And Im kind of one of the lucky ones where I had really expansive and thorough documentation for all the parts of this story. [3] In high school there, Fierceton was a model student. "We have concluded that there is a basis for serious concern and that further investigation by the Rhodes Committee may be appropriate", she wrote. So I started while I was an undergrad and was taking classes at the same time. A week later, Brandt interviewed Morrison again at the police station; this time she said that her daughter had injured herself, saying "I guess she has more problems than I thought." What about Rhodes? Mackenzie Fierceton (born Mackenzie Terrell on August 9, 1997; later Mackenzie Morrison,[1]:6364,86) is an American activist and graduate student currently studying at Oxford University. Im part of a wrongful death lawsuit that was filed in August, 2020. And how much did she challenge your medical condition after that beating? Last edited on 10 February 2023, at 00:35, Learn how and when to remove this template message, the state's Department of Social Services, tortious interference with a business relationship, negligent infliction of emotional distress, "Verified Answer and New Matter to Plaintiff's Complaint", "How an Ivy League School Turned Against a Student", "Deconstructed: Mackenzie Fierceton on Her Battle With UPenn", "Ex Alderman Newsletter 168 And Chesterfield 113", "St. Luke's physician charged with felony child abuse", "Abuse charges against former St. Luke's physician are dropped", "Henry Lovelace, owner of Wild Horse Fitness Passes Away", "Former St. Louis woman who spent time in foster care named Rhodes Scholar", "Thousands petition U. to cut ties with Philly PD, reform militarized campus 'police state', "Penn student who aged out of foster care wins prestigious Rhodes Scholarship", "Following public outcry, Penn lifts hold on former Rhodes Scholar Mackenzie Fierceton's master's degree", "University Mourns Loss of Cameron Avant Driver", "Student loses Rhodes scholarship over allegations of lying about her foster care upbringing", "Former St. Louis-area student loses Rhodes scholarship over 'false narratives', "Student Misleads With Story of Poverty and Abuse and Wins Rhodes ScholarshipNow, the Media Is Defending Her", "Did This Rhodes Wannabe Lie About Her Background? Fierceton's life story, as well as her self-identification as a "first generation" college student, came under scrutiny by the university when an anonymous email alleged that Fierceton was not. [2], Two weeks after the New Yorker article was published, Fierceton gave an interview to The Intercept's Ryan Grim for an installment of the Deconstructed podcast. She was . Detective Carrie Brandt, who had been planning to follow up on the hotline report at Whitfield that day, instead interviewed Fierceton at the hospital. ", Morrison said. Mackenzie told the police her mother had pushed her down the stairs and struck her in the face. RG: Or whatever our kind of contemporary version of it is. Morrison then brought suit in circuit court to have the board's decision reviewed and reversed. Which as Im sure youve learned since is a complete and fundamental misunderstanding of poverty . Did she lie? Is that what sent you into a surreal state? The show was mixed by William Stanton. Mackenzie, for her part, was accepted to the University of Pennsylvania and, in her sophomore year, won a Rhodes Scholarship. Her last set of foster parents had had a baby and she felt less a part of their lives. [2] Winkelstein, who has a Ph.D. in bioengineering and has studied injuries,[3] then proceeded to interrogate Fierceton at length about her abuse and hospitalization, in a manner that led Fierceton to believe that not only did Winkelstein doubt her story but had spoken with Morrison. And when will you have finished up your Ph.D.? 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. And all of us, no matter what our situation, are not completely safe from it. [Laughs.]. I identify with the FGLI umbrella term and definitely being a low-income student, but I've never really called myself a standalone first-generation. She is a student who found herself in a complex and easily-misunderstood situation: working towards her degree without support from family. 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. So I felt pretty confident. And: Did you report what was going on to your school? "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." Fierceton grew up in a wealthy community and attended an elite private school in a St. Louis suburb. I think they do have a richer experience if they have more diversity around them, but that is more the point. And that dynamic, I would say, [laughs] probably played a big part in all of this. RG: Right. MF: So [laughs] I feel like I could go on for hours about that. And that is, I felt very defeated too. "Once you do something that the University sees as undermining its quest for power and prestige, it will not think twice about discarding you, humiliating you, and retaliating against you, which is exactly what they did" said one SP2 student in support of Fierceton. And its no offense its not like the most profound . But part of it is funding decisions. And they were the ones I believe and this is public now because Penn attached it to their response to the lawsuit I filed and I believe they were the first ones to mention that I had gone to private school and that they were questioning if I was low-income. And its funny, cause it just made me so frustrated and I actually went back and read it. Raised in Chesterfield, Missouri, a West County suburb of St. Louis, she attended and graduated from the Whitfield School in Creve Coeur. She also alleged that Penn had on many occasions failed to follow its own disciplinary policies in its investigation of her.