I do think that it is a huge defense mechanism that people deploy. Because Im not under any illusion that Im the typical foster kid. Theyre not on a website. Professor Walter Licht, a Penn historian who runs the program, recalls her as the sort of student who would "[ask] a question that makes everyone stop and brings the conversation to a different pitch." Who will spend some significant amount of time in poverty. verbally. Fierceton was mentioned in the complaint as having experienced similar issues following her seizure; she was deposed in the suit in March 2021, the month before the university's investigation led her to withdraw from the Rhodes Scholarship. I asked specifically about those boxes and the answer I got was again, this was multiple years ago, but it was something along the lines of I dont think that biological parents are relevant to this. Her mentor told Licht afterwards that "it felt like an attack on a student" and that she had never experienced anything like it. RG: in America. Or is that it separates two into one? 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. Our producer is Zach Young. And I think psychologically one way people feel safer about it is to say: No, that happens to other people. And so, Mackenzie, you and I were just talking offline. And I also think we have this racist and classist notion of who can be an abuser or who can cause harm. Fierceton considered dropping out, but "if I truly can't do this, where am I supposed to return to? We dont have ads, so we depend on our members 35,000 and counting to help us hold the powerful to account. [2], The next morning, when Fierceton awoke, Morrison told her she was taking her car keys and telling the school she was sick. And in the U.S., there is much more pressure to pull kids out of homes, right? And where are you at school? [3], After the interview White emailed Morrison about how it went; she wrote back regretting that Fierceton continued to tell the same story. She wasn't poor and grew up in a wealthy household with a successful mother. Penn filed a 130-page response two weeks later, denying all her allegations of wrongdoing and saying that the university officials and co-defendants who had investigated the case were unaware of the Driver lawsuit when they did. 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. He was earlier arrested in Chattanooga, Tennessee. But part of it is funding decisions. She has a bachelor's degree in political science from Penn and was working on a master's in social work. 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. The award brings the number of Penn Rhodes Scholars to 31 since the scholarship's inception in 1902. 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. He died of his heart attack within 12 minutes of arrival at the hospital. Because thats not how we understand poverty. [2], The trust notified Fierceton at the beginning of 2021 that it was conducting an investigation into the allegations. Her admission to Oxford was unaffected, and she began her graduate studies in sociology there later in the year, with a Penn professor covering her tuition. Yeah. I think [its] called Penn First, I believe, and it seems like you socially spent a lot of time with them? 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. And I just want to read this for people. 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. [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. 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. Enough blood? White, who had apparently drafted the offer, added a sentence to it requiring Fierceton to say she was agreeing to it "voluntarily and without pressure" after she learned that Fierceton was complaining to professors that she felt Penn was pressuring her to do this. MF: 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 how much confidence do you have that that anonymous complainer was Carrie, your biological mother. And eventually they filed a big wrongful death lawsuit in August 2020. And you experienced that yourself, right? When she was a teenager, she showed up bloodied and bruised at her elite private school. 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 I was the one who uncovered my classmates death. Thank you so much for having me. But in this application they had two questions which are to determine financial aid. Yeah. What foster family were you with in X,Y, Z year? And so was it later, in a different conversation where they asked about the line in the essay about not being able to recognize yourself or is there some illusion to that in the transcript that you found? Just like some basic questions [laughs] and then a lot of detailed questions about my application. [2][3], Fierceton had initially expected it would be easier for her to transition to college life than it was for other students, since she was not leaving a family behind at home. Are we going to see these injuries? Mackenzie Fierceton grew up poor, cycling through the rocky child welfare system. And I think its true. I think [its] called Penn First, I believe, and it seems like you socially spent a lot of time with them? 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 first-generation and/or low-income, again, is the acronym. 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. Absolutely. RG: And do you know Linda Tirado? MF: I think youre right. [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. 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. 