"[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. Mhmm. MF: You know, in my personal experience, there were not very many kids who came from a background like me. Penn, by questioning so much of Fierceton's story, was making itself "complicit in a long campaign of continuing abuse", she added. Did you go into foster care? or in graduate school. 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. [4] It took nearly an hour, during which Fierceton seized intermittently and never completely regained consciousness, for her to be taken to the hospital. 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? 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. Youre engaged in a lawsuit with Penn. RG: or in graduate school. And then there was this other foster sibling who was the biological kid of the foster parents I was staying with, and spelling it out in that way. Fierceton clarified her identity during the interview:[4]. Her mother had no explanation for the injuries, other than saying perhaps she had done it to herself. And I turned over all this information to his widow. 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. RG: And that feels like one of them where it feels like the system is willfully misunderstanding reality in order to bend it in their direction. The recurring sexual abuse by Lovelace had made Fierceton even more anxious over the summer after he gave her mother a gun as a gift (Morrison had called the police after Lovelace showed Fierceton pictures of the gun. Cause I had assumed it was her. What happened the night you ended up in foster care? 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?" Im part of a wrongful death lawsuit that was filed in August, 2020. 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. That was Mackenzie Fierceton and thats our show. ", 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. Anything in particular jump out at you after having read back over that transcript? And eventually they filed a big wrongful death lawsuit in August 2020. And its no offense its not like the most profound . 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. And so I did definitely have that kind of like: I have no idea what else is going to convince these people. Her mentor told Licht afterwards that "it felt like an attack on a student" and that she had never experienced anything like it. I think they have said, well, theres different definitions and the dean who is the dean of the grad school said: Well, thats not our definition. 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. Thank you so much for having me. By the end of the year she was in a third foster home. 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. Fierceton finished her Whitfield education on a scholarship while living in foster homes. 2020 College graduate Mackenzie Fierceton (Photo from Mackenzie Fierceton). 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. [Laughs.]. January 7, 2022. 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. And it was a very similar situation where it took everyone a long time to get to the building. In its response to Fierceton's lawsuit, the university says its general counsel talked with Hayes, who said that bringing the charges had been the "biggest mistake" of his career. 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? I cant remember if it was in the Rhodes essay or in another essay that, in hindsight, you wouldve tightened up. And still, it was just like: Nope. 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. Yes, to my lawyer who communicated it to me. [22] It went into greater detail about her past, providing more substantiation for her abuse allegations from teachers, fellow students and their parents, Carrie Brandt (the police detective who had investigated and arrested Morrison) and her allegations that Morrison had enabled Lovelace's sexual abuse. Our theme music was composed by Bart Warshaw. And when will you have finished up your Ph.D.? Given the pandemic, Rhodes Scholar judges interviewed candidates over Zoom. And after you talked to the school, how did you get to school the next morning? Within days of the article being published, the universitys general counsel was in touch with Mackenzies mother. And to me, I'm like I am a household of one, so I am the only person in my family. And I dont remember all of the questions, but it was a really intense, rapid fire of really difficult and challenging questions. And then she hired a law firm and eventually they were doing their own investigation for several months. [2], "Family is not the people you are related to by blood," she wrote in the diary. And that felt very powerful in an institution where the overwhelming majority of people are coming from two-parent households, extremely wealthy, like a whole nother level of wealth that I have really ever seen, in my life in terms of just around me, like the 1 percent to the 0.001 percent. 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. This can happen to someone in my community. [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. 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. Mackenzie Fierceton was deposed after seeking justice for a mature student, Cameron Driver, 38. RG: Penn officials, of course, have said the interview was appropriate. It didnt have any facts of the case. The 23-year-old planned to use. 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. 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. 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. So I kind of simplified that in a sentence to make my point of what I wanted to study, which was the foster-care-to-prison pipeline, which is also what I ultimately ended up doing my Ph.D. on and what I just started this year. Is it as well explored territory as a school-to-prison pipeline? That was my personal statement. 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 . [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. 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". Its just so obvious that you fit the criteria for low-income, but it seems like they feel like you dont fit it in the spirit of how they want it. So I started while I was an undergrad and was taking classes at the same time. You have a good education and youre clearly smart. I think they do have a richer experience if they have more diversity around them, but that is more the point. In November 2020, Mackenzie Fierceton was one of just 32 students to be awarded the Rhodes Scholarship to study at Oxford. 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. 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. RG: And did they say anything along those lines? And all of us, no matter what our situation, are not completely safe from it. [c] Chewing was difficult as well, and she had a feeding tube inserted. Thank you so much for having me. 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. Now Im sobbing, Im hyperventilating, and the staff member interrupted and said: Can we have an estimate of how much time is left? 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. 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. RG: Rather than it being for the purpose of benefiting the students themselves. "[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 felt as if it might have been an attempt to intimidate her. ")[3], The OSC report also concluded that nothing in her academic record warranted the revocation of either degree. Mackenzie Fierceton described herself as s a "queer,. 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. I do think that it is a huge defense mechanism that people deploy. RG: Mhmm. But it was definitely something I saw happening sort of this funneling of kids from the child welfare to criminal justice system. [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. Laura Flynn is our supervising producer. Both reports refrained from expressing an opinion about the truth of her abuse allegations. [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. And then as the different internships, and then I went to get my masters in social work and all of this happened, I started to see that continue in different capacities while I was in different roles, seeing that theme in this relationship between foster care and the criminal justice system. How long were you in the hospital? So not that I think at all the population of kids who are in foster care is representative of what abuse or neglect and what households they occur or dont occur in. And then theres also foster siblings in the sense of other people who are in the foster care system who youre living with. 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. MF: She definitely asked some questions about it. And we have our own specific grad school definitions. RG: And do you know Linda Tirado? A former teacher in elementary school recalled that in one of those calls, Morrison made a reference to an earlier discussion of Fierceton's mental illness; the teacher did not remember any such conversation. Mackenzie Fierceton, 23, originally from St. Louis, Missouri, possesses a bachelor's degree from the University of Pennsylvania and planned to utilize the scholarship to pursue a Ph.D. in social . 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. In her reading, Tracy came across an article that congratulated Mackenzie Fierceton, a University of Pennsylvania graduate, on being named a Rhodes Scholar. What happened the night before? But its interesting because most of the questions are about these applications and then the second half is when it turns to these questions of the abuse. 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. So they didnt ask about that in this meeting. So I felt pretty confident. 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. RG: And how much did she challenge your medical condition after that beating? 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