[16]. The Intercept is an independent nonprofit news outlet. MF: Yeah. Yeah. And please go and leave us a rating or a review it helps people find the show. Yes, to my lawyer who communicated it to me. She had had a fairly upper middle class life yet was working at multiple fast food restaurants and barely getting by. 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. And so the fact that shes continued pursuing you to me kind of demonstrates the entire case. At Oxford University, Mackenzie Fierceton will conduct research on the "foster care-to-prison" pipeline. 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. 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? [i] Ruderman corroborated that later to The New Yorker, saying she was paraphrasing Fierceton's self-identification as FGLI. And so, yes, if the student, then, is no longer useful, I could imagine it turning. 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. And thats an unfortunate reality so many survivors experience, not having a lot of documentation. 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. ", When Penn's Office of Student Conduct confronted Fierceton with the discrepancy between her statement on two of her applications that she ", The exact definition of FGLI relevant to forms Fierceton filled out is a key point in the Rhodes Trust and Penn investigations of her. I was in this private school with a lot of upper-middle class or wealthy white students. RG: Mhmm. What kind of a group is that? Like you said, theres also the cultural stereotype of like Orphan Annie and Oliver Twist of what these kinds of kids are supposed to look like that starts so early on in, and deep in the culture or media that we encounter that I think really ingrains that into people. Theres no cell phone reception in the basement. How did you get to school? So how is a person who is filling out this application supposed to know what definition youre supposed to use? And I dont remember all of the questions, but it was a really intense, rapid fire of really difficult and challenging questions. [2], The trust notified Fierceton at the beginning of 2021 that it was conducting an investigation into the allegations. And its funny, cause it just made me so frustrated and I actually went back and read it. So Im not sure how much could have been missing. And I also think we have this racist and classist notion of who can be an abuser or who can cause harm. Like, those two things dont fit together. I didnt even really think about it when I checked it, because I felt like I had a lot of information that backed it up. We need to stay on task. 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. Penn didnt respond to a request for comment, but in its response to Mackenzies lawsuit, they write: Penn denies that there are accessibility problems with the Caster Building which contributed to Mackenzies medical emergency or to [Cameron] Drivers death. And at the time I was like: Why what? Penn officials, of course, have said the interview was appropriate. She felt as if it might have been an attempt to intimidate her. And then she hired a law firm and eventually they were doing their own investigation for several months. It recommended the scholarship be rescinded. She, about 10 years ago, she wrote a comment I think on a Gawker post or something like that that we ended up then re-publishing as an essay at The Huffington Post about, and it was about her life in poverty, and it went viral, millions of people read it, extremely well-written piece. RG: Instead, I want to talk more about what this says about the system, that something so seemingly irrational could be produced by this system, and actually could be predicted to be produced by this system in some ways. They had done their own investigation again, quotes on investigation and then I had submitted over a hundred pages of documents to them. 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. as a kid. Instead, I want to talk more about what this says about the system, that something so seemingly irrational could be produced by this system, and actually could be predicted to be produced by this system in some ways. [Laughs.]. And we cant acknowledge that, so we then have to pick apart the other pieces of it, and say that well this, this just cant be real. Now Im sobbing, Im hyperventilating, and the staff member interrupted and said: Can we have an estimate of how much time is left? [2][g], The packages she says she received were supplemented by hangup calls, which a faculty member Fierceton occasionally lived with recalled her receiving in the months preceding the trial of her mother's lawsuit against DSS later in her junior year. 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. woman who won a coveted scholarship in the US to study at Oxford after claiming she was poor, overcame childhood abuse and grew up in foster care lost the opportunity after it emerged she was. If you enjoy this podcast, be sure to also check out Intercepted as well as Murderville, which is now in its second season. Like what does Penn say when you tell them: Hey, the Penn official who helped me fill this out said that these are the categories that I fit. MF: No, I found it before. In between those placements, she slept at friends' houses for long periods. Thats not in question. The university, in its response to Mackenzies lawsuit, referred to Mackenzies mother as an accomplished physician and claimed that a court had found her allegations not to be credible. [14], Fierceton and her faculty supporters have suspected that Penn's investigation of her, and its determination to cast aspersions on her credibility, may be related to her role in fomenting a wrongful death suit filed against the university in August 2020, before she had been announced as a Rhodes Scholarship winner. To me, it seems like any reader of the English language would read that in a literary sense , of its self-exploration, self-doubt, trauma. Penn shut down in-person classes and gave students living on campus a week to find somewhere else to live until it was safe to return. "I think that we could contribute to the community, the broader Philadelphia community, and the West Philadelphia community more positively, instead of doing things that are not only undermining them but are actively policing them, and end up creating and perpetuating more violence," she told The Daily Pennsylvanian, the university's student newspaper. Yes. The program's application asked "Are you the first generation in your family to attend college? Brandt, the Chesterfield police detective who had originally investigated the case, said later that the prosecutor never explained to her what that new evidence was. [3], By the end of the interview Fierceton was crying. Her junior year at Whitfield, a prestigious prep school, Mackenzie showed up to school one day in a terrible state. 