RG: Like, those two things dont fit together. 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 theyll openly talk about this. 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. As an anonymous letter writer revealed, however, she was also the privately educated child of a radiologist, brought up in an affluent suburb. Right. RG: Who will spend some significant amount of time in poverty. "[2], When Fierceton returned to the St. Louis area on vacations and breaks, she stayed with friends. RG: And so if its a well-educated white girl from a private school, thats way too close to home for a lot of these elites. Morrison then brought suit in circuit court to have the board's decision reviewed and reversed. And what area of it are you going to explore with your Ph.D.? The program's application asked "Are you the first generation in your family to attend college? The 23-year-old planned to use. Within days of the article being published, the universitys general counsel was in touch with Mackenzies mother. Did she lie? MF: And its mentioned briefly. So they didnt ask about that in this meeting. She was diagnosed with post-concussion syndrome and released after three weeks. When asked what she might have done differently, Fierceton told the Chronicle that while she had at some points wished she had never applied to Penn, and later considered rephrasing some of the things she wrote on her essays and applications, "[w]here I've landed is that I have a right to write about my experiences as I experienced them. [H]onestly, first-generation is never something I've really identified with fully. And it felt very similar that, well, this cant be real. I really appreciate it. I really appreciate it. "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. Like, I dont have the precise statistics in front of me, but if you asked people to guess at the number of people who will experience, say, two years of poverty in their life, people will miss it by magnitudes. [2], In March 2014, Fierceton began keeping a secret diary[a] documenting her life and her ruminations on her situation, writing it in her bedroom closet by the light of her phone and hiding it behind a ventilation panel. Mackenzie Fierceton: Yeah. And then instantly people started picking her story apart. RG: Anything in particular jump out at you after having read back over that transcript? She wasn't poor and grew up in a wealthy household with a successful mother. It didnt, though, to the University of Pennsylvania. [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. So Im not sure how much could have been missing. So I started while I was an undergrad and was taking classes at the same time. Raised in Chesterfield, Missouri, a West County suburb of St. Louis, she attended and graduated from the Whitfield School in Creve Coeur. There were some pretty basic errors, such as my name, my birth name, and my birth place, and claiming that I didnt have a sibling, that I wasnt low-income, a lot of facts that were pretty easily disputed. 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. And it became pretty clear to me that they had spoken to Carrie and or seen medical records. And so where is your story now? And please go and leave us a rating or a review it helps people find the show. RG: Right. Her mother had no explanation for the injuries, other than saying perhaps she had done it to herself. 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. But they just assumed theres no way that it could have happened. 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. 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 like you said, like, yes, obviously I was looking in a mirror, and I knew I was looking in a mirror. "How much does one have to suffer to have value? 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. 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. When she was a teenager, she showed up bloodied and bruised at her elite private school. And all of us, no matter what our situation, are not completely safe from it. 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. 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. And then again there was trouble getting him out of the basement. Penn, by questioning so much of Fierceton's story, was making itself "complicit in a long campaign of continuing abuse", she added. 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. [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 quotes her as saying "If you find me dead, it was my mom. 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. The father's message was forwarded to Penn's general counsel, Wendy White, who got in touch with Morrison. According to Fierceton, her mother pushed her down the stairs and then beat her extensively at the bottom. And the staff member saying like: I understand, can you please give Mackenzie an estimate of how many questions are left? Deconstructed is a production of First Look Media and The Intercept. [f] Fierceton felt no ambivalence about her answer. MF: Yeah, so Penn First for the whole FGLI community. When they did, they were unable to get stretchers or backboards down Caster's stairways or elevators as there was insufficient space. 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. I wasnt there for all of this, but after I went through all these interviews, that was my conclusion. . 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. We need to stay on task. So it makes some sense that they were very similar questions. Her sister also wrote White as well, alleging that Fierceton "deliberately tried to frame Carrie and planted 'evidence' around the house, including her own blood. Rather than it being for the purpose of benefiting the students themselves. 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. RG: Right. 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. Penn has released its hold on a master of social work degree from Mackenzie Fierceton the former Rhodes Scholarship recipient who filed a lawsuit against the University following its investigation into allegations that she falsified her status as a first-generation, low-income student and survivor of abuse. [2], Fierceton refused, and a week before she withdrew from the Rhodes Scholarship, Penn's Office of Student Conduct (OSC) notified Fierceton it, too, would be investigating. 's office explained the decision to drop the charges against Morrison as based on new evidence that had emerged. [2][4][15], After learning this, Fierceton and a fellow SP2 student began doing research. 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? "[2], Near the end of November Fierceton was named one of 32 Rhodes scholars from the U.S. for the year. 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, honestly, first-generation is never something Ive really identified with fully. And it felt very similar that, well, this cant be real. MF: You know, I believe the first people who said that was the Rhodes Trust. So I could imagine why at some point youd be like, you know what, Im just not going to keep taking Ls here. 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. [2], During her high school years, Fierceton has alleged that her mother subjected her to emotional and physical abuse, the latter enough on more than one occasion to require hospitalization. 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. How long were you in the hospital? She was an independent student when she applied. RG: And so where is your story now? "[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. She was one of only 32 high school students selected from a pool of 2300 applicants. The Inquirer story came out in November 2020. [1]:64, In February 2015, before presenting the evidence against Morrison to a grand jury for an indictment, the St. Louis County district attorney's office dropped all the charges against Morrison over Brandt's objections. Her junior year at Whitfield, a prestigious prep school, Mackenzie showed up to school one day in a terrible state. You had mentioned that you actually made a transcript of your interview with Deputy Provost Finkelstein shortly after the conversation. There were definitely, Im sure. [Laughs.] RG: And it has, has she stuck by that? "[1]:119, Dismissal of mother's charges and expurgation of records, Role in wrongful death suit against university, In its response to Fierceton's suit, Penn quotes Fierceton as telling police as soon as they entered her hospital room after her later injury about her diary and that it would tell them everything they would need to know. Or was the real issue that Fierceton did not really fit the profile of a suffering student who needed the benevolence of an Ivy League school?" [2] Ruderman's story, published the next day, began:[13]. 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. She also called herself a first-generation low-income student. Fierceton described herself as a first-generation college applicant who came from a low-income, foster-care background. 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