As youve had time to sort through this, what do you think was driving Penn to go through this process, which they had to know, at some level, would cost them? RG: Who will spend some significant amount of time in poverty. RG: So, to cut into the interview here real quick, I wanted to add that Mackenzie is referring to a letter sent to the Rhodes Trust in December 2020. Our concern is instead with the conduct of our. And do you know Linda Tirado? And we have our own specific grad school definitions. [2], During her high school years, Fierceton has alleged that her mother subjected her to emotional and physical abuse, the latter enough on more than one occasion to require hospitalization. According to Fierceton, her mother pushed her down the stairs and then beat her extensively at the bottom. Thank you so much for having me. I think there were almost 30 of those letters again, very similar to who had given statements in the past to corroborate my abuse as well as leaders in the FGLI community saying yes, we started this community. Rather than it being for the purpose of benefiting the students themselves. Because thats not how we understand poverty. And I dont remember exactly what their statement was, but they disputed it. [2] Fierceton and her mentor reconstructed the conversation and transcribed it; the university has claimed it is inaccurate but the mentor stands by it. RG: who was, I believe now, the acting provost. And so was it later, in a different conversation where they asked about the line in the essay about not being able to recognize yourself or is there some illusion to that in the transcript that you found? [Laughs.] I think youre right. [3] The change in her living situation greatly complicated her college plans as she had no financial resources of her own. As an anonymous letter writer revealed, however, she was also the privately educated child of a radiologist, brought up in an affluent suburb. And I was the one who uncovered my classmates death. [2][e], A spokesman for the D.A. And then theres the part that felt like: I have no idea whats going to convince these people if I gave them medical records, I gave them forensic photos of me taken in the hospital, I gave them again like corroboration from professors of like how I described myself, from leaders in the FIGLY community. We started building this, and this is exactly who we built it for. I reached out for a response to the University of Pennsylvania and also Provost Beth Winkelstein and General Counsel Wendy White for a response, as well as to Mackenzies biological mother. Seeing other students consult their parents for minor decisions made her feel left out; she avoided telling people she had been in foster care before college. In between those placements, she slept at friends' houses for long periods. There was, yes, disagreement, because I said there was blood in my hair in the essay, they said there wasnt enough blood or there wasnt blood or something. I was like: Great. We dont have ads, so we depend on our members 35,000 and counting to help us hold the powerful to account. Mackenzie Fierceton, a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, has won the prestigious and extremely competitive Rhodes Scholarship, which will allow her to study at Oxford in November 2020. [Laughs.]. And then it just launched into the first half being a line-by-line it felt like interrogation of my applications. MF: Yeah. "[4][2], Winkelstein followed up with a letter to Elizabeth Kiss, the trust's CEO, alerting her that the university had been investigating Fierceton's story, found it to have seriously diverged from the reality of her life, with the abuse allegations quite possibly fabricated. I have all these three kinds of different rationale and corroborations. "[25], "I cannot avoid the sense that Mackenzie is being faulted for not having suffered enough", Norton told The New Yorker. Mackenzie Fierceton was championed as a former foster youth who had overcome an abusive childhood and won a prestigious Rhodes Scholarship. In the transcript, I wrote it was really just focused on: What happened the night you went into foster care? But its interesting because most of the questions are about these applications and then the second half is when it turns to these questions of the abuse. And again, people, including Penn administrators, have the perception of I think the stereotype and my friend Anea Moore, whos a Rhodes Scholar and graduate of Penn who founded Penn first or co-founded it had a really great quote in The New Yorker about we arent all, quote-unquote something along the lines of like impoverished, inner city kids who go to crumbling public schools as the wider media portrays us to be. I think this is a conversation not necessarily for people who are still in question about what happened here. Just like some basic questions [laughs] and then a lot of detailed questions about my application. So one of the questions that you mentioned that they asked was about your essay , which, correct me if Im wrong, but I think it begins saying something along the lines of: