Yes. She is a student who found herself in a complex and easily-misunderstood situation: working towards her degree without support from family. I didnt really know what it was going to be, but I feel like its always good to have someone with you. 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. And we spoke for a long time and I went through everything I had found. So yes, I know that is me. 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. I think for a lot of us, we have to sort of other poverty and abuse and put it in a box, partly, to protect ourselves. Also, there was a delay in getting the Penn Police there because they didnt know where the building was. But while OSC allowed that it may not have been Fierceton's explicit intent to deceive, she had still done so, particularly when checking "yes" on the question on her SP2 application as to whether she was the first in her family to attend college (Fierceton stands by her reliance on Penn's definitions of FGLI on the Penn Plus website and the applicable federal laws; the university says that question is "composed of ordinary words with everyday meanings, and it makes no reference to any term or definition appearing in any other publication. Or whatever our kind of contemporary version of it is. I mean, part of it is honestly like its looking at cause we just wanted to be as thorough as possible of when [laughs] I was crying, and then I was crying and taking breaths. She had bruises all over her body in different stages of healing an obvious sign of child abuse.. According to Fierceton, her mother pushed her down the stairs and then beat her extensively at the bottom. RG: 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. 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! RG: And The New Yorker article also alluded to a few things that you had gotten loose with in a couple of paragraphs. Mackenzie told the police her mother had pushed her down the stairs and struck her in the face. 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. 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." Fierceton applied for the Rhodes Scholarship with assistance from Penn's Center for Undergraduate Research and Fellowships. And now they have to face the fact that someone who looks like them, who shares all these identities with them, could be the source of all of this harm. ", 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. Then the Philly paramedics couldnt figure out how to get to the building and then they couldnt get me out. Nor is she obligated to meet their expectations of her. It's a hard scholarship to win, but Fierceton. 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. [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. [1] It appended both the Rhodes report and OSC's as exhibits. Or is this something thats been overlooked? 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. Youre welcome to talk to Penn Police or their Division of Special Services or the Womens Center, or any program that Ive been involved in, or people that have been involved in supporting me who can corroborate this. Right. Who are your biological family? [Laughs.]. 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? 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. [2], To White, Morrison repeated her story that her daughter had fabricated the abuse 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. 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. They didnt respond, though Mackenzies biological mother has denied the allegations of abuse. In addition to reiterating many of the themes of comments made by her and her supporters in the previous articles, including criticism of the Rhodes and Penn investigations (the former of which Grim noted she was putting air quotes around when she mentioned it), she expressed a belief that her story had triggered a defensive anxiety in women like Finkelstein and White:[4]. Two weeks into the school year, she realized she had been wrong. 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. So one question was: Are you from a low-income family? Mackenzie Fierceton was deposed after seeking justice for a mature student, Cameron Driver, 38. The 35-year-old has been hit with two warrants for his arrest. And did you find this after The New Yorker article was published? She bounced from one foster home to the next. Theres people who span all different kinds of experiences. Anything in particular jump out at you after having read back over that transcript? RG: I think for a lot of us, we have to sort of other poverty and abuse and put it in a box, partly, to protect ourselves. But part of it is funding decisions. And my biological family did not fit those stereotypes, and I think that was really hard for people to process. [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. [2][4][15], After learning this, Fierceton and a fellow SP2 student began doing research. Mackenzie Fierceton didn't come until much later, but with good reason. So one question was: Are you from a low-income family? Why were you in the hospital that long? "She lies better than I can tell the truth. [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. It was: Shes a spoiled little brat. 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. 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. 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. 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. And I dont remember all of the questions, but it was a really intense, rapid fire of really difficult and challenging questions. So Rachel had it and Penn disputed it. Those investigations revealed that for the first 17 years of her life, Fierceton was raised by her mother, Dr. Carrie Morrison, an accomplished physician. 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. 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. RG: Rather than it being for the purpose of benefiting the students themselves. "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. Im curious, having dealt with so many people along the way, who are questioning your story, how do you feel like the boxes play into this? And then she hired a law firm and eventually they were doing their own investigation for several months. DSS had originally planned to place Fierceton with one of her mother's sisters but put her in foster care after Whitfield's principal warned the agency that Fierceton would not be safe with them. Our producer is Zach Young. [2], Fierceton remained in the hospital, where DSS ordered her placed in protective custody. And youre getting instruction from a university official that that's how you're supposed to fill it out, that's what the definition says online. MF: So those questions really came later. 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. Attached were copies of the Missouri court orders expunging Morrison's arrest and removing her name from the DSS registry. [Laughs.]. And its funny, cause it just made me so frustrated and I actually went back and read it. Mackenzie Fierceton, 24, claimed she was from a poor background and grew up in foster care when she actually attended private school By Phoebe Southworth 13 January 2022 8:00pm Mackenzie. [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. A petition to the county circuit court to have the arrest expunged was granted in a one-page order that attributed the arrest to "false information". 