As I listen to Reddington today, I am keenly aware of the framing in play, largely because the Commonwealth appears to have no direct evidence establishing the story it is asking a jury to accept.
There is already an enormous amount online examining virtually every detail of the Lindsay Clancy case. I am not going to do that here.
What strikes me today is something larger. It is possible for a system to become part of the harm.
For those of us who know through lived experience how profoundly institutions can fail, that is a harsh reality. And it deserves more attention than the familiar conclusion that “the system failed.”
Because sometimes failure is not merely passive. Sometimes a narrative enters the system, becomes institutionalized, and then begins generating consequences of its own.
Let me break this down. Imagine an intimate relationship in which one partner is determined to eliminate the other from his or her life, reputation, family, liberty, credibility, or even existence.
The objective may not begin with physical elimination. It may begin with controlling how the other person is perceived. Once institutions accept that framing, the power imbalance changes dramatically.
For institutional machinery to move repeatedly and effectively in one person’s favor, however, something more than a persuasive story may be required. There is often a power element.
The Power and Control Element
That power may be political. It may be financial, professional, social, or institutional. It may simply be access to people whose words carry more weight than the person being targeted.
And that matters. Because if a controlling domestic partner possesses sufficient power, influence, money, status, or institutional access, the system itself can potentially become part of the coercive dynamic.
This is what I have long called Legal Domestic Abuse. It is a very different proposition from saying simply, “the system failed.”
The system may be responding exactly as its participants have been led to respond. The deeper question is: Who had the power to establish the frame in the first place?
The Framing Architect
Police reports, medical and psychiatric records, court pleadings, and child custody proceedings can all reflect that frame. Eventually, one institutional record begins appearing to validate another. What began as one person’s characterization can acquire the appearance of independently established fact. That is where this becomes frightening.
In intimate partner abuse, control is central to the dynamic. When a controlling partner senses that control is being lost, efforts to regain control typically intensify.
In some relationships that escalation becomes physical violence. In others it may take legal, psychiatric, financial, reputational, or institutional forms. The system itself can become another instrument through which control is exercised.
I wrote about this years ago in Legal Domestic Abuse: Learn to Successfully Navigate the System because women in family court encounter versions of this phenomenon every day.
Some lose their children, access to their homes or finances, and freedoms most people assume cannot simply disappear. Others find themselves defending their mental stability rather than discussing the conduct that brought them into court.
And afterward we say, “The system failed them.” But what if that description is incomplete?
What if the more important question is not simply how the system failed, but how the system came to participate in the framing?
Who supplied the original narrative?
What evidence supported it?
What evidence contradicted it?
Was contradictory evidence investigated with equal seriousness?
At what point did an allegation become an assumption?
And once that assumption entered institutional records, who ever went back to examine whether the original premise was true?
This is what I find so disturbing about the Lindsay Clancy case. Whatever ultimately happened inside that home, a criminal prosecution should rest on evidence, not merely on the most institutionally convenient story.
And when the evidence contains unanswered questions, those questions matter. Because institutional authority does not transform a narrative into reality.
A prosecutor repeating something does not make it true. A medical record repeating something does not make it true. A court accepting something does not necessarily make it true. Repetition can create consensus. But consensus and truth are not the same thing.
That distinction matters far beyond this courtroom. Women caught in coercive relationships and contested family court proceedings have known this for a very long time.
Once the system adopts the frame, the person trapped inside it may spend years trying to prove that the frame itself is the problem. And the rest of us look on and call it system failure.
Sometimes we should be asking a much more unsettling question:
What happens when the system stops merely failing to protect someone and begins carrying the narrative that harms them?
If you are entangled in legal psychiatric framing, reach out here https://innersanctuaryonline.org/spousal-abuse-help/ for unbiased professional help before it spirals out of control.
©2026 Dr. Jeanne King, Ph.D. Mind Matters Media LLC
Clinical Psychologist | Trauma, Coercive Control, and Family Systems Dynamics
Dr. Jeanne King, Ph.D. helps coercive control victims protect their sanity and rights in family court.