Youre in the hospital, you looked in the mirror, and you couldnt recognize yourself, you couldnt recognize your features. Fierceton clarified her identity during the interview:[4]. Her mother had no explanation for the injuries, other than saying perhaps she had done it to herself. And I turned over all this information to his widow. And I think its true. On Saturday afternoon, Fierceton said she found herself in a Zoom meeting for several hours with 10 other finalists from this region. Right. They demanded that the university remove the notation from her file. I wasnt there for all of this, but after I went through all these interviews, that was my conclusion. "We would never have believed any of it if we weren't living it." What was the response from the readers of the paper? I tried to help as much as I could. But now looking back and rereading that article in the last year and seeing that it virtually had no information. RG: Right. What kind of a group is that? After her graduation summa cum laude, political science professor Anne Norton invited Fierceton to stay with her and her partner in their large house in Northwest Philadelphia for as long as she needed to in order to complete her master's over the next year. I cant remember if it was in the Rhodes essay or in another essay that, in hindsight, you wouldve tightened up. "Without her trauma, she didnt matter", wrote a commentator in the Tulane Hullabaloo. [2] The psychologist testified that she had seen both mother and daughter during 2007 and 2008. "I advised him that this was ridiculous, and this had to be a 'status thing", she said. So thats the background of him. And those other people are kind of like the orphans that we think of in Dickensian novels. It called attention to claims, such as the one in her application essay, that by the time she was six she "knew every police officer in my county by their first name", a claim Fierceton herself admitted was untrue and born of her fear of her biological family when she wrote it. Or is that it separates two into one? There was also the part of me that was terrified. She didnt even know what building he had died in. Enough bruises? Because that was one of the ones that really blew my mind. Now-provost Beth Winkelstein told this person: I know youre here as a supporter for MacKenzie, but you cannot speak. And at the time I was like: Why what? And I started interviewing people who were in the class where he died and who were in nearby classes where he died, who knew him, and paramedics who were Penn paramedics and just as many people as I could. A 24-year-old Rhodes Scholar has left the prestigious program after being accused of lying about growing up poor, reports say. [1], Shortly after Penn filed its response, the Chronicle of Higher Education reported on the story. And I asked again and just said: Ive had different experiences of harassment for the last four years at Penn. Fine. That they would forward charges to the federal government of wire fraud. And I think its striking to read that back and just see how clearly distressed and distraught I was in continuing to push on that series of questions about a really traumatic experience. "[2], When Fierceton returned to the St. Louis area on vacations and breaks, she stayed with friends. And after you talked to the school, how did you get to school the next morning? I had never heard of FGLI, but these labels resonated with a story I was still trying to process. And then I remembered that my teacher had told me to write a gratitude list. Fierceton's mother's supporters have maintained that her daughter was an emotionally manipulative girl who injured herself and fabricated other aspects of the abuse in order to become a more appealing candidate for admission to an Ivy League college such as the University of Pennsylvania. [2], Classmates who told Fierceton this also noted the similarities to another medical emergency in September 2018, when a 38-year-old SP2 graduate named Cameron Driver had suffered a cardiac event during a class in Caster's basement. But it doesnt mean you were always low-income, just that you are now. Medical records, records from child welfare services, corroborating letters from detectives and lawyers and elementary, middle, and high school teachers, childhood friends, professors basically everyone who had known me. [2], In public, while she was at Whitfield, Morrison and her daughter seemed to evoke the Gilmore Girls, echoing that television series's main characters, a single mother and her precocious daughter with a close and strong relationship. A Rhodes Scholar who claimed that she had grown up in the foster system has lost her scholarship after an investigation revealed that she grew up in a middle-class family and attended a $30,000-per-annum private school. RG: Rather than it being for the purpose of benefiting the students themselves. RG: as a kid. And that feels like one of them where it feels like the system is willfully misunderstanding reality in order to bend it in their direction. Mackenzie told the police her mother had pushed her down the