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"[3][l], The Chronicle story led to nationwide coverage,[17][18] most of which framed the narrative as Penn and the Rhodes Trust had in their reports, depicting Fierceton as yet another exposed fraud. So that was what the actual poem and personal statement was about [laughs.] 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. But they just assumed theres no way that it could have happened. I think youre right. Photograph by Robbie Lawrence for The New Yorker Mackenzie Fierceton grew up in a middle-class suburb of St. Louis. [1]:115 As to her previous involvement with the child welfare system, Penn says Fierceton told them she was not certain, but she was referring either to the guardian ad litem appointed for her during her parents' divorce or an earlier incident when she and her biological parents were still living in Connecticut. Two other women he was involved with had also reported him to law enforcement). [4] Within days, the father of one of Fierceton's Whitfield friends, and a high-school classmate using an anonymous email, contacted Penn to inform them she had apparently misrepresented herself and had actually spent most of her childhood in her mother's home in an affluent West County suburb of St. Louis. [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. 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. In May 2022, after a lengthy article in The New Yorker drew widespread media attention to Fierceton's story, the university dropped the charge and awarded her the degree. I have some of my own theories, but I want to hear yours. MF: And with that, like you said, notion of: Well, theres no way that you went to private school and all of this could have still happened, or that you could be low-income now and this idea that socioeconomic status is permanent. If you speak, Im going to disconnect you from the call. I think they do have a richer experience if they have more diversity around them, but that is more the point. "Was the problem that a child who was placed into foster care and had no contact with her biological mother wasn't actually a first-generation college student? [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. I had no idea what she already knew. I mean, youd been taking loss after loss, despite having the facts on your side. And is it somewhat of a defense mechanism that people deploy to protect themselves? Who would hold party elites accountable to the values they proclaim to have? But it doesnt mean you were always low-income, just that you are now. And the theme of private school definitely came up many times over the course of the last year and a half. [1]:86, Morrison prospered in her medical career, and she provided generously for her daughter, allowing her to ride horses, go on river rafting trips and attend exclusive private schools, such as Whitfield, in nearby Creve Coeur, where annual tuition was almost $30,000. Uh, my lawyer. Right. And then the other question was: Are you the first in your family to attend college? Some people were very much on my side; some people were very much, I think, in that sort of cognitive dissonance of: This cant be true because if it can, then Im in danger. And thats again, like not because there isnt abuse or neglect going on in families that looked like mine, or biological families that looked like mine. In retrospect, I just honestly wish I had never written about those people, but it was kind of one of those things where I was like: OK, I need to make my point. She had wanted to appeal the Rhodes committee's findings, but Rafaelle advised her that Penn had hinted to him that it might consider referring the matter to federal prosecutors on the grounds that she had lied about being FGLI on her Free Application for Federal Student Aid form. The university's police did not know at first where the building was and the city's paramedics did not know how to get to it. 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. Then the University of Pennsylvania accused her of lying. MF: You know, in my personal experience, there were not very many kids who came from a background like me. 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. Why would I do that? And I think psychologically one way people feel safer about it is to say: No, that happens to other people. I really appreciate it. While the investigators understood, they also wrote that the limited information she provided may have been more likely to elicit an answer favorable to her. 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. And all of us, no matter what our situation, are not completely safe from it. I tried to help as much as I could. There were so many there are, I guess I should say so many moving pieces. And so I wanted to start with where things really started to unravel for you. So the Rhodes Trust ended up after their quote-investigation, and I submitted all the evidence, they ended up still recommending that my scholarship be rescinded, uh, but I had another opportunity to respond to their report, which I absolutely wanted to do. Whereas a social worker comes into a poor home and looks around and sees just the normal poverty that our system has foisted on people and says: Oh, well, clearly this is somebody that needs to be stripped out of here. But once I got out of the hospital and I learned that information, I remembered that a classmate had died in the same basement about 16 months earlier. And those other people are kind of like the orphans that we think of in Dickensian novels. Fine. Fierceton was living off-campus by then, but she and her roommates decided to leave their apartment. I wrote a poem about the actual what the message was, which is so cheesy and Im cringing at my 17-year-old self [laughs], but it was about the healing power of gratitude. Like I just havent, really, there to be a lot of information about me publicly. Its virtually almost an unknown phenomena or to people who are working in the field, its certainly known, but theres been very little research on it, which partially complicates my Ph.D., because theres so little to draw upon. And I dont remember exactly what their statement was, but they disputed it. 