MF: Its hard to say. If you want to give us additional feedback, email us at. You know, I believe the first people who said that was the Rhodes Trust. How many people kind of fit that category that you interacted with, and how many kind of fit closer to your category, not just in your own interactions, but also in your research? I think [its] called Penn First, I believe, and it seems like you socially spent a lot of time with them? And in the U.S., there is much more pressure to pull kids out of homes, right? Enough bruises? And then very quickly turn to very specific questions about different instances of abuse. And then she hired a law firm and eventually they were doing their own investigation for several months. She is suing Penn for defamation, arguing its real goal in investigating her was to discredit her as a witness in and retaliate for a wrongful death suit filed against the university by the widow of a fellow student which Fierceton instigated. There were some pretty basic errors, such as my name, my birth name, and my birth place, and claiming that I didnt have a sibling, that I wasnt low-income, a lot of facts that were pretty easily disputed. MF: Yeah, it was, things like that where I simplified all of these foster kids that youre living with a biological family who have kids, which I would say are foster siblings. At first there was actually, there was contention. So they heard from her and immediately they call you into a meeting with the deputy provost at the time, Beth Winkelstein . So, yes, an article came out in the local paper saying that she had been arrested. But I just had a bad feeling and I started to try to find more information. And if those things are true, and youre also struggling in poverty, then something is deeply wrong with the system. RG: Well, Mackenzie, thank you so much for joining me and sharing your story. His master's level university, Ivy College Pennsylvania, also failed to grant him the acquired master's degree . And because poverty and abuse are so pervasive in society and particularly in a country that has such a minimal social safety net and has so much violence. 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. So Im not sure if it was Penn who reached out to her or vice versa, which I think is also an important question in all of this. "[20][m] A syndicated morning radio show named Fierceton its "donkey of the day". [3], Through her attorney, Morrison gave a statement, her only one so far, on the case: "Mackenzie is deeply loved by her mom and family. RG: Rather than it being for the purpose of benefiting the students themselves. And at the time I was like: Why what? students, defines first generation broadly, including students who have a strained or limited relationship with a parent who has graduated from college. I really appreciate it. She didnt even know what building he had died in. Fierceton responded that that showed the university's "vulnerability and desperation". According to an investigation by the Chronicle of Higher Education, University of Pennsylvania student Mackenzie Fierceton lost her Rhodes scholarship and her master's degree was withheld after. [2], Morrison's arrest had been reported in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch,[6] where commenters on the online version of the story took her side, speculating that Fierceton was "an entitled brat" who had vengefully fabricated charges that had the potential to end her mother's medical career. This was about a week after. And I think said something along the lines of there were things missing and it was distorted. Because that was one of the ones that really blew my mind. The reporter had assumed based on her status as a FGLI student which stands for first-generation, low-income that she had been poor her entire life. What about Rhodes? Mhmm. Then the University of Pennsylvania accused her of lying. But I also think it has something to do with the way that we understand poverty. She didnt know he was in the basement. RG: Talk just a little bit about that case . 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. MF: I think youre right. "They are the people that support you, look out for you, & love you unconditionally. [2], Some of those Morrison talked with did believe her; a classmate of Fierceton's recalled people likening her to the protagonist of the film Gone Girl, about a Missouri woman who disappears in order to avenge herself on an adulterous husband, whom she makes it appear killed her. RG: And how much did she challenge your medical condition after that beating? Mackenzie Fierceton was championed as a former foster youth who had overcome an abusive childhood and won a prestigious Rhodes Scholarship. Did you go into foster care? 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. And I was having flashbacks to cross-examinations and depositions Id given about this which later made sense, because we found out that Wendy White had spoken with one of Carries defense lawyers. While Kerr noted that Fierceton's three weeks in the hospital was far longer than might be expected given the bruises that led to her admission, she also noted the absence of injuries to Fierceton's back despite having reportedly fallen or being thrown downstairs. And then as the different internships, and then I went to get my masters in social work and all of this happened, I started to see that continue in different capacities while I was in different roles, seeing that theme in this relationship between foster care and the criminal justice system. 