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 it felt very similar that, well, this cant be real. [c] Chewing was difficult as well, and she had a feeding tube inserted. And you saw that playing out right away, right, when your biological mother was first arrested? She chose Fierceton from a list of names she had come up with herself that projected strength, and a petition to the Court of Common Pleas in Philadelphia was accepted. The university writes: After those who knew Fierceton raised questions about her story, it was investigated not just once, but several times, and not just by Penn faculty and staff, but also the Rhodes Trust. I think they do have a richer experience if they have more diversity around them, but that is more the point. I was in this private school with a lot of upper-middle class or wealthy white students. And I dont remember exactly what their statement was, but they disputed it. That they would forward charges to the federal government of wire fraud. The mother hired a high-powered attorney and engaged in a local campaign to discredit Mackenzie. And so I wanted to start with where things really started to unravel for you. Fine. 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 thats an unfortunate reality so many survivors experience, not having a lot of documentation. RG: And so when you applied for your masters in social worker or sociology? There were so many there are, I guess I should say so many moving pieces. And I think psychologically one way people feel safer about it is to say: No, that happens to other people. Because Im not under any illusion that Im the typical foster kid. And that dynamic, I would say, [laughs] probably played a big part in all of this. Her mother was arrested and charged with child abuse, but those charges were later dropped; state courts later expunged the arrest and ordered her removed from the state's child-abuser registry. 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. MF: And its mentioned briefly. "She was a foster child, but not for long enough. 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. 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. so that people have the background there. Enough bruises? And Im kind of one of the lucky ones where I had really expansive and thorough documentation for all the parts of this story. And many more vicious sentiments. 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. By those standards, the standards of real family, not one person I'm related to by blood meets those requirements or even comes close." 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. 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. This made Fierceton feel as if she were being watched for anything she did that could be used against the state's case by her mother. 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. And: Did you report what was going on to your school? Michael Hayes, who had prosecuted Morrison, told the Chronicle that "The more I learned, the less certain I became about what really happened. You have a good education and youre clearly smart. And if those things are true, and youre also struggling in poverty, then something is deeply wrong with the system. 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. Who would hold party elites accountable to the values they proclaim to have? What was the response from the readers of the paper? 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. We dont believe you. In the transcript, I wrote it was really just focused on: What happened the night you went into foster care? 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." And Im Ryan Grim, D.C. bureau chief of The Intercept. And then she hired a law firm and eventually they were doing their own investigation for several months. That was Mackenzie Fierceton and thats our show. Fierceton grew up in a wealthy community and attended an elite private school in a St. Louis suburb. And I turned over all this information to his widow. 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. So they didnt ask about that in this meeting. Its practically half of Americans, or more. MF: She, to my knowledge, has stuck by that. Cops have accused the MTV star of stalking as well as violation of an order of protection. Ryan Grim: This weeks guest on Deconstructed is Mackenzie Fierceton, who was the subject of a recent story in The New Yorker. "[25], "I cannot avoid the sense that Mackenzie is being faulted for not having suffered enough", Norton told The New Yorker. 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? Then, the first-generation box. Fierceton had apparently made much of her status as a 'first generation, low income' student, an abuse survivor who aged out of foster care. Her mother was a doctor and Fierceton attended a prep school, but she was. Mackenzie Fierceton didn't come until much later, but with good reason. [Laughs.]. And when will you have finished up your Ph.D.? It didnt have any facts of the case. And The New Yorker article also alluded to a few things that you had gotten loose with in a couple of paragraphs. This was about a week after. Mackenzie Hargreaves is a fictional character from the Australian soap opera Neighbours, played by Georgie Stone.She made her first appearance on 30 August 2019. Penn, she claimed, had leaked that information to the Inquirer whose editor-in-chief was married to Louisa Shepard, the university's news director, whom she named as a defendant along with Finkelstein, White, and the university's board of trustees. 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! 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. And it felt very similar that, well, this cant be real. [2], Fierceton remained in the hospital, where DSS ordered her placed in protective custody. And I ended up reading the comments, and the comments were just horrendous. The program's application asked "Are you the first generation in your family to attend college? 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