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. 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. Those investigations revealed that for the first 17 years of her life, Fierceton was raised by her mother, Dr. Carrie Morrison, an accomplished physician. MF: So [laughs] I feel like I could go on for hours about that. [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. And the chain of events that happened leading into foster care? The fact that they even challenged that really does expose a lot of whats going on here because I assume in their mind, theyre saying: Well, she went to this private school; she had a nice house; her mom probably drove a nice car maybe you even drove a decent car! Yeah. 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. There were definitely, Im sure. And theres also literature thats economic literature versus sociology, different fields have different perspectives on what that relationship between foster care and the criminal justice system is and what the causes are. Enough blood? [1]:95, Judge Kristine Allen Kerr ultimately held for Morrison. Given the pandemic, Rhodes Scholar judges interviewed candidates over Zoom. RG: Mhmm. 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. Her mother had no explanation for the injuries, other than saying perhaps she had done it to herself. If you want to give us additional feedback, email us at. The situation was further complicated by a lack of cell phone service in the basement, requiring students to team up and verbally relay information from the 9-1-1 operator to a professor performing CPR on Driver and back to a student posted just outside the door. 's office explained the decision to drop the charges against Morrison as based on new evidence that had emerged. RG: who was, I believe now, the acting provost. Yeah. And I asked in the email exchange: Is this about the anonymous email? And what area of it are you going to explore with your Ph.D.? Is that your experience with it as well? And when I asked her again when I was gathering all this evidence in 2020, she gave me the same answer of: I dont believe its relevant, and this box isnt relevant to admission. A 24-year-old Rhodes Scholar has left the prestigious program after being accused of lying about growing up poor, reports say. How did you get to school? He was earlier arrested in Chattanooga, Tennessee. And still, it was just like: Nope. 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? There were so many there are, I guess I should say so many moving pieces. While that was not literally true, Penn's own definition of an FGLI student included those who have a "strained or limited" relationship with a parent who has graduated from college. And I was the one who uncovered my classmates death. Consider what the world of media would look like without The Intercept. And it started with, this paragraph-and-a-half of waking up in the hospital and then, like you said, looking at my face, not recognizing myself, and kind of describing what I felt like and what the room looked like. So one question was: Are you from a low-income family? 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. She didnt know he was in the basement. box, it's like you have to fit yourself in, saying: Are you the first in your family to attend? Because thats not how we understand poverty. MF: Yeah. And I turned over all this information to his widow. And when will you have finished up your Ph.D.? At first she went to a friend's home in Ohio and then returned to the Philadelphia area as May and graduation approached to live with a classmate's family. The New Yorker reported that Fierceton reported this to Penn's campus police, fearing that her mother had somehow found out where she was living. But it did open with these literary elements of what I was feeling like, and the experience I was having in those moments. "[2], Near the end of November Fierceton was named one of 32 Rhodes scholars from the U.S. for the year. She added the additional detail that at the time of her first hospitalization, Fierceton had just failed her first AP Chemistry test. So that was what that specific sentence in The New Yorker was referencing is this kind of condensing this group of people and to one sentence. I think [its] called Penn First, I believe, and it seems like you socially spent a lot of time with them? 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. Theyre not on a website. 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. The show was mixed by William Stanton. ", 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 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. And we have our own specific grad school definitions. The Chronicle reports that although she spent her final year of high school in foster care, the student had grown up in an affluent suburb of St. Louis with her mother, a radiologist, and attended private schools. 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. 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. [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. But I got a bit of pressure from Penn to do that. My understanding is there were two anonymous emails. RG: Penn officials, of course, have said the interview was appropriate. [2], One day in September 2014, she told the history teacher about Lovelace's abuse. I tried to help as much as I could. Yeah, I mean, so that specific definition wasnt public until 2018. RG: Thats been my understanding of it. And did you find this after The New Yorker article was published? So, yes, an article came out in the local paper saying that she had been arrested. 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. Joining is simple and doesnt need to cost a lot: You can become a sustaining member for as little as $3 or $5 a month. [2], Fierceton moved into the first of several foster homes, with one other foster sibling and two biological children of the foster parents. [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. MF: Yes, definitely. And I just want to read this for people. So they didnt ask about that in this meeting. Yeah. In The New Yorker article, one teacher had written: She showed up at my classroom door with a bloodied and battered face and then fainted., And then, Rachel Aviv, the reporter also quotes Sherry McClain, who was a nurse who was assigned to you, she said: She had two black eyes, and her hair was full of blood. Margulis later told The New Yorker that he had been telling the prosecutor repeatedly that Fierceton "had no credibility and made all of this up", the same theme as Morrison's many arguments in person and over the phone to other Whitfield parents. Like some students do have a story, more like me where they had some kind of separation from their family; other students their parents were doctors or lawyers or Ph.D. students in other countries, but then they came here and their degrees no longer, essentially, counted or people who are just first-generation and not necessarily low-income or people who are low-income, but not first-generation. We started building this, and this is exactly who we built it for. 