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. [10], Fierceton, who outside of school had also taken on a volunteer position as a birthing doula, decided during that summer to apply for a Rhodes Scholarship to get a Ph.D. at Oxford University in England, encouraged by a classmate who had just won one himself and was impressed by her activism. MF: And its mentioned briefly. She ruined her moms career. Morrison told White in an email. Why were you in the hospital that long? She entered foster care only at the age of 17, after making a complaint of abuse against Dr. Morrison a complaint that a court later found not to be credible. A University of Pennsylvania May graduate who is currently completing her master's degree at Penn has been awarded a Rhodes Scholarship for graduate study at the University of Oxford.. Penn's 2021 Rhodes Scholar is Mackenzie Fierceton from St. Louis, currently residing in Philadelphia. MF: You know, in my personal experience, there were not very many kids who came from a background like me. So to me it was pretty clear that it likely came from them. Like questioning: How much blood? MF: She, to my knowledge, has stuck by that. So Rachel had it and Penn disputed it. 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. 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. Enough blood? Her mentor told Licht afterwards that "it felt like an attack on a student" and that she had never experienced anything like it. But she says she occasionally received packages at her dorm room containing objects she suspected had come from her mother, such as a bracelet with an inscription about finding the truth, or others close to her, such as a pair of sneakers, which she believed Lovelace, who had sometimes helped her stretch before workouts, had sent. So one question was: Are you from a low-income family? Are we going to see these injuries? And I turned over all this information to his widow. verbally. But they just assumed theres no way that it could have happened. She lost consciousness and was taken to the hospital, where she spent three days in intensive care. And I asked in the email exchange: Is this about the anonymous email? And I asked again and just said: Ive had different experiences of harassment for the last four years at Penn. 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. Mackenzie Fierceton is the child of a doctor who attended a private prep school in a wealthy suburb. Now Im sobbing, Im hyperventilating, and the staff member interrupted and said: Can we have an estimate of how much time is left? "I had so much anger and grief, and I didn't want them to be affiliated in any way with this new life I was building. In November 2020, Mackenzie Fierceton was one of just 32 students to be awarded the Rhodes Scholarship to study at Oxford. 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. And so that was when it really transitioned, the second half of it, into these really intimate questions about my abuse until the point where I was sobbing and couldnt answer the questions anymore. who was, I believe now, the acting provost. They didnt respond, though Mackenzies biological mother has denied the allegations of abuse. RG: Well, Mackenzie, thank you so much for joining me and sharing your story. I said were almost done. Yeah. [2], In December 2021 Fierceton retained another lawyer pro bono and filed her own suit against Penn, alleging that the university's investigations into her history and how she had represented herself was a "sham", undertaken with the intent of forcing her to withdraw from the Rhodes Scholarship and damaging her credibility as a witness in the Driver suit, constituting tortious interference with a business relationship and intentional and negligent infliction of emotional distress. But those definitions arent anywhere to be found. Penn acknowledged that, for that reason, it could not state definitely that those events did not take place but still, "the way [she] presents this information invites the reader to speculate when she herself states she does not have a clear recollection of the nature of this event, if it occurred. And then the other question was: Are you the first in your family to attend college? Our grad school had no specific definitions or instructions, but I did have a relationship with the associate director of admissions at the time. Not as something that is for the benefit of the MacKenzies, the people who were being brought into the school, but actually for the benefit of the university itself, its image and also for the students. RG: And so where is your story now? It, too, alleged that Fierceton was misrepresenting herself as having been poor and grown up entirely in foster care, with many photos of Fierceton as a little girl on the beach and riding horses, and other activities usually associated with affluence. [2], One day in September 2014, she told the history teacher about Lovelace's abuse. More the point ] in high school there, Fierceton was a really intense, rapid fire of really and., 2020 one day in September 2014, she slept at friends ' houses for long.. 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