Mackenzie Fierceton

Mackenzie Fierceton (born Mackenzie Terrell on August 9, 1997; later Mackenzie Morrison,[1]: 63–64, 86 ) is an American activist and graduate student currently studying at Oxford University. Raised in Chesterfield, Missouri, a West County suburb of St. Louis, she attended and graduated from the Whitfield School in Creve Coeur. She received a bachelor's degree in political science and a master's degree in social work from the University of Pennsylvania (commonly known as Penn), on a full scholarship, through a combined five-year program.

Mackenzie Fierceton
Born
Mackenzie Terrell

(1997-08-09) August 9, 1997
Danbury, Connecticut, United States
Other namesMackenzie Morrison
EducationB.A, political science; M.S.W; Penn, 2021
Known forcontroversy over representation of childhood and abuse

Beginning in 2021, Fierceton became embroiled in a scandal with Penn over the representation of her background in her university applications. In her applications to Penn, and later the Rhodes Scholarship, Fierceton stated that she was sexually abused by her mother's boyfriend; was physically abused by her mother to the point of hospitalization; and had lived in foster care for a number of years. She also identified as a first-generation low-income (FGLI) student due to her lack of financial support, as a result of parental estrangement. An investigation by the Rhodes Trust and Penn concluded that she failed to correct statements and impressions made in her application essays, particularly in regard to the severity of abuse, nature of her upbringing, and duration of foster care. Additionally, Penn threatened to withhold Fierceton's degrees, fine her, and refer her to criminal prosecution. She later withdrew from the Rhodes Scholarship, filing suit against Penn for the infliction of emotional distress.

Although fellow students and faculty at her high school noticed signs of abuse displayed by Fierceton, her mother denied all allegations and claimed that Fierceton lied for her own personal benefit. She had been hospitalized twice in 2014 for injuries, including concussions and bruised ribs, which she attributes to her mother. After the second stay, which lasted three weeks, state officials placed her in foster care and arrested her mother under child abuse charges, which were later dropped. Missouri state courts later expunged the arrest and removed her mother from the state's child-abuser registry.

Penn eventually unconditionally awarded Fierceton her degrees, but a notation about the investigative finding remains in her transcript. In Fierceton's lawsuit, she alleges that their investigation was done to discredit her as a witness in a wrongful death suit filed against the university which Fierceton instigated. Her supporters at Penn have called for the university's acting provost, Beth Winkelstein, to be held accountable for her role in the investigation, characterizing it as a continuation of her abuse. In early 2022, her struggle with Penn and the Rhodes Trust gained national attention through stories run in The Chronicle of Higher Education and The New Yorker. Commentators criticized the university and American elite higher education to their use of Fierceton and other recent Rhodes recipients as poverty porn, and for their shifting definitions of FGLI students.

Early life

Fierceton was born August 9, 1997, by 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.[2] Her father, Billy Terrell,[1] had been an actor in soap operas.[2] In the early 2000s, the couple divorced, granting Morrison custody of her daughter. Fierceton had no relationship with her father from that time onward.[2] Afterwards, Morrison changed her daughter's last name to her own.[1]: 86  Morrison prospered in her medical career, financially providing generously for her daughter. Fierceton graduated from Whitfield, an exclusive private school in Creve Coeur, where annual tuition was almost $30,000.[3] She was a model student who achieved straight As and was active in student government, volunteering, and varsity sports.[2]

Allegations of abuse by mother

Teachers noticed that Fierceton often seemed physically uncomfortable in her mother's presence, and a close friend noted that she was often injured. 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.[2]

During her high school years, Fierceton alleged that her mother subjected her to emotional and physical abuse, the latter requiring hospitalization on multiple occasions. One trigger for the beatings was allegedly sexual abuse by one of her mother's boyfriends, Henry Lovelace, Jr., which her mother warned her never to talk about.[2] At the end of 2013, in the middle of her sophomore year, Fierceton was admitted to St. Luke's Hospital, where her mother worked, with a head injury. She did not remember what had caused it. Morrison had told the admitting physician that she had not been present when her daughter was hurt but believed she had fallen down the stairs in the house, which the hospital accepted as the likely cause, even though her fearfulness was also noted. Fierceton was released after four days.[2]

In March 2014, Fierceton began keeping a secret diary[lower-alpha 1] documenting her life and her ruminations on her situation. She had begun to remember more about the incident, and while still not certain how it had happened recalled that before it, she and her mother had been fighting about Lovelace. She feared that her mother had inflicted the injuries, perhaps out of jealousy that Lovelace was attracted to her, even though she had felt that Morrison had encouraged Lovelace to assault her.[2] In her diary, she considered the advantages and disadvantages of reporting her mother, but ultimately feared she might not even be believed, as her mother would tell people she was mentally ill or lying. She considered running away but had a distant relationship with her father, and nowhere else she believed she could go.[2]