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". Mackenzie is currently suing the university. 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. 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 like: Great. The kind of reporting we do is essential to democracy, but it is not easy, cheap, or profitable. It recommended that Fierceton's master's be withheld until she paid a $4,000 fine and that her academic transcript carry a notation that she was sanctioned for her "objective inaccuracy" in answering the first-generation question on her application. And I ultimately didnt end up responding because I got a serious threats from Penn that if I didnt withdraw that they were going to come after my undergrad degree, and launch proceedings to revoke my undergrad degree, and never give me my M.S.W which I was supposed to graduate with in May 2021, I have not yet received that diploma if I didnt withdraw from the Rhodes and sign an NDA. And so can you talk a little bit about your research? "We would never have believed any of it if we weren't living it." 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. It was: Shes a spoiled little brat. MF: No, I found it before. I cant remember if it was in the Rhodes essay or in another essay that, in hindsight, you wouldve tightened up. And I was the one who uncovered my classmates death. And when will you have finished up your Ph.D.? She had had a fairly upper middle class life yet was working at multiple fast food restaurants and barely getting by. She had lived with her mother since her parents divorced acrimoniously during her childhood, and a guardian ad litem was appointed to represent Fierceton's interests in the proceeding, during which abuse allegations were made. Penn officials, of course, have said the interview was appropriate. She also called herself a first-generation low-income student. We dont have ads, so we depend on our members 35,000 and counting to help us hold the powerful to account. Mackenzie Fierceton grew up poor, cycling through the rocky child welfare system. I tried to help as much as I could. I didnt encounter many of them in the two years that I was living in foster families. RG: Like, those two things dont fit together. 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? [22], In the New Yorker article, Fierceton and others criticized Penn for its use of not only her story but another recent FGLI Rhodes awardee as poverty porn, suggesting the university had turned on her when it learned she had actually come from a privileged, affluent background and thus did not fit the narrative of having grown up in foster care recounted in its news release and the accompanying Inquirer article. Thats not in question. MF: She definitely asked some questions about it. [i] Ruderman corroborated that later to The New Yorker, saying she was paraphrasing Fierceton's self-identification as FGLI. And it felt very similar that, well, this cant be real. RG: Anything in particular jump out at you after having read back over that transcript? And they released this quote-unquote report in April of 2021 with their findings. And then again there was trouble getting him out of the basement. Mackenzie Fierceton was championed as a former foster youth who had overcome an abusive childhood and won a prestigious Rhodes Scholarship. Our grad school had no specific definitions or instructions, but I did have a relationship with the associate director of admissions at the time. At school, she began confiding about her situation with a history teacher, telling them about her mother's physical abuse. RG: And so youre becoming rather inconvenient to the university at that point , RG: I would assume, which plays into the way that universities and elite structures think of diversity, I think. Because that was one of the ones that really blew my mind. That is when I would trace it back to. Like, they want to curate a diverse experience for their well-off students, so that they can say that they had this diverse experience in college . Raised in Chesterfield, Missouri, a West County suburb of St. Louis, she attended and graduated from the Whitfield School in Creve Coeur. She recalled showing up at the foster home with her new clothes in a plastic bag, feeling "like a passenger in my own body", she recalled later. [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. And the theme of private school definitely came up many times over the course of the last year and a half. Mhmm. Youre engaged in a lawsuit with Penn. Yes, definitely. 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. 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. I really appreciate it. 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. And so I did definitely have that kind of like: I have no idea what else is going to convince these people. And, in this case, almost everyone who was involved in the university administration are upper middle class or very wealthy, highly academically educated white women. And she quickly got interest of a book deal because she was obviously such a great writer. A picture of her was posted at the nurse's station should she make the attempt. 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. [2], Shortly after the Rhodes investigation began, Rafaelle was informed that Penn was proposing to revoke Fierceton's bachelors on the grounds of her apparent self-misrepresentation. Is that your experience with it as well? Penn's report notes that Fierceton disputes this account. 