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". When she was a teenager, she showed up bloodied and bruised at her elite private school. MF: She, to my knowledge, has stuck by that. RG: And what was the first-generation community like on campus? A picture of her was posted at the nurse's station should she make the attempt. Mackenzie Fierceton, a 2016 graduate of Whitfield School in Creve Coeur, lost the scholarship after allegations surfaced that she had provided "false narratives" to education officials, the New. And whats the difference between the U.S. and English system? "[2], On her application, Fierceton recounted her background and the unexpected way it led to her becoming a foster child. Then, the first-generation box. 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. Penn's admissions department thus automatically coded Fierceton as a first-generation student, a category it was seeking to increase among its undergraduate population, even though her mother had an advanced degree[2] and her grandfather was a college graduate who had taught at the University of Missouri. ", 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. Fierceton applied for the Rhodes Scholarship with assistance from Penn's Center for Undergraduate Research and Fellowships. Mackenzie Fierceton was championed as a former foster youth who had overcome an abusive childhood and won a prestigious Rhodes Scholarship. "I advised him that this was ridiculous, and this had to be a 'status thing", she said. There, she wandered the hallways until she found the history teacher, and collapsed. And it just felt pretty devastating to me, because for so long I hid everything, Id been so ashamed, and I already felt so much guilt in coming forward then. 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. And we spoke for a long time and I went through everything I had found. And what happened after that? 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. "[20][m] A syndicated morning radio show named Fierceton its "donkey of the day". [2] She was also working two jobs, as a policy fellow with Philadelphia City Council and another interning in social work at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. RG: Interesting. Yeah. Fierceton grew up in a wealthy community and attended an elite private school in a St. Louis suburb. Interesting. MF: I think youre right. In 2019, Fierceton testified in a court hearing that, in September 2014, her mother allegedly pushed her down a set of stairs and hit her in the face several times. Did they make that threat in writing or was that . 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. I was in this private school with a lot of upper-middle class or wealthy white students. 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. The teen said she was sent to. How long were you in the hospital? 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. "[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. And then I remembered that my teacher had told me to write a gratitude list. "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." or in graduate school. Thank you so much for having me. Her mother had no explanation for the injuries, other than saying perhaps she had done it to herself. And there was also the added threat that they would report me to the federal government for wire fraud if I didnt, again, withdraw from the Rhodes and sign this NDA. It didnt, though, to the University of Pennsylvania. RG: Mhmm. RG: And because you were not just low-income, actually no income, other than the jobs that you were working nobody has complained about the low-income one, right? Fierceton wrote to SP2 dean Sara Bachman complaining about the interview, saying she felt "worthlessness, hopelessness, and shame" for a week afterwards. The lawsuit, filed on behalf of Mackenzie Fierceton claimed that Penn officials targeted the grad student for retaliation after she became a key witness in a wrongful death lawsuit filed against the university. Did she lie? Who will spend some significant amount of time in poverty. Fierceton joins Ryan Grim to discuss the saga of her battle with UPenn and why the Ivy Leagueinstitution seems to have so much trouble recognizing the complexity of poverty in America. Mackenzie Fierceton is the child of a doctor who attended a private prep school in a wealthy suburb. In addition it offered details of what its own investigation had concluded about Fierceton's childhood and adolescence that led OSC to believe it was likely that she had exaggerated or fabricated outright her claims about her mother. Then the Philly paramedics couldnt figure out how to get to the building and then they couldnt get me out. 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. She expressed some concern to Penn staff that if she won, the media attention might incite her mother and her family to attack her reputation, and expressed on a form she filed with Penn as part of the process a concern of hers that FGLI students such as herself were "pressured to be someone they were not amidst their application process." In other words, if you are parent who says that you are wishing your daughter well and youre telling the authorities that shes just mentally ill and its just a really, really sad and tragic case that shes making up all of these allegations of abuse and throwing herself down stairs, and beating herself up all for cries for help, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera you wouldnt then also pursue a multi-year long effort to destroy her life. [2], Fierceton supplied the trust's investigators with her medical and court records from the mid-2010s as well as letters from 26 peopleteachers at Whitfield, the three Penn faculty members who had written her Rhodes recommendation letters, vouching for her abuse claims and saying she had never misrepresented herself. I n November 2020, University of Pennsylvania graduate student Mackenzie Fierceton, 24, won the Rhodes Scholarship to study at Oxford University. 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. 