At the beginning of April,[5] after she came to school with a black eye, she was taken to see the wellness director, who asked what had happened. Fierceton told the story that, according to her diary, her mother had told her to tell—that she had tripped while playing with the family dogs and bruised herself on the corner of a nearby table. The wellness director told her she would have to notify the state's Department of Social Services (DSS) of the incident. 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. She later wrote in her diary that she was afraid that Morrison would hit her while they talked in the kitchen.[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. At school, she began confiding the situation concerning her mother's physical abuse to a history teacher. After Lovelace gave Morrison a gun as a gift, Fierceton became even more anxious over the summer. Morrison had called the police after Lovelace showed Fierceton pictures of the gun. Two other women he was involved with had also reported him to law enforcement.[2]

Hospitalization and mother's arrest

One day in September 2014, she told the history teacher about Lovelace's abuse, who reported it to the state's child-abuse hotline. That night at home, Morrison, who had apparently learned of the report, confronted her daughter about it. According to Fierceton, her mother pushed her down the stairs and then beat her extensively at the bottom.[2]

The next morning, when Fierceton awoke, Morrison told her she was taking her car keys and telling the school she was sick. After her mother left, Fierceton got out of bed, found a spare set of keys and drove herself to school. There, she wandered the hallways until she found the history teacher, and collapsed. The teacher recalled that she had black eyes and hair matted with blood, a description corroborated by a nurse who saw her on arrival after an ambulance brought her to nearby Mercy Hospital St. Louis. The nurse also reported bruises all over Fierceton's body, in different stages of healing, considered an indicator of possible physical abuse.[2]

Local police were called. Detective Carrie Brandt, who had been planning to follow up on the hotline report at Whitfield that day, instead interviewed Fierceton at the hospital. She told Brandt it was her mother, and asked her to keep Morrison from coming to her room. A picture of her was posted at the nurse's station should she make the attempt.[2]

Brandt interviewed Morrison, who described the relationship between herself and her daughter as intimate. At first she explained Fierceton's injuries as either having been caused by an intruder or somehow self-inflicted, then said her daughter had accidentally fallen downstairs. Asked about Lovelace's alleged sexual abuse, Morrison expressed amusement at the possibility that her boyfriend could have mistaken her teenage daughter for her. Lovelace, interviewed separately, denied all the allegations.[2]

Brandt noted that Morrison never asked about, or expressed concern for, her daughter's well-being. She found Fierceton's diary at the house and read it, then interviewed teachers and administrators at Whitfield, learning of Morrison's insulting texts to Fierceton. A week later, Brandt interviewed Morrison again at the police station; she said that her daughter had self-injured. Morrison was arrested and charged with felony child abuse and third-degree assault for the incident that had led to Fierceton's hospitalization, and an additional felony child abuse count for the incident that had triggered the DSS caseworker's visit earlier in the year. The arrest warrant alleged that Morrison had deliberately slammed her daughter's head into the table.[5] Lovelace was also arrested and charged with sexual abuse.[2]

Fierceton remained in the hospital, where DSS ordered her placed in protective custody. She kept a journal, writing that she was in so much pain from her bruised ribs that she could barely breathe.[lower-alpha 2] Chewing was difficult as well, and she had a feeding tube inserted. She was diagnosed with post-concussion syndrome and released after three weeks. 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. The court had ordered Fierceton and Morrison into family therapy, but the former was too afraid of the latter to do it.[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.[2] Morrison's bond was originally set at $40,000, but lowered to $5,000 over prosecutors' strenuous objections.[5] She posted it before Fierceton's release from the hospital, and once free began calling Fierceton's friends and former teachers, telling them that Fierceton was having issues and had made it appear Morrison had beaten her. A former teacher in elementary school recalled that in one of those calls, Morrison had referenced a fabricated earlier discussion of Fierceton having a mental illness.[2]

Morrison retained William Margulis, a former member of Whitfield's board whose daughter was Fierceton's classmate, as her attorney. This made Fierceton feel as if she were being watched and intimidated by her mother. 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".[2] Some of those Morrison talked with did believe her; a classmate of Fierceton's recalled people likening her to the protagonist of the film Gone Girl, about a Missouri woman who disappears in order to avenge herself on an adulterous husband, whom she makes it appear killed her. One Whitfield parent Morrison had talked to said that she believed Fierceton had done this to get admitted to an Ivy League college.[2]

Foster care placement

Fierceton moved into the first of several foster homes, with one other foster sibling and two biological children of the foster parents. Teachers and parents at Whitfield had donated new clothing and school supplies for her. 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]

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. By the end of the year she was in a third foster home. In between those placements, she slept at friends' houses for long periods.[2]