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? And it became pretty clear to me that there had been a very similar delay in his care, but even worse dynamics. And after you talked to the school, how did you get to school the next morning? She had not, she insisted, written her original essay with the intent of increasing her chances of admission. And Im Ryan Grim, D.C. bureau chief of The Intercept. We started building this, and this is exactly who we built it for. Mackenzie is currently suing the university. [2], Morrison's lawyer questioned Fierceton closely about apparent differences between her medical records from the hospital and her description of her injuries in a scholarship application essay the lawyer had obtained, and other details from the latter, such as the "metallic" taste of a feeding tube that was plastic and her claim that she was unable to recognize her own facial features in the hospital mirror, when her medical records showed that her injuries were well short of being even temporarily disfiguring. In early 2022, after stories about her struggle with Penn and the Rhodes Trust received national attention from stories in The Chronicle of Higher Education and The New Yorker, commentators took the university, and American elite higher education in general, to task for its use of the story of Fierceton and some other recent Rhodes recipients as poverty porn and its shifting definition of an FGLI student. MF: Just a quick circling back, Im actually not sure if it was her who first reached out or if it was General Counsel Wendy White, because I later found out that they had a phone call about 36 hours after the article came out and seemed to talk pretty extensively, and then there were a lot of emails that happened. [4] After gathering all the evidence, they approached Driver's widow, Roxanne Logan, who had not been informed of the accessibility issues and delays involved in her husband's death; in fact she had been given the impression he had been evacuated from the building almost as soon as he began experiencing symptoms. 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? And so, like I mentioned earlier, I dont want to go over too much of the history that led up to your battle with Penn and with the Rhodes trust, because people can find that in The New Yorker article that came out recently, you went over that in some pretty decent length; in Katie Courics podcast in a recent interview there. That is when I would trace it back to. 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 First, Morrison had tried to send Fierceton some jewelry during her freshman year and contacted the university to find out how to get in touch with her; when Fierceton was informed of this she said she had a, "Regardless of the actual reason for her name change," Penn's lawyers write in their response to her lawsuit, "Fierceton effectively fastened a buffer of separation between her real life story and the false story she had cultivated for Penn and others. And it was a very similar situation where it took everyone a long time to get to the building. Penn also noted that her name change had the effect, whether she had intended it or not, of making her background harder to research. I took photos of the building and sent it to them, and I was connecting them with different people who were in my class, who were in his class. Asked about Lovelace's alleged sexual abuse, specifically an incident the year before where Fierceton, having fallen asleep in her mother's bed, woke to find him caressing her breasts, Morrison expressed amusement at the possibility that her boyfriend could have mistaken her teenage daughter for her; Lovelace, interviewed separately, denied all the allegations. She feared that her mother had inflicted the injuries, perhaps out of jealousy that Lovelace was attracted to her, even as it seemed to Fierceton that Morrison was "offering [her] up to him on a silver platter". I think they do have a richer experience if they have more diversity around them, but that is more the point. Her junior year at Whitfield, a prestigious prep school, Mackenzie showed up to school one day in a terrible state. I asked specifically about those boxes and the answer I got was again, this was multiple years ago, but it was something along the lines of I dont think that biological parents are relevant to this. In addition to the complaint she had made against Lovelace, a similar complaint to police that her mother was abusing prescription drugs also did not yield any evidence to support it. Like one of them was describing a biological child in a house as another foster child, and something about a half-brother or something.What were those and how were those errors kind of deployed against you? Our concern is instead with the conduct of our. he asked in the first. We started building this, and this is exactly who we built it for. There were so many there are, I guess I should say so many moving pieces. Its just so obvious that you fit the criteria for low-income, but it seems like they feel like you dont fit it in the spirit of how they want it. They demanded that the university remove the notation from her file. And back in high school, it was a similar thing. Raised in Chesterfield, Missouri, a West County suburb of St. Louis, she attended and graduated from the Whitfield School in Creve Coeur. [9] In a news release, Penn's then-president Amy Gutmann, a daughter of Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany who had herself been the first in her family to attend college,[11] spoke admiringly of Fierceton as "a first-generation low-income student and a former foster youth. And MacKenzie is the only one whos allowed to answer these questions. And I was actually really nervous about doing any press for this reason. In 2020, former foster child Mackenzie Fierceton received a Rhodes Scholarship as a self-identified first generation, low income student at the University of Pennsylvania. [2], In July the OSC concluded its investigation with a 31-page report sent to provost Wendell Pritchett examining Fierceton's background more extensively than the Rhodes Trust had. Nor is she obligated to meet their expectations of her. Yes, to my lawyer who communicated it to me. When she was a teenager, she showed up bloodied and bruised at her elite private school. And the chain of events that happened leading into foster care? Its practically half of Americans, or more. Mackenzie Fierceton of St. Louis