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. It finds the definition the university's office uses, without that language, as being more determinative; Penn First, the FGLI student organization Fierceton had been involved with, also used that definition on its website for most of the time she was an undergraduate. What happened the night before? [3], By the end of the interview Fierceton was crying. 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 was like: Great. RG: Mhmm. No, I cant. It didnt, though, to the University of Pennsylvania. "They are the people that support you, look out for you, & love you unconditionally. In a 25-minute conversation, she went into detail with Fierceton about her past and what she planned to do with her scholarship. RG: Like questioning: How much blood? [2], Almost three months later, The New Yorker ran a longer article about Fierceton, which had taken the magazine eight months to report and fact-check. [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. Thank you so much for having me. And I think that she kind of encompassed a lot of the stereotypes that people, and also the Penn administrators have about what FGLI students are when in reality, those of us who are part of the community know that theres so many shapes and sizes of FGLI students. Again, this is obviously secondhand, because I was unconscious. Its a very under-researched field. But I think a lot of it stems from the current policies and practices of federal and local funding and what kind of programs theyre funding for kids. It was more, I think, in the times after and the months after where I ended up like giving different medical records and all of these things to corroborate my account, but there were a few questions that were very specific to what had happened. There were three instances of attempted contact from her family or foster family. "[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. 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. [2] When she turned 18, she formally left foster care[d] but continued living with the family whose home she was in. 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. And its striking to see just the continuing to push of what happened. RG: First of all, thats one box? [3], Before that happened, Fierceton withdrew from the scholarship on her own. 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 . If youre an independent student, then you should check yes to both boxes. I think this is a conversation not necessarily for people who are still in question about what happened here. In April, the trust's investigative committee produced a 15-page report praising Fierceton as "gifted, driven, and charismatic" but concluding ultimately that she "created and repeatedly shared false narratives about herself", noting in particular her references to injuries she was treated for in her September 2014 hospital stay that are not reflected in her medical records. And we have our own specific grad school definitions. [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. I have some of my own theories, but I want to hear yours. And I just want to read this for people. This can happen to someone in my community. Then, the first-generation box. And it felt very similar that, well, this cant be real. 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. And then theres also foster siblings in the sense of other people who are in the foster care system who youre living with. Fierceton was born August 9, 1997, under the name Mackenzie Terrell, in Danbury, Connecticut,[1] to Carrie Morrison, a physician who would later head the breast imaging department at St. Luke's Hospital in Chesterfield, where the couple lived. A trial was held in early 2019 at which she, Fierceton, a psychologist and a DSS investigator testified. 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], 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 Im like: I dont know what else I could give them that would possibly convince them if their belief is as a 15-year-old, 16-year-old was journaling about my experience of abuse and hiding it in an air vent, and it was actually secretly all a plan to like accuse my mother of abuse and go into foster care so I could have a sad story. RG: Interesting. 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. Im part of a wrongful death lawsuit that was filed in August, 2020. We need to stay on task. So it makes some sense that they were very similar questions. The court granted Morrison a protection order against her former husband; Fierceton had no relationship with him from that time onward. Yes, to my lawyer who communicated it to me. And if you havent already, please subscribe to the show so you can hear it every week. Uh, my lawyer. Penn student and Rhodes Scholarship recipient Mackenzie Fierceton filed a lawsuit against the University following its investigation into allegations that questioned her status as a first-generation, low-income student and survivor of abuse.. 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. Fellow students, their parents and Whitfield faculty also noticed signs which led them to suspect abuse. Penn also noted that her name change had the effect, whether she had intended it or not, of making her background harder to research. [2] Her father, Billy Terrell,[1] had been an actor in soap operas. And she had gone to a private school growing up. Fierceton, according to Penn's response, had learned during her parents' divorce how to make calls to the child-abuse hotline and that teachers were mandatory reporters. So normally the term FGLI, its just an umbrella term for both. Aviv tells the story of Mackenzie Fierceton, a former student at the University of Pennsylvania. RG: Well, Mackenzie, thank you so much for joining me and sharing your story. [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. Asked by the school's wellness director (who later told police she had seen insulting texts from Morrison on Fierceton's phone) about the reasons for the injuries, Fierceton said that she was "clumsy" but did not offer any details. Or is that it separates two into one? As in her case, first responders had experienced similar delays in finding and reaching the building, and difficulties removing Driver once they did due to the same accessibility issues. There was also the part of me that was terrified. In the presence of her mother that night at their house, Mackenzie repeated the same story to a visiting caseworker, who appeared to accept it. 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. She was . Youre engaged in a lawsuit with Penn. And I think its true. Penn, by questioning so much of Fierceton's story, was making itself "complicit in a long campaign of continuing abuse", she added. And what area of it are you going to explore with your Ph.D.? , but with good reason after having read back over that transcript having read back over that transcript after! 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