For her senior year, Whitfield gave Fierceton a full scholarship.[2] When she turned 18, she formally left foster care[lower-alpha 3] but continued living with the family whose home she was in.[3] The change in her living situation greatly complicated her college plans as she had no financial resources of her own.[2] Fierceton was eventually accepted at the University of Pennsylvania on a full scholarship, arranged through QuestBridge. Following the advice of her college counselor, she did not identify her parents on her application, since she was estranged from both of them (she describes them both as "biological"[3][2]). 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 and her grandfather was a college graduate and former university instructor.[1]: 64 [2]

Dismissal of mother's charges and expurgation of records

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 Detective Carrie Brandt's objections.[2][5] It did not disclose that it had done so until March.[7] The charges against Lovelace were dropped later for lack of evidence.[2][lower-alpha 4][2]

Morrison, no longer employed by St. Luke's, then began the process of trying to restore her reputation by having all references to the abuse removed from the public record. 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". Within a year of her arrest, another St. Louis-area hospital had granted her admitting privileges, and she was able to resume her medical career.[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. Morrison then brought suit in circuit court to have the board's decision reviewed and reversed. A trial was held in early 2019 at which she, Fierceton, a psychologist and a DSS investigator testified. Mother and daughter both told the same stories they had earlier; Morrison depicted her daughter as "willful and intense", claiming she had bought and read many books to try to help her understand the issues she said Fierceton had.[2]

Morrison's lawyer questioned Fierceton closely about apparent differences between her medical records from the hospital and her description of her injuries in a scholarship application essay the lawyer had obtained, and other details from the latter, such as the "metallic" taste of a feeding tube that was plastic and her claim that she was unable to recognize her own facial features in the hospital mirror, when her medical records showed that her injuries were short of being even temporarily disfiguring.[2] The psychologist testified that she had seen both mother and daughter during 2007 and 2008. She had seen no signs of abuse in the relationship and considered Fierceton to be the dominant personality in it.[1]: 95 

Judge Kristine Allen Kerr ultimately held for Morrison, stating that a preponderance of the evidence could not yield the conclusion that Morrison was a child abuser. 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. Morrison's name was therefore ordered removed from the DSS registry.[2][3]

College career

At Penn, when Fierceton returned to the St. Louis area on vacations and breaks, she stayed with friends. She began to feel a lack of a sense of identity. Although she had not attended an orientation session for first-generation/low-income (FGLI) students she had been invited to, she began attending meetings and gatherings of Penn First, an FGLI student group founded the preceding year. Fierceton called the group, "one of the first spaces on campus where I felt, These are my people ... I had never heard of FGLI, but these labels resonated with a story I was still trying to process."[2]

Fierceton was one of 15 freshmen made Civic Scholars, a program focused on social justice and community service, with an emphasis on confronting the intersections of identity and privilege. 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." Another program official that year recalls Fierceton as seeming more vulnerable than she let on. After picking her up from the hospital following bone surgery that year, she noticed that Fierceton had a very light winter coat and few other possessions.[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.[9][3]

In her sophomore year, Fierceton, already majoring in political science,[3] decided to pursue social work as a career, with the goal of being a voice for children in foster care like the ones she had come to know. She applied to a program at Penn's School of Social Policy and Practice (commonly referred to at Penn as SP2) that would allow her to begin graduate studies while still an undergraduate, so she could graduate with a master's degree in the field a year after completing her undergraduate degree. The program's application asked "Are you the first generation in your family to attend college?"[2]

Fierceton answered yes. 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. This is derived from language in the federal Higher Education Act, which ties first-generation status to the educational attainment of the parent the student "regularly resides with and receives support from".[lower-alpha 5][2]

At her request, Penn kept her contact information out of the school's directory on its website. 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 had sent. 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.[lower-alpha 6] The packages she says she received were supplemented by hangup calls, which a faculty member Fierceton occasionally lived with in her junior year recalled her receiving.[2]

After the DSS trial ended, Fierceton resolved to change her last name. 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. Later in the year she wrote online that the name change gave her "ownership of her identity" and a sense of agency she had not had before in her life.[2][lower-alpha 7]

In January 2020[4] Fierceton had a seizure and collapsed during a class for one of her graduate social work courses. She lost consciousness and was taken to the hospital, where she spent three days in intensive care. Doctors diagnosed her with epilepsy, telling her the head injuries that had resulted in her earlier hospitalizations may have been a contributing factor to her developing it.[2]

Over the middle of 2020, Fierceton became active in the Black Lives Matter protests at Penn. She helped SP2 assistant professor Toorjo Ghose draft and promote a petition in support of Police Free Penn, an activist group calling on the university to cut its ties with the Philadelphia Police Department over its poor relations with the largely black and Latin residents of the West Philadelphia neighborhoods around the university's campus, and rethink its own police department, the largest private one in the state. "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.[10]