was an Oxford student who had to offer her a Rhodes scholarship after the university caught her lying about her financial condition and her unpleasant teenage years on her application reports. [H]onestly, first-generation is never something I've really identified with fully. But that was definitely a driving force for why I decided, ultimately, to withdraw because I felt like: OK, federal prison is no joke. How much research has been done on the foster-care-to-prison-pipeline? And Penn is still claiming that those are fake journals. "[12] Gutmann, soon to step down from her position to serve as U.S. ambassador to Germany, had made increasing the amount of FGLI students at Penn a priority in her previous 17 years as the university's president. "We have concluded that there is a basis for serious concern and that further investigation by the Rhodes Committee may be appropriate", she wrote. Penn, by questioning so much of Fierceton's story, was making itself "complicit in a long campaign of continuing abuse", she added. And you experienced that yourself, right? [2] Afterwards Morrison changed her daughter's last name to her own. My life is over, Im in the hospital, Im at rock bottom. Deconstructed[emailprotected]theintercept.com, Photo illustration: Soohee Cho for The Intercept; Getty Images, AP, This weeks guest on Deconstructed is Mackenzie Fierceton, who was the subject of, The Philadelphia Inquirer erroneously wrote that she had grown up poor. So, yes. "Without her trauma, she didnt matter", wrote a commentator in the Tulane Hullabaloo. But it was in the sense of: I didnt recognize myself both because I was beaten and my face was swollen and whatever, and I felt like at rock bottom and broken. "[2], Near the end of November Fierceton was named one of 32 Rhodes scholars from the U.S. for the year. 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. Her account was not completely inaccurateshe described as a foster child one sibling of hers who was actually the biological child of her foster parents, for instance, which she attributed later to not having developed her essay at length. RG: Mhmm. What happened the night before? RG: Mhmm. You know, I honestly dont know. The Intercept is an independent nonprofit news outlet. Uh, my lawyer. Ultimately she decided to apply for the scholarship, in which she proposed to expand on the subject of her undergraduate thesis, the intertwining of the foster care and juvenile justice systems, to "continue to try to move forward in my life. Yes, definitely. [2], At the beginning of the next school year, Fierceton was examined by her pediatrician, who noticed a large bruise on her arm but chose not to X-ray it, a decision the doctor later regretted. In any event, The University of Oxford, where Mackenzies doing her Ph.D., has remained supportive, and in the wake of The New Yorker investigation, and the resulting protests from students and faculty, Penn lifted the hold on her degree. And it became pretty clear to me that they had spoken to Carrie and or seen medical records. And so I was like, of course, Im going to respond again. So you use what you have, uh, which are the definitions that were already out there. If youd like to support our work, go to theintercept.com/give your donation, no matter what the amount, makes a real difference. Why were you in the hospital that long? RG: And The New Yorker article also alluded to a few things that you had gotten loose with in a couple of paragraphs. 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. And then theres also foster siblings in the sense of other people who are in the foster care system who youre living with. as a kid. She had had a fairly upper middle class life yet was working at multiple fast food restaurants and barely getting by. There were definitely, Im sure. Is that your experience with it as well? Youre engaged in a lawsuit with Penn. But yeah, that, I guess, just one point of clarification that I recently, in the last few months, just found out about. I have all these three kinds of different rationale and corroborations. And it was also the community was kind of divided. [2], One day in September 2014, she told the history teacher about Lovelace's abuse. And like you said, like, yes, obviously I was looking in a mirror, and I knew I was looking in a mirror. Given the pandemic, Rhodes Scholar judges interviewed candidates over Zoom. Mackenzie Fierceton was named Penn's 2021 Rhodes Scholar. [3], After the interview White emailed Morrison about how it went; she wrote back regretting that Fierceton continued to tell the same story. Why would I do that? 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. There, she wandered the hallways until she found the history teacher, and collapsed. And just Deputy Provost Finkelstein saying: No. 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 its no offense its not like the most profound . [2], To White, Morrison repeated her story that her daughter had fabricated the abuse allegations. Mackenzie Fierceton (born Mackenzie Terrell on August 9, 1997; later Mackenzie Morrison, [1] : 63-64, 86 ) is an American activist and graduate student currently studying at Oxford University. An article in The Philadelphia Inquirer erroneously wrote that she had grown up poor. Like I just havent, really, there to be a lot of information about me publicly. She had bruises all over her body in different stages of healing an obvious sign of child abuse.. [3] In high school there, Fierceton was a model student. But part of it is funding decisions. RG: And one of the main things they pointed to was that she had gone to this private school . Fierceton had also brought her mentor, a staff member at the university's Civic House, into the meeting; at the outset Winkelstein told the woman she could not speak or she would be disconnected immediately. To very specific questions about different instances of abuse had grown up poor Mackenzie, thank you so much joining! 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