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. [2], Morrison retained William Margulis, a former member of Whitfield's board who had sent four of his children there, including one of her daughter's classmates, as her attorney. We want to think of it as: If you were ever rich, youre always rich; if youre ever poor, youre always poor. Logan filed her wrongful death suit in August 2020, alleging Penn was negligently responsible for her husband's death through failing to make Caster properly accessible and not making SP2 develop an emergency response protocol. [2] When she turned 18, she formally left foster care[d] but continued living with the family whose home she was in. MF: And that is, I felt very defeated too. So normally the term FGLI, its just an umbrella term for both. And if you havent already, please subscribe to the show so you can hear it every week. [3], After the interview White emailed Morrison about how it went; she wrote back regretting that Fierceton continued to tell the same story. Its hard to say. At Norton's request, a fellow political science colleague, Rogers Smith, who while at Yale had chaired that university's undergraduate disciplinary committee, agreed to represent Fierceton during what he called "a very unusual process". [Laughs.] [2], At the end of 2013, in the middle of her sophomore year, Fierceton was admitted to St. Luke's, where her mother worked, with a head injury. RG: And do you know Linda Tirado? There were so many there are, I guess I should say so many moving pieces. And like: Why are you considered an independent student? And then very quickly turn to very specific questions about different instances of abuse. She was diagnosed with post-concussion syndrome and released after three weeks. And thats actually one of the things that, if there was any doubt whatsoever about this story, in some ways it was settled by that. And my biological family did not fit those stereotypes, and I think that was really hard for people to process. But her mother wasnt finished with her. 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 how much confidence do you have that that anonymous complainer was Carrie, your biological mother. In a 25-minute conversation, she went into detail with Fierceton about her past and what she planned to do with her scholarship. MF: verbally. [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. I didnt encounter many of them in the two years that I was living in foster families. Two weeks into the school year, she realized she had been wrong. But the outline of the story is this: Mackenzie was raised in a wealthy St. Louis suburb by a single mother who was repeatedly abusive, according to two state agencies. So therefore that doesnt fit their understanding of low-income, despite the fact that your mother was no longer your legal guardian, youre a ward of the state. And eventually they filed a big wrongful death lawsuit in August 2020. Interesting. 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. "[b] She considered running away but had a distant relationship with her father, and nowhere else she believed she could go. A graduate student named Mackenzie Fierceton was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship by the University of Pennsylvania in 2020 only to have it stripped from her a few months later after allegations. 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. Yes. And I didnt really know any information, except for that he had had a medical emergency in class and then been pronounced dead at the hospital. The University of Pennsylvania on Tuesday announced it will stop withholding a master's degree from Mackenzie Fierceton, the former student at the center of a recent New Yorker magazine. [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. And she had gone to a private school growing up. And so, yes, if the student, then, is no longer useful, I could imagine it turning. 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. [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. 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. [19] The New York Post wrote that "[t]he case exposes the murky underbelly of elite schools like Penn. 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. 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. We started building this, and this is exactly who we built it for. And that dynamic, I would say, [laughs] probably played a big part in all of this. And then throughout the now a year and a half process [laughs] of different sort of invented processes that happened, eventually the university was like: OK, I guess shes low-income. [2], Two months later the COVID-19 pandemic emerged. Now Im sobbing, Im hyperventilating, and the staff member interrupted and said: Can we have an estimate of how much time is left? 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. Thats not in question. Mackenzie is the soap's first transgender character, added to the series after Stone wrote to executive producer Jason Herbison to pitch the character. "[2], On her application, Fierceton recounted her background and the unexpected way it led to her becoming a foster child. students, defines first generation broadly, including students who have a strained or limited relationship with a parent who has graduated from college. And one of the main things they pointed to was that she had gone to this private school . [2], Fierceton remained in the hospital, where DSS ordered her placed in protective custody. RG: That was Mackenzie Fierceton and thats our show. It's a hard scholarship to win, but Fierceton. So one question was: Are you from a low-income family? That they would forward charges to the federal government of wire fraud. [3] In high school there, Fierceton was a model student. 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. Fierceton was released after four days. 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. Were close to done. The nurse also reported bruises all over Fierceton's body, in different stages of healing, considered an indicator of possible physical abuse. I do think that it is a huge defense mechanism that people deploy. 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 MacKenzie is the only one whos allowed to answer these questions. 2020 College graduate Mackenzie Fierceton (Photo from Mackenzie Fierceton). But Mackenzie Fierceton is not a liar. As a result she withdrew from the Rhodes Scholarship; a sympathetic Penn faculty member has paid her Oxford tuition in its stead.[2]. And is it somewhat of a defense mechanism that people deploy to protect themselves? So yes, I know that is me. The fact that they even challenged that really does expose a lot of whats going on here because I assume in their mind, theyre saying: Well, she went to this private school; she had a nice house; her mom probably drove a nice car maybe you even drove a decent car! How many covert wars, miscarriages of justice, and dystopian technologies would remain hidden if our reporters werent on the beat? By those standards, the standards of real family, not one person I'm related to by blood meets those requirements or even comes close."

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