Rhodes Scholarship controversy

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 obtain a D.Phil. at Oxford University, encouraged by a classmate who had just won one himself and was impressed by her activism. 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. Ultimately she decided to apply for the scholarship, in which she proposed to expand on the subject of her undergraduate thesis, the intertwining of the foster care and juvenile justice systems.[2]

On her application, Fierceton recounted her background and the way it led to her becoming a foster child. Her account was not completely accurate, which she attributed later to not having developed her essay at length. Beth Winkelstein, at the time Penn's deputy provost, signed off on her application for the school, writing that "Mackenzie understands what it is like to be an at-risk youth, and she is determined to re-make the systems that block rather than facilitate success."[2]

Near the end of November Fierceton was named one of 32 Rhodes scholars from the U.S. for the year.[9] In a news release, Penn's then-president Amy Gutmann, spoke admiringly of Fierceton as "a first-generation low-income student and a former foster youth."[11] 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.[2]

Wendy Ruderman, a reporter for The Philadelphia Inquirer, called Fierceton to interview her for a story about the scholarship. In a 25-minute conversation, she went into detail with Fierceton about her past and what she planned to do with her scholarship.[2] Ruderman's story, published the next day, began:[12]

Mackenzie Fierceton grew up poor, cycling through the rocky child welfare system. She bounced from one foster home to the next. 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.

Fierceton said later that she had never used the word "poor" to describe herself or her childhood.[lower-alpha 8] Ruderman corroborated that later to The New Yorker, saying she was paraphrasing Fierceton's self-identification as FGLI. Fierceton wished that she had been more willing to correct mistaken impressions that she might have made and at the time "just kind of crumbled behind the pressure."[2][lower-alpha 9]

The evening the story ran, Ruderman called Fierceton back and told her she had received some anonymously written emails casting doubt on what she had written. Fierceton clarified the details in question and Ruderman said she understood better.[4] Within days, two of Fierceton's affiliates in high school 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. The father's message was forwarded to Penn's general counsel, Wendy White, who got in touch with Morrison.[2]

To White, Morrison repeated her story that her daughter had fabricated the abuse allegations. She added the additional detail that at the time of her first hospitalization, Fierceton had just failed her first AP Chemistry test and constructed an abuse narrative as "an out" from academic pressures. Fierceton's Whitfield transcript shows she got a B+ in the class.[2]

A week later, Fierceton received an email asking her to attend a meeting over Zoom with Winkelstein. Fierceton had also brought her mentor, a staff member at the university's Civic House, into the meeting. At the outset, Winkelstein told the mentor she could not speak or would be disconnected immediately.[2] Winkelstein, who has a Ph.D. in bioengineering and has studied injuries,[3] then proceeded to interrogate Fierceton at length about her abuse and hospitalization, in a manner that led Fierceton to believe that not only did Winkelstein doubt her story but had spoken with Morrison.[2]

By the end of the interview Fierceton was crying. Her mentor told Licht afterwards that "it felt like an attack on a student" and that she had never experienced anything like it. Fierceton and her mentor later reconstructed the conversation and published a transcript of it, which the university has claimed is inaccurate.[3] Fierceton subsequently wrote to SP2 dean Sara Bachman complaining about the interview, saying she felt shame and worthlessness for a week afterwards.[3]

After the interview, White emailed Morrison about how it went. She wrote back regretting that Fierceton continued to tell the same story. "She has become emboldened over time, and has been successful with her evolving tale for 6 yrs.", Morrison said. "We would never have believed any of it if we weren't living it." Morrison's sister also wrote White as well, alleging that Fierceton "deliberately tried to frame Carrie and planted 'evidence' around the house, including her own blood."[2]

In December, an anonymous 22-page letter was sent to the U.S. office of the Rhodes Trust, which administers the scholarship program, alleging 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 doing activities usually associated with affluence, such as horseriding. Fierceton believes it was likely sent by Morrison or one of her close relatives, because of the inclusion of childhood photos.[4][2]

Winkelstein followed up with a letter to Elizabeth Kiss, the trust's CEO, alerting her that the university had been investigating Fierceton's story and found it to have seriously diverged from the reality of her life, with the abuse allegations quite possibly fabricated.[2] The trust notified Fierceton at the beginning of 2021 that it was conducting an investigation into the allegations. Fierceton retained two lawyers to represent her pro bono; they talked to Morrison themselves, who told them she still loved her daughter and wanted her to come home. One attorney, Michael Raffaele, said he believed Morrison was trying to leave Fierceton with no other options.[2]

Fierceton supplied the trust's investigators with her medical and court records from the mid-2010s as well as letters from 26 people—teachers at Whitfield, the three Penn faculty members who had written her Rhodes recommendation letters, vouching for her abuse claims and saying she had never misrepresented herself. 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 that are not reflected in her medical records. It recommended the scholarship be rescinded.[3]

Before that happened, Fierceton withdrew from the scholarship on her own. 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. 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. While her yes answer to "At any time since you turned age 13, were both your parents deceased, were you in foster care or were you a dependent or ward of the court?" was truthful, Rafaelle feared that if the U.S. Attorney decided to pursue a prosecution, it would be likely to last a long time and consume much of her attention.[2]

Penn investigation

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. They would not do so, however, if she agreed to withdraw from the scholarship, surrender the Latin honors that had accompanied her degree, and take a mandatory leave for "counseling and support" before receiving her master's. 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.[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. 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". Penn again spoke with Morrison and, this time as well, the St. Louis County prosecutor who had decided to drop the charges, without informing Fierceton, which the university defended as standard practice not to identify witnesses interviewed.[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.[3] "Mackenzie may have centered certain aspects of her background to the exclusion of others—for reasons we are certain she feels are valid—in a way that creates a misimpression," the report 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.[2][lower-alpha 10]

While the trust had come to seriously doubt Fierceton's claims about the severity of her injuries, OSC declined to make a determination on that. Both reports refrained from expressing an opinion about the truth of her abuse allegations. 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."[3]

The OSC report also concluded that nothing in her academic record warranted the revocation of either degree. 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. OSC referred the recommendation to an SP2 panel to make a final determination; she subsequently appealed the decision.[2]

The fine was later withdrawn after it was found to conflict with a provision of the university's charter prohibiting the imposition of fines in cases involving academic integrity. 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. The notation in her transcript remains.[13]

Role in wrongful death suit against university

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]

After she had recovered from her seizure incident earlier that year, fellow students told her how difficult it had been for first responders to get to the basement of Caster Hall. The university's police did not know at first where the building was and the city's paramedics did not know how to get to it. When they did, they were unable to get stretchers or backboards down Caster's stairways or elevators as there was insufficient space.[4] It took nearly an hour, during which Fierceton seized intermittently and never completely regained consciousness, for her to be taken to the hospital.[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. First responders had experienced similar delays in finding and reaching the building and in removing Driver. 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. It took an hour to remove Driver from the building; he died of his heart attack within 12 minutes of arrival at the hospital.[2][4][14]

After learning this, Fierceton and another SP2 student began doing research, taking photographs of Caster's staircases and elevators, and interviewing witnesses and some of the paramedics who had responded.[2] They learned that SP2 had no real protocol for an emergency situation in the building.[4] After gathering all the evidence, they approached Driver's widow, Roxanne Logan, who had not been informed of the accessibility issues and delays involved in her husband's death, and who had the impression that he had been evacuated almost as soon as he began experiencing symptoms.[2]

Fierceton shared the information she had with Logan, who in turn took it to a law firm that investigated further. 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. 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.[2]

Lawsuit against university

In December 2021, Fierceton retained another lawyer pro bono and filed her own suit against Penn, alleging that the university's investigations into her history and how she had represented herself was a "sham", undertaken with the intent of forcing her to withdraw from the Rhodes Scholarship and damaging her credibility as a witness in the Driver suit, constituted tortious interference with a business relationship and intentional and negligent infliction of emotional distress. Penn, she claimed, had leaked personal 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. She also alleged that Penn had on many occasions failed to follow its own disciplinary policies in its investigation of her.[15]

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. 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.[1] It appended both the Rhodes report and OSC's as exhibits.

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. In addition to the complaint she had made against Lovelace, a similar complaint to police that her mother was abusing prescription drugs also did not yield any evidence to support it. 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. Penn also noted that her name change had the effect, whether she had intended it or not, of making her background harder to research.[1]

Media coverage

Shortly after Penn filed its response, the Chronicle of Higher Education reported on the story. Its account focused on the Rhodes controversy, discussing her and Driver's suits near the end, and recalling some other recent instances of academic dishonesty, including one 2009 Harvard student whose largely fabricated high school records were only discovered when he had applied for a Rhodes Scholarship. 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. Period." She had not, she insisted, written her original essay with the intent of increasing her chances of admission.[3]

Through her attorney, Morrison gave a statement, her only one so far, on the case: "Mackenzie is deeply loved by her mom and family. Our greatest desire is that Mackenzie chooses to live a happy, healthy, honest, and productive life, using her extraordinary gifts for the highest good." Michael Hayes, who had originally prosecuted Morrison, told the Chronicle that he was uncertain of what had happened between Morrison and Fierceton.[3][lower-alpha 11]

The Chronicle story led to nationwide coverage,[16][17] most of which framed the narrative as Penn and the Rhodes Trust had in their reports, depicting Fierceton as yet another exposed fraud.[18] The New York Post wrote that "[t]he case ... exposes the murky underbelly of elite schools like Penn."[19][lower-alpha 12] A syndicated morning radio show named Fierceton its "donkey of the day".[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.[21] 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.[2] Katie Couric had Fierceton as a guest on her podcast a week later.[22] In mid-April, Penn released Fierceton's master's degree.[13]

The publicity led 150 Penn students to stage a walkout from classes to demonstrate in support of Fierceton. They demanded that the university remove the notation from her file. Gathering outside Caster, whose renovation they also demanded, they marched toward College Hall, and chanted for Winkelstein's ouster as well. At the end of the march they were addressed by Fierceton and other FGLI students.[23]

In a statement to The Daily Pennsylvanian, the university said the New Yorker article "did not accurately reflect" the university's investigation of the issues raised by the Rhodes Trust. Fierceton responded that that showed the university's "vulnerability and desperation". Rogers 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.[21]

Poverty porn

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. Others echoed the criticism. "Without her trauma, she didn’t matter", wrote a commentator in the Tulane Hullabaloo. "How much does one have to suffer to have value? ... Yes, it may be true that institutions like UPenn give students like Fierceton opportunities because of their story, but that does not mean her narrative is theirs for the taking. Nor is she obligated to meet their expectations of her."[24]

"I cannot avoid the sense that Mackenzie is being faulted for not having suffered enough", Norton told The New Yorker. "She was a foster child, but not for long enough. She is poor, but she has not been poor for long enough. She was abused, but there is not enough blood." Penn, by questioning so much of Fierceton's story, was making itself "complicit in a long campaign of continuing abuse", she added.[2]

Two weeks after the New Yorker article was published, Fierceton gave an interview to The Intercept's Ryan Grim for an installment of the Deconstructed podcast. 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]

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 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. And that dynamic, I would say, [laughs] probably played a big part in all of this.

Jay Caspian Kang sounded similar themes in two different New York Times newsletters discussing Fierceton's story. "Was the problem that a child who was placed into foster care and had no contact with her biological mother wasn't actually a first-generation college student? 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?" he asked in the first.[25] In the second, he wrote, "[y]ou could also conclude from Mackenzie Fierceton's story that there is no actual empathy within elite institutions unless you perfectly fit into the trauma hierarchy they have created, which preferences the types of overcoming-adversity stories they can place in a brochure."[26]

Personal life

Fierceton identifies as queer.[12]

See also
  • DARVO, strategy of accused abusers of in turn accusing their victims.
  • Linda Tirado, activist whose viral narrative about living in poverty as a single mother was later questioned when her background in an affluent family was revealed

Notes
  1. 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. It quotes her as saying "If you find me dead, it was my mom."[1]: 66  Penn does not explicitly suggest the diary is fabricated, but Fierceton characterizes them as having that opinion: "Penn is still claiming that those are fake journals. And I'm like: I don't 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. That would have to be the rationale that they would have for those childhood journals to be faked."[4]
  2. In her QuestBridge scholarship application essay, written the next year, Fierceton wrote that she could not breathe, and recalled "Heart monitor, IV pump, crash cart. They're all there to make sure I don't stop breathing again." The Rhodes Trust found no mention of any apnea in her hospital records.[2][1]: 92 
  3. When Penn's Office of Student Conduct confronted Fierceton with the discrepancy between her statement on two of her applications that she "aged out" or was "forced out" of foster care and an email she wrote to her caseworker at the time indicating she was voluntarily leaving the system (she would have been allowed to remain in it until she was 21), she told its investigators that she had felt pressured by DSS to leave foster care since the agency believed she was capable of handling herself outside of it and language in the email about her positive feelings about this was effectively written by someone else for her to use. An unnamed source involved in the process at the time said that while there was pressure on Fierceton to make a decision, her anticipation for regaining more control over her own life was genuine.[1]: 124 
  4. Lovelace died in January 2022.[8]
  5. The exact definition of FGLI relevant to forms Fierceton filled out is a key point in the Rhodes Trust and Penn investigations of her. She shared with the former screenshots of online chats and printouts of emails with representatives of the Federal Student Aid Information Center (FSAIC) and College Board in which she asked if an applicant in foster care with living biological parents, at least one of whom had graduated from college, would qualify as FGLI; the FSAIC representative could not say and the College Board said yes. In later conversations with Penn staff on the issue, which Fierceton claimed were inquiries on behalf of friends, she received a variety of answers, most of them suggesting that the definition meant, literally, students whose parents had not attended college but one admitting that there was considerable confusion around the issue. In conclusion, the trust, noting that she had only started asking once she was aware Penn was investigating her, agreed that there was a variety of definitions but her failure to elaborate on her situation when the forms gave her the opportunity to do suggested that she had exploited that uncertainty when writing her essays in such a way to lead readers to believe she had more clearly fit the definition as a foster child for most of her youth: "The evidence demonstrates a clear pattern of misrepresentation through which [Fierceton] has embellished her own life and falsely claimed the hardship of others for her own gain."[1]: 90–91 

    For the Penn investigation, Fierceton relied on the definition on the webpage for Penn First Plus, the university's support program for FGLI students, which includes the language about the student having a "strained or limited relationship" with the graduate parent. 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. 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.[1]: 111–112 

    Penn's investigators asked Fierceton why she had pretended to be asking on another's behalf when she made her queries within the university. She told them she felt that would be more likely to get an unbiased answer that way. 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.[1]: 111–112 

    In her Intercept interview, Grim recounts how this was reported in The New Yorker and asks "So how is a person who is filling out this application supposed to know what definition you’re supposed to use?" Fierceton said that when she had applied to SP2 as a sophomore she had cleared it with the school's associate director of admissions, who told her that a student's biological parents were not relevant to that definition, and said the same thing in 2020 (Penn's OSC interviewed the associate director and SP2's associate director for financial aid whom Fierceton said she had a similar conversation with; neither remembered speaking with Fierceton about the issue)[1]: 111–112 ). The dean of SP2 told Penn otherwise, but Fierceton noted that the school had never shared what its definition was. Fierceton clarified her identity during the interview:[4]

    ... [H]onestly, first-generation is never something I've really identified with fully. I identify with the FGLI umbrella term and definitely being a low-income student, but I've never really called myself a standalone first-generation. But when you're filling out a box where it's "yes" or "no" and there's no more information or "kind of!" box, it's like you have to fit yourself in, saying: Are you the first in your family to attend? And you’re getting instruction from a university official that that's how you're supposed to fill it out, that's what the definition says online. And to me, I'm like I am a household of one, so I am the only person in my family.
  6. The Rhodes Trust report found that the Penn police had no records of any calls to them from Fierceton about this. There were three instances of attempted contact from her family or foster family. 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 restraining order against her mother forbidding all contact (she did not). Second, the last foster mother she had tried to reach out to her during the 2018–19 academic year; again Fierceton declined contact. Lastly, her biological family wanted to let Fierceton know she could come home and live with them again when the pandemic started, or send her care packages if she chose not to. Statements from others corroborating these claims, the report said, were little more than hearsay, as they only reported that she had told them about these contacts.[1]: 92–94 
  7. "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."[1]: 62 
  8. However, in its report, Penn notes that Fierceton had, in an essay (which it allows may not have actually been submitted) for her application for a travel fellowship her sophomore year, described herself as "bouncing throughout the foster care system throughout my life", wrote about "my childhood in the child welfare system" and recalled worrying about how she would pay for a winter coat while her classmates traveled abroad." She told the investigators that she did not remember writing those words but agreed she should have been more careful.[1]: 117 
  9. The Rhodes report acknowledged her documentation of an email she wrote to a reporter at the Post-Dispatch (misidentified by the trust as the "Times-Dispatch"), but added "it was prudent of her to [correct her hometown newspaper], since her story was likely to be read by those who knew her growing up." It also noted that while she asked that it be corrected to read that she had "aged out" of foster care rather than having been "raised in" it, she also said in her email that she "had been involved with various other branches of the child welfare system throughout my life", a claim the trust said it could not substantiate. It also noted that she had not reached out to correct statements in the trust's or the university's news releases to the effect that she had grown up in foster care despite being made aware of the opportunity to do so, an opportunity it says at least a few scholar-designates take each year.[1]: 91 

    Penn's report notes that Fierceton disputes this account.[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 and a separate witness said records of child-welfare agencies from years earlier are not easy to obtain. Penn acknowledged that, for that reason, it could not state definitely that those events did not take place but still, "the way [she] presents this information invites the reader to speculate when she herself states she does not have a clear recollection of the nature of this event, if it occurred."[1]: 119 

  10. Penn's investigation noted that even if Fierceton had been referring to the Chesterfield police rather than the St. Louis County police, the agency had about 99 officers at that time. She also said, in that same paragraph, that child protective services had been called to her house more than a dozen times by her 11th birthday and that by the time she was 13, "I had broken more bones than years I had been alive." Fierceton described those statements, which she agreed considerably exaggerated those aspects of her childhood, to Penn as also arising from the fear of her biological family she felt at the time, specifically that they, too, might get in touch with Penn or Questbridge.[1]: 119 
  11. 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. He explained that Morrison had had no prior criminal record, Fierceton's complaints about her mother's boyfriend and prescription drug abuse had been unsubstantiated, her cousin had witnessed no abuse while living with the Morrisons at a time prior to the incident, and he had learned that Fierceton "had regular temper tantrums, beyond the normal range for an adolescent".[1]: 73 
  12. Gawker critiqued the Post story, noting that it downplayed the evidence the Chronicle had reported on corroborating Fierceton's abuse allegations and that "while [her] claims are not precisely accurate, they are also not complete lies." It accused the Post of having, as Fierceton was alleged to have done, "highlight[ed] the parts of a story they think a reader will like best."[20]

References
  1. "Verified Answer and New Matter to Plaintiff's Complaint". Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas. January 3, 2022. Retrieved May 13, 2022.
  2. Aviv, Rachel (April 4, 2022). "How an Ivy League School Turned Against a Student". The New Yorker. Retrieved April 5, 2022.
  3. Bartlett, Tom (January 7, 2022). "The Dredging". The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved April 6, 2022.
  4. Fierceton, Mackenzie (April 16, 2022). "Deconstructed: Mackenzie Fierceton on Her Battle With UPenn". The Intercept (Interview). Interviewed by Ryan Grim. Retrieved May 1, 2022.
  5. Hoffmann, John (March 9, 2015). "Ex Alderman Newsletter 168 And Chesterfield 113" (PDF). John Hoffmann. pp. 3–4. Retrieved April 8, 2022.
  6. Holleman, Joe (October 3, 2014). "St. Luke's physician charged with felony child abuse". St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Retrieved April 8, 2022.
  7. Holleman, Joe (March 18, 2015). "Abuse charges against former St. Luke's physician are dropped". St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Retrieved April 9, 2022.
  8. "Henry Lovelace, owner of Wild Horse Fitness Passes Away". St. Louis Post-Dispatch. January 17, 2022. Retrieved April 28, 2022.
  9. Holleman, Joe (November 24, 2020). "Former St. Louis woman who spent time in foster care named Rhodes Scholar". St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Retrieved May 2, 2022.
  10. Singh, Pia (June 6, 2020). "Thousands petition U. to cut ties with Philly PD, reform militarized campus 'police state'". The Daily Pennsylvanian. Retrieved May 2, 2022.
  11. Ozio, Ron. "A 2021 Rhodes Scholar for Penn" (Press release). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania. Retrieved May 3, 2022.
  12. Ruderman, Wendy (November 22, 2020). "Penn student who aged out of foster care wins prestigious Rhodes Scholarship". The Philadelphia Inquirer. Retrieved May 4, 2022.
  13. Sousa, Tori (April 12, 2022). "Following public outcry, Penn lifts hold on former Rhodes Scholar Mackenzie Fierceton's master's degree". The Daily Pennsylvanian. Retrieved May 8, 2022.
  14. Jackson, John (September 12, 2018). "University Mourns Loss of Cameron Avant Driver" (Press release). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania. Retrieved May 10, 2022.
  15. "Complaint: Fierceton v. Winkelstein et al". Court of Common Pleas for Philadelphia. December 21, 2021. Retrieved May 11, 2021.
  16. Shen, Michelle (January 19, 2022). "Student loses Rhodes scholarship over allegations of lying about her foster care upbringing". USA Today. Retrieved May 22, 2022.
  17. Holleman, Joe (January 13, 2022). "Former St. Louis-area student loses Rhodes scholarship over 'false narratives'". St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Retrieved May 22, 2022.
  18. Gardey, Ellie (January 12, 2022). "Student Misleads With Story of Poverty and Abuse and Wins Rhodes Scholarship—Now, the Media Is Defending Her". The American Spectator. Retrieved May 22, 2022.
  19. Oppenheimer, Jerry; Vincent, Isabel (January 11, 2022). "'Rhodes Scholar' claimed she grew up poor and abused — then her story started to unravel". New York Post. Retrieved May 18, 2022.
  20. Hitt, Tarpley (January 11, 2022). "Did This Rhodes Wannabe Lie About Her Background?". Gawker. Retrieved May 18, 2022.
  21. Sousa, Tori (April 13, 2022). "Inside Mackenzie Fierceton's ongoing legal battle with the University". The Daily Pennsylvanian. Retrieved May 21, 2022.
  22. Santo, Emily (April 7, 2022). "Mackenzie Fierceton Sets the Record Straight on Losing a Rhodes Scholarship Over Accusations of 'Dishonesty'". KatieCouric.com. Retrieved May 20, 2022.
  23. Ratner, Kate (April 14, 2022). "Penn community rallies in support of former Rhodes Scholar Mackenzie Fierceton". The Daily Pennsylvanian. Retrieved May 20, 2022.
  24. Verghese, Apoorva (April 20, 2022). "Universities must stop fetishizing trauma". Tulane Hullabaloo. Retrieved May 22, 2022.
  25. Kang, Jay Caspian (April 7, 2022). "The Pity of the Elites". The New York Times. Retrieved May 30, 2022.
  26. Kang, Jay Caspian (April 18, 2022). "How the Elites Monopolize Empathy". The New York Times. Retrieved May 30, 2022.
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