“That doesn’t mean no accountability, it just means that we recognize the suffering and the stigma, and we try to find a way to prevent this from happening in the future,” Patrick Clancy said.
In an extended cut of his “60 Minutes” interview released Tuesday, Patrick Clancy opened up about his own mєntal health struggles and suggested a “compᴀssionate” approach to justice after his ex-wife, Lindsay Clancy, killed their children in 2023.
“It’s hard sometimes. I’ve had people say to me, ‘Pat, you were really quiet today,’” Patrick shared. “But they don’t know the things that are playing over and over and over again in my head. They don’t know that the scenes are playing over and over again from that night, or that the grief is just so heavy that it makes me quiet.”
He previously revealed that he suffered a “mᴀssive, traumatic” panic attack after testifying at length about the night Lindsay strangled their children — 5-year-old Cora, 3-year-old Dawson, and 8-month-old Callan — at home in Duxbury on Jan. 24, 2023. Patrick, who was out running errands at the time, returned home to find his wife badly injured from a sᩚuᩚiᩚcide attempt and their children ᴅᴇᴀᴅ or dying.
Speaking to “60 Minutes” correspondent Ross Douthat in the extended cut, Patrick said he has benefitted from the trauma-focused psycH๏τherapy EMDR, or Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing.
“It’s a little unusual. They put you right back in that place that you’ve been trying to avoid for years, and you face it head-on,” he explained. “And it’s unpleasant, but they get you used to dealing with that, and eventually you’re better at processing it.”
After several EMDR sessions, “the waking up screaming, the horrible dreams, they mostly stopped,” Patrick said. “I mean, it was like a miracle.”
Lindsay, who is charged with first-degree murder, has admitted to strangling all three children but maintains she was suffering from postpartum psychosis at the time and heard a voice in her head urging her to kill the children and herself. Prosecutors rejected her so-called insanity defense, arguing that although her mєntal health declined leading up to the killings, she was still able to tell right from wrong and control her actions.
Judge William Sullivan declared a mistrial Sept. 4 after the jury of nine women and three men returned ᴅᴇᴀᴅlocked. The Plymouth County District Attorney’s Office has not yet said whether it intends to retry Lindsay, but an attorney for Patrick has said he and his family find the prospect of another trial “extraordinarily painful.”
Asked what justice looks like in a case that revolves around mєntal illness, Patrick suggested a measured approach.
“I think we can find a compᴀssionate way to deal with these tragedies,” he told Douthat. “And that doesn’t mean no accountability, it just means that we recognize the suffering and the stigma, and we try to find a way to prevent this from happening in the future. That’s always how I’ve looked at it.”
He also said he thinks about his children every day and tries to keep their memory alive.
“Cora was cautious; she was shy, but she was so good at making friends,” Patrick recalled. “I used to see her at birthday parties and at school when I’m picking her up, and I could see the friendships that she was creating. And I just loved that.”
Dawson “helped me realize that not all of your kids are the same, they have different personalities,” Patrick continued, describing his middle child as adventurous and daring.
The youngest Clancy child, Callan, “was just one of the happiest babies,” he added. “I mourn Callan in a way that I didn’t really get to know him as well as my other kids.”
Though he has since moved to New York City, divorced Lindsay, and remarried, Patrick said he’s still in touch with close friends in Duxbury.
“My kids are buried here, and I still have family here,” he explained. “But it’s hard. It’s difficult, coming back to this town, even though I loved it so much.”
Speaking to “60 Minutes” correspondent Ross Douthat in an extended cut of his interview, Patrick Clancy spoke about his own mєntal health following the deaths of his three children in 2023.
Joining him in the “60 Minutes” interview was his second wife, Dr. Rachel Danis, who confirmed she and Patrick are now starting a family of their own. Danis told Douthat she initially viewed Patrick as more of a friend after they met in a New York run club in January 2024. She said she began to see him in a new light a few months later, when he came to cheer her on at a half marathon and met her sister, who has Down syndrome.
“I think you can tell a lot about someone when they’re interacting with a person with special needs. Pat was really friendly, really warm,” Danis said. Patrick also snapped a candid pH๏τo of the sisters hugging, which Danis said showed her that he “really saw what matters to me.”
Still, she said some of her close friends “paused” when she and Patrick began dating.
“I think people were worried,” Danis explained, adding that she had hesitations as well.
However, “I would say and still say it was the first time Sundays felt like Saturdays,” she quipped. “Life just got a lot calmer for me.”
The couple married in April, a few months before Lindsay’s murder trial began. Asked about the viral — but unfounded — conspiracy theories that suggest Patrick was somehow involved in his children’s deaths or that he cheated on Lindsay while her condition deteriorated, Danis was quick to come to her husband’s defense.
“I don’t understand how the story has been so twisted, but I would hope people know that Pat is … the most selfless father and supportive partner,” she said. “And I was just a girl that met a guy running in Central Park on a really cold Saturday, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.”
💔 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.
