As the trial drags on after six long days of jury deliberation, eagle-eyed courtroom watchers have spotted a bizarre new detail on her wheelchair – and legal experts warn it could backfire.
A pink sticker reading ‘#sidebah’ and affixed to the drink holder on Clancy’s wheelchair was caught on camera by the court’s official pH๏τographer this week.
It appears to be a reference to the way Clancy’s lawyer, Kevin Reddington, says ‘sidebar’ in his Boston accent. The phrase has gone viral online as a satirical meme shared during the trial.
Repeated sidebars (private conversations between a judge and lawyers that the jury and public cannot hear) have been a feature of the contentious proceedings, with both the prosecution and defense regularly sparring with Judge William Sullivan.
Clancy’s supporters outside court Thursday told the Daily Mail they see the sticker as a joke and an affectionate tribute to Reddington, who has become a major figure among the accused child murderer’s fanbase.
But legal analyst Neama Rahmani, who is not involved in the trial, warned the sticker could be interpreted as Clancy making light of the proceedings.
Florida-based attorney Andrea Lewis agreed and said that while it may seem insignificant, the sticker could affect the ᴅᴇᴀᴅlocked jury’s thinking if they were to see it.
‘A trial about the deaths of three children is not the place for jokes. A sticker may seem insignificant, but jurors see everything and may view that as a sign that she is not taking the trial seriously. That is an enormous risk to take when your life is literally on the line,’ Lewis said.
A pink sticker reading ‘#sidebah’ and affixed to the drink holder on Lindsay Clancy’s wheelchair was caught on camera by the official court pH๏τographer this week
It appears to be a reference to the way Clancy’s lawyer, Kevin Reddington, says ‘sidebar’ in his Boston accent
The phrase has gone viral online as a satirical meme shared during the trial
The panel of nine women and three men has been unable to reach a unanimous verdict after 36 hours of deliberations. There appears to be an 11-1 split among jurors.
Clancy is accused of murdering her three children by strangling them with exercise bands in January 2023. She has admitted to the killings but insists she is not guilty of murder because she was in the grip of severe postpartum psychosis at the time.
She is now paralyzed from the waist down after having jumped from her second-story bedroom in an apparent sᩚuᩚiᩚcide attempt immediately after the killings.
Tara Mill, 59, a nursing ᴀssistant from Plymouth, Mᴀssachusetts, who was outside court on Thursday supporting Clancy, explained the origin of the #sidebah meme.
‘Oh, it’s kind of a joke, because of Reddington, him saying “I really don’t want to go to the sidebah”. So people are making memes out of that,’ Mill said.
Mill added that she had seen the phrase repeatedly on TikTok.
The phrase appears to have first emerged online in 2024 during the high-profile Karen Read murder trial, which was also held in Mᴀssachusetts, but its usage has been particularly widespread in recent months amid the global fascination with Clancy’s case.
Caryn Marshall, 52, a labor and delivery nurse and mother who lives in Duxbury, where the killings took place at the Clancy family home, was also outside court on Thursday.
She described Reddington as something of an unlikely folk hero.
‘He’s a really good, intelligent, old school lawyer. Like, they don’t make him like that anymore. He’s amazing to watch. Yeah, you a class confidence and He’s a gentleman. He’s a gentleman first,’ she said.
‘I think everyone should have a Kevin in their corner. That would be my hashtag, Kevin in my corner.’
But many social media critics aren’t seeing the funny side.
‘Lindsay Clancy has the audacity to put a “joke” sticker “SideBah” on her drink holder?!?!!! Does she think that’s all a joke?!’ one X user wrote.
An aggrieved Reddit user called the sticker ‘absolutely disgusting’.
Lewis, a former prosecutor, told the Daily Mail: ‘Jurors see everything. They notice how a defendant is dressed, her body language, her facial expressions, who she interacts with, and whether she smiles or laughs at a moment that may seem inappropriate.
‘That scrutiny is particularly intense in a case like this, where the allegations are so disturbing and Lindsay Clancy is sitting just feet away from the jury.
‘Something as small as a sticker may seem insignificant outside the courtroom, but inside it, there really are no small details. Fairly or unfairly, jurors are constantly observing the Lindsay and forming impressions from everything they see.’
Rahmani, a former prosecutor and defense attorney, said he ultimately believed the sticker was ‘harmless’ and unlikely to sway jurors either way.
‘It’s a local Mᴀssachusetts jury, so I don’t think a wheelchair sticker is going to move the needle one way or another and get these jurors to come around and reach a verdict. I think we’re marching towards the very high likelihood of a mistrial,’ he said.
This comes as tensions have boiled over amid a verdict ᴅᴇᴀᴅlock, with one holdout juror accused of failing to follow the law.
The Clancy family not long before the killings
Clancy was paralyzed from the waist down after jumping from her second-story bedroom following the killings
Clancy’s lawyer Kevin Reddington has been praised and memed online by Clancy supporters
On Thursday, a note from the jury foreperson was given to Judge William Sullivan claiming that one of the twelve is not following the law as it pertains to reasonable doubt.
That development prompted Clancy’s lawyer to request the holdout juror be thrown off the trial. Sullivan denied that request and sent the ᴅᴇᴀᴅlocked jury home for the evening.
But Rahmani warned that if the case were to end in a mistrial and be retried, prosecutors could potentially use the wheelchair sticker to argue Clancy was not taking the proceedings seriously.
‘You could potentially raise it in opening or closing: she’s not taking it seriously, she thinks this is a joke. That definitely happens a lot. I have used that argument,’ Rahmani said.
He added that such an argument could also be relevant to a judge when determining a sentence, if a defendant appeared not to have sincerely accepted responsibility.
Clancy has appeared largely stone-faced throughout proceedings, but broke down several times during testimony and as graphic evidence was presented to the jury.
Rahmani said: ‘If I were her attorney, I would not want her to make light of the proceedings at all.’
He praised Reddington’s performance in the trial, saying the defense had far exceeded his expectations.
Rahmani said that before the trial he had viewed the case as a ‘layup’ for prosecutors, given how rarely insanity defenses succeed.
‘I was interviewed about this case weeks before trial, and I said that this would be a layup for the prosecution. As the case progressed, when the closings and the summations finished, I predicted either a not criminally responsible [verdict] or a hung jury. That’s how well the defense has done in this case,’ he said.
‘You play with the hand that you’re dealt [as a defense attorney]. And this was a very difficult hand: three ᴅᴇᴀᴅ children under the age of five.’
Jury deliberations will continue Friday.
💔 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.