stairs and struck her in the face. The father's message was forwarded to Penn's general counsel, Wendy White, who got in touch with Morrison. To me, it seems like any reader of the English language would read that in a literary sense , RG: of its self-exploration, self-doubt, trauma. Whereas white parents, a lot of times, it is much harder the bar is much higher to remove them from their homes because their whiteness or possibly class privilege or whatever identities that they have that might not fit a social worker or judges or whoevers involved perception of whose kids should be in the foster system. I mean, youd been taking loss after loss, despite having the facts on your side. One trigger for the beatings was sexual abuse by one of her mother's boyfriends, Henry Lovelace, Jr., a fitness trainer and multiple winner of the Missouri's Strongest Man competition in his weight class, which her mother warned her never to talk about. The Intercept is an independent nonprofit news outlet. And thats an unfortunate reality so many survivors experience, not having a lot of documentation. I think [its] called Penn First, I believe, and it seems like you socially spent a lot of time with them? I think this is a conversation not necessarily for people who are still in question about what happened here. Fierceton says she had not failed any tests; her Whitfield transcript shows she got a B+ in the class. And at the time I was more in panic mode than like, let me step back and look at this logically, theres absolutely no case, this is an intimidation tactic to try to silence me and sign this NDA and withdraw from the Rhodes and agree to whatever terms they wanted me to agree to you. Nor is she obligated to meet their expectations of her. She had not, she insisted, written her original essay with the intent of increasing her chances of admission. So Im not sure how much could have been missing. Mackenzie Fierceton has lost her Rhodes Scholarship and her University of Pennsylvania master's degree is being held after an anonymous tipster called out alleged inaccuracies in her school. She was . RG: Mhmm. And then instantly people started picking her story apart. Because Im not under any illusion that Im the typical foster kid. And so, yes, if the student, then, is no longer useful, I could imagine it turning. MF: They have since claimed that that is not what they [laughs] insinuated, I believe my former lawyer spoke to it in The New Yorker piece. [1]:111112, In her Intercept interview, Grim recounts how this was reported in The New Yorker and asks "So how is a person who is filling out this application supposed to know what definition youre supposed to use?" Yeah, so Penn First for the whole FGLI community. [i] Ruderman corroborated that later to The New Yorker, saying she was paraphrasing Fierceton's self-identification as FGLI. And many more vicious sentiments. And MacKenzie is the only one whos allowed to answer these questions. And so thats the low-income box. After a teacher reported what they felt was abuse, a social worker came by and your mother was able to just charm the pants off her. [2], Later that year, after that first foster home turned out to be "chaotic", with Fierceton's foster sibling attempting suicide, she moved to another one. Her history teacher described the incident this way: She showed up at my classroom door with a bloodied and battered face and then fainted., Mackenzie was hospitalized. Her admission to Oxford was unaffected, and she began her graduate studies in sociology there later in the year, with a Penn professor covering her tuition. Or is that it separates two into one? And my biological family did not fit those stereotypes, and I think that was really hard for people to process. MF: You know, I believe the first people who said that was the Rhodes Trust. That evening that the article came out is when I got a call from the reporter saying: I got this anonymous email that said X, Y, Z, and I wanted to let you know. "While it is possible that [she] was the cause of the alleged injuries," she wrote a month afterward, "the court cannot make that finding by a preponderance of the evidence based on the evidence presented." She felt as if it might have been an attempt to intimidate her. Our theme music was composed by Bart Warshaw. who was, I believe now, the acting provost. She was one of only 32 high school students selected from a pool of 2300 applicants. Even though I had, again, written statements from two ICU nurses who took care of me saying: Yes, there was blood, [laughs] theres photographs, and there still was the argument of like, there wasnt enough blood or your face wasnt so distorted you could couldnt tell who you were. Thats all it takes to support the journalism you rely on. Then the University of Pennsylvania accused her of. Is that just an interpretation or did they say anything that suggested to you that the fact that you had gone to a private school and grown up in an upper-middle-class situation meant that you could never at any point consider yourself low-income? And in the U.S., there is much more pressure to pull kids out of homes, right? RG: Right. verbally. That is when I would trace it back to. Picture: University of Pennsylvania/Instagram. RG: Or whatever our kind of contemporary version of it is. The mother of a friend of Fierceton's recalls that when she told Morrison on the phone that she "was not interested" in hearing what Morrison had to say, she got angry and confrontational. But part of it is funding decisions. And that felt very powerful in an institution where the overwhelming majority of people are coming from two-parent households, extremely wealthy, like a whole nother level of wealth that I have really ever seen, in my life in terms of just around me, like the 1 percent to the 0.001 percent. [Laughs.]