"[2], When Fierceton returned to the St. Louis area on vacations and breaks, she stayed with friends. I really appreciate it. [2], For her senior year, Whitfield gave Fierceton a full scholarship. RG: Talk just a little bit about that case . And I turned over all this information to his widow. MF: Yeah. And she had gone to a private school growing up. I cant remember if it was in the Rhodes essay or in another essay that, in hindsight, you wouldve tightened up. 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. At Oxford University, Mackenzie Fierceton will conduct research on the "foster care-to-prison" pipeline. 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. [2], Fierceton was accepted at the University of Pennsylvania (commonly known as Penn) on a full scholarship, arranged through QuestBridge. [3] The change in her living situation greatly complicated her college plans as she had no financial resources of her own. 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. Rather than it being for the purpose of benefiting the students themselves. [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. Penn didnt respond to a request for comment, but in its response to Mackenzies lawsuit, they write: Penn denies that there are accessibility problems with the Caster Building which contributed to Mackenzies medical emergency or to [Cameron] Drivers death. And the theme of private school definitely came up many times over the course of the last year and a half. But it was in the sense of: I didnt recognize myself both because I was beaten and my face was swollen and whatever, and I felt like at rock bottom and broken. on about your day, ask yourself: How likely is it that the story you just read would have been produced by a different news outlet if The Intercept hadnt done it? And do you know Linda Tirado? And then to be so unanimously disbelieved and, at that point, this article was like a paragraph and a half. 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. And I also think we have this racist and classist notion of who can be an abuser or who can cause harm. [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. Absolutely. 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. "Without her trauma, she didnt matter", wrote a commentator in the Tulane Hullabaloo. RG: And it has, has she stuck by that? And they released this quote-unquote report in April of 2021 with their findings. And is it somewhat of a defense mechanism that people deploy to protect themselves? The Intercept is an independent nonprofit news outlet. The kind of reporting we do is essential to democracy, but it is not easy, cheap, or profitable. RG: Right. A University of Pennsylvania May graduate who is currently completing her master's degree at Penn has been awarded a Rhodes Scholarship for graduate study at the University of Oxford.. Penn's 2021 Rhodes Scholar is Mackenzie Fierceton from St. Louis, currently residing in Philadelphia. Because thats not how we understand poverty. If you speak, Im going to disconnect you from the call. But those definitions arent anywhere to be found. Her mother was a doctor and Fierceton attended a prep school, but she was. Our grad school had no specific definitions or instructions, but I did have a relationship with the associate director of admissions at the time. But it doesnt mean you were always low-income, just that you are now. Like you said, theres also the cultural stereotype of like Orphan Annie and Oliver Twist of what these kinds of kids are supposed to look like that starts so early on in, and deep in the culture or media that we encounter that I think really ingrains that into people. 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 its funny, cause it just made me so frustrated and I actually went back and read it. [2][4][15], After learning this, Fierceton and a fellow SP2 student began doing research. Fierceton was living off-campus by then, but she and her roommates decided to leave their apartment. So Rachel had it and Penn disputed it. And at the time I was like: Why what? [2], In March 2014, Fierceton began keeping a secret diary[a] documenting her life and her ruminations on her situation, writing it in her bedroom closet by the light of her phone and hiding it behind a ventilation panel. So these are all things Ive learned [laughs] I learned after the fact. 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. Then the University of Pennsylvania accused her of. At school, she began confiding about her situation with a history teacher, telling them about her mother's physical abuse. "She was falling apart under the academic stresses at school and was exhausted, and I believe looking for an out." And that dynamic, I would say, [laughs] probably played a big part in all of this. Did she lie? RG: And so youre becoming rather inconvenient to the university at that point , RG: I would assume, which plays into the way that universities and elite structures think of diversity, I think. And that is part of what felt like it gave me such a home, is because we had these sort of underlying shared experiences, but all came from different backgrounds to an extent, and all still supported and accepted one another. Her account was not completely inaccurateshe described as a foster child one sibling of hers who was actually the biological child of her foster parents, for instance, which she attributed later to not having developed her essay at length. Fierceton is the 31st Penn student to be chosen as a Rhodes Scholar since the distinguished program's start in 1902. We want to think of it as: If you were ever rich, youre always rich; if youre ever poor, youre always poor. And she ended up responding right away, and asked to get on a phone call. Penn's Office of Student Conduct recommended withholding her master's degree until she paid a fine; both conditions were dropped but a notation about the investigative finding remains in her transcript. [2], One day in September 2014, she told the history teacher about Lovelace's abuse. And Im glad that people are having the kinds of systemic discussions that are so key to all of this. I mean, youd been taking loss after loss, despite having the facts on your side. 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. How did you get to school? [3] "Mackenzie may have centered certain aspects of her background to the exclusion of othersfor reasons we are certain she feels are validin a way that creates a misimpression," the report said. 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. So those questions came like later on and were really a part of the initial interrogation. And that was the end of it, right? But I guess I cant say for sure. 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. My understanding is there were two anonymous emails. RG: And so if its a well-educated white girl from a private school, thats way too close to home for a lot of these elites. And you experienced that yourself, right? You know, in my personal experience, there were not