity, but neither does a diagnosis magically prove innocence. The law looks at function, knowledge, intent, appreciation of wrongfulness, and the specific requirements of the charged defense. That's the analytical discipline that prevents mental health evidence from becoming an all-purpose solvent capable of dissolving responsibility. Without that discipline, the defendant with the most extreme psychiatric presentation would often receive the greatest legal protection, regardless of what the evidence showed about

17:36her conduct. The danger of that expansive defense is not merely that it produces strange results and Valos case. It creates a principle that cannot be contained once announced. If severe mental illness plus distorted judgment equals innocence, defendants and countless deliberate killings can demand the same equation. The parent who believes the child is possessed can invoke it, the cult member, who kills under apocalyptic delusions can invoke it, the paranoid spouse who believes supernatural forces inhabit a partner can invoke it. The religious extremist, acting under a psychotic conviction can invoke it, the defendant, whose hallucinations coexist with careful planning, can invoke it. Soon the courtroom becomes trapped in an impossible contest over whose internal suffering was profound enough to neutralize external conduct. That wouldn't represent enlightened treatment of psychiatric illness. It would represent a refusal to distinguish between people whose disease actually destroys

18:38the capacity is required for criminal responsibility and people whose disease coexist with those capacities. And in my opinion that distinction is exactly why Laurie Valow is such a devastating stress test for the argument. Nobody needs to deny that she displayed profound psychiatric disturbance in order to believe. It could still be legally responsible for crimes connected to the death of her children. Nobody needs to mock delusions, minimize psychosis, or pretend that mental illness is unimportant. The opposite is true. Taking mental illness seriously requires precision rather than slogans. It requires asking what symptoms existed when they existed, how they affected cognition, whether they eliminated legally relevant capacities and how those conclusions fit the defendant's actual behavior before and after the crime. It requires separating sympathy for illness from conclusions about culpability. It requires acknowledging that psychiatric explanation can be compelling without being

19:40exculpatory. Remembering that murdered children do not become secondary characters, merely because the defendant's mental state is medically complicated, if the mental health argument cannot survive application to Laurie Valow without producing a conclusion that feels absurd, then the problem is not that Laurie Valow has somehow exposed a loophole. The problem is that that argument was drawn far too broadly in the first place. If we're prepared to say that mental illness alone can transform the killing of children into innocence, then intellectual consistency demands, that we extend that protection to defendants whose delusions are even more profound, elaborate, and reality detached. Laurie Valow would not be an exception to that rule, she'd be one of its strongest beneficiaries. We would be forced to look at dead children, concealment, lies, extraordinary beliefs, and an entire trail of conduct, and conclude that the psychiatric diagnosis overwhelms everything else. Very few people actually believe criminal responsibility should operate that way.

20:43What they usually believe, once the rhetoric is stripped away, is that some mental conditions under some circumstances may satisfy specific legal standards and excuse or mitigate responsibility. That's an entirely different proposition. It's more narrow, harder to prove, intensely fact dependent, and incapable of being established merely by repeating the name of a diagnosis. So when any defense of a parent accused of killing children begins an ends with the existence of a serious mental disorder, Laurie Valow should be standing in the intellectual doorway, because either mental illness requires careful legal analysis before it negates responsibility or consistency demands that we start manufacturing innocence for defendants, almost nobody invoking that argument, whatever dream of acquitting. And that's where all this ends, because eventually the euphemisms run out and the bodies remain. If mental illness is going to be treated as a magic phrase that wipes away responsibility,

21:45then stop pretending that principle belongs only to the defendants, people find sympathetic. Give it to Laurie Valow too. Give it to every parent who believes something insane, every killer who heard voices, every defendant who lived inside a delusion, and every person who's grip on reality was profoundly damaged when someone else ended up dead. Follow that rule honestly and watch how quickly compassion mutates into absurdity. Valow can't become a popularity contest when one mother is recast as a victim because her diagnosis makes people uncomfortable, while another is condemned because her delusions are uglier, stranger, or harder to romanticize. Dead children don't care, which psychiatric label makes the public feel better about what happened to them. They don't get their lives back because adults found a more palatable explanation for the person who killed them. At some point, explanation has to stop masquerading as an absolution, because if we keep moving the line every time a defendant has a tragic enough story, then the only person who never

22:48received the benefit of our compassion are the ones buried in the ground. And maybe that's the ugliest truth of all of this. We've become so desperate to understand the person standing at the defense table that we're in danger of forgetting the children who will never stand anywhere again. All the information that goes with this episode can be found in the description box.