. RG: And all of us, no matter what our situation, are not completely safe from it. Penn claims that was meant purely for purposes of the program, to attract as many students as possible who could benefit from participation in it. [22] It went into greater detail about her past, providing more substantiation for her abuse allegations from teachers, fellow students and their parents, Carrie Brandt (the police detective who had investigated and arrested Morrison) and her allegations that Morrison had enabled Lovelace's sexual abuse. She shared with the former screenshots of online chats and printouts of emails with representatives of the, The Rhodes Trust report found that the Penn police had no records of any calls to them from Fierceton about this. I cant say how many questions are left and were close to done. He explained that Morrison had had no prior criminal record, Fierceton's complaints about her mother's boyfriend and prescription drug abuse had been unsubstantiated, her cousin had witnessed no abuse while living with the Morrisons at a time prior to the incident, and he had learned that Fierceton "had regular temper tantrums, beyond the normal range for an adolescent". She ruined her moms career. [2] Morrison's bond was originally set at $40,000, but lowered to $5,000 over prosecutors' strenuous objections. Her sister also wrote White as well, alleging that Fierceton "deliberately tried to frame Carrie and planted 'evidence' around the house, including her own blood. And you saw that playing out right away, right, when your biological mother was first arrested? What happened after you went out of the hospital? Deconstructed is a production of First Look Media and The Intercept. I do think that it is a huge defense mechanism that people deploy. They didnt respond, though Mackenzies biological mother has denied the allegations of abuse. students, defines first generation broadly, including students who have a strained or limited relationship with a parent who has graduated from college. Mackenzie Fierceton has lost her Rhodes Scholarship and her University of Pennsylvania master's degree is being held after an anonymous tipster called out alleged inaccuracies in her school and scholarship applications.NY Post photo composite She is poor, but she has not been poor for long enough. Right. Or was the real issue that Fierceton did not really fit the profile of a suffering student who needed the benevolence of an Ivy League school?" The Inquirer story came out in November 2020. But it did open with these literary elements of what I was feeling like, and the experience I was having in those moments. Its, in my opinion, because they get overlooked and the kids like me are kind of rendered invisible by the privileges of our biological families. @RachelAviv for @NewYorker [2], "Family is not the people you are related to by blood," she wrote in the diary. "How much does one have to suffer to have value? Smith said he believed the university had decided before it began investigating that Fierceton's abuse allegations were false and that she had fabricated them with the goal of finding an easier way into Penn or another elite school. And I decided to do it cause I felt like I had nothing to lose and I ended up making gratitude lists every day for years and it really was a very healing experience for me. She applied to a program at Penn's School of Social Policy and Practice (commonly referred to at Penn as SP2) that would allow her to begin graduate studies while still an undergraduate, so she could graduate with a master's degree in the field a year after completing her undergraduate degree. And the theme of private school definitely came up many times over the course of the last year and a half. One home, during her junior year of high school, was so "toxic" and crammed with other foster kids that she left for weeks at a time, sleeping each night on a carousel of couches at the homes of various friends, she said. And still, it was just like: Nope. And The New Yorker article also alluded to a few things that you had gotten loose with in a couple of paragraphs. Which as Im sure youve learned since is a complete and fundamental misunderstanding of poverty . I remembered that my teacher had told me to write a gratitude list: Ive had different experiences harassment! 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