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. I cant remember if it was in the Rhodes essay or in another essay that, in hindsight, you wouldve tightened up. But the acclaim quickly devolved into acrimony as the university and the Rhodes Trust began questioning aspects of Fiercetons backstory. [2], At the beginning of April,[5] after she came to school with a black eye that showed through the concealer she put over it, she was taken to see the wellness director, who asked what had happened. And the chain of events that happened leading into foster care? And I was in a kind of unique situation where I applied to grad school at the beginning of my sophomore year of college, because I sub-matriculated. RG: as a kid. One of them, to me, felt pretty clear that it was probably from someone in my biological family, because it had photos of me; it had very specific information that very few people would have and I dont think many people would have random childhood photos of me. Raised in Chesterfield, Missouri, a West County suburb of St. Louis, she attended and graduated from the Whitfield School in Creve Coeur. And did they say anything along those lines? Now anyone who earns that distinction is to be commended, but the article also noted that Mackenzie had aged out of foster care . And I told them I only have a half-hour, because Im working, Im in class, and were going to go through all of this. And I think its true. [3], Before that happened, Fierceton withdrew from the scholarship on her own. A cousin who lived with the Morrisons for a while did not see any signs of abuse and believed it was possible Fierceton could have inflicted the injuries herself. And the staff member saying like: I understand, can you please give Mackenzie an estimate of how many questions are left? Thats why Im pausing to let her catch her breath. And it became pretty clear to me that there had been a very similar delay in his care, but even worse dynamics. And the chain of events that happened leading into foster care? And you experienced that yourself, right? 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 we entered the meeting and it immediately felt really hostile to me. [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. Yeah. MF: You know, I believe the first people who said that was the Rhodes Trust. And we have our own specific grad school definitions. MF: So those questions really came later. And I was the one who uncovered my classmates death. [1]:111112, Penn's investigators asked Fierceton why she had pretended to be asking on another's behalf when she made her queries within the university. RG: Yeah. We want to think of it as: If you were ever rich, youre always rich; if youre ever poor, youre always poor. Attached were copies of the Missouri court orders expunging Morrison's arrest and removing her name from the DSS registry. "They are the people that support you, look out for you, & love you unconditionally. [2], Fierceton moved into the first of several foster homes, with one other foster sibling and two biological children of the foster parents. Fierceton had apparently made much of her status as a 'first generation, low income' student, an abuse survivor who aged out of foster care. 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 youre getting instruction from a university official that thats how youre supposed to fill it out, thats what the definition says online. Its a very under-researched field. But when you're filling out a box where it's "yes" or "no" and there's no more information or "kind of!" 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. The 23-year-old planned to use. "[b] She considered running away but had a distant relationship with her father, and nowhere else she believed she could go. She was then admitted to Penn on a full scholarship, where she identified as a first-generation low-income (FGLI) student despite her background due to her estrangement from her parents and lack of financial support from them, a classification she says Penn officials told her was acceptable in those circumstances. She thought that he had been very quickly removed from the building. [i] Ruderman corroborated that later to The New Yorker, saying she was paraphrasing Fierceton's self-identification as FGLI. 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. But it was definitely something I saw happening sort of this funneling of kids from the child welfare to criminal justice system. [19] The New York Post wrote that "[t]he case exposes the murky underbelly of elite schools like Penn. [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. You didnt grow up in crumbling projects your entire life. She had bruises all over her body in different stages of healing an obvious sign of child abuse.. Which as Im sure youve learned since is a complete and fundamental misunderstanding of poverty . Theres people who span all different kinds of experiences. 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. She wasn't poor and grew up in a wealthy household with a successful mother. One, Michael Raffaele, said he believed Morrison was trying to leave Fierceton with no other options. Its hard to say. "We would never have believed any of it if we weren't living it." [2], DSS kept Morrison on its child-abuser registry, as it still believed the allegations to be founded, and a petition to its Child Abuse and Neglect Review Board to have her removed was denied. There were definitely, Im sure. 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. She told Brandt it was her mother, and asked her to keep Morrison from coming to her room. As a result she withdrew from the Rhodes Scholarship; a sympathetic Penn faculty member has paid her Oxford tuition in its stead.[2]. And so I did definitely have that kind of like: I have no idea what else is going to convince these people. And I dont remember all of the questions, but it was a really intense, rapid fire of really difficult and challenging questions. And when will you have finished up your Ph.D.? So I could imagine why at some point youd be like, you know what, Im just not going to keep taking Ls here. It recommended the scholarship be rescinded. 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. A background like me it. protect themselves their statement was about [ laughs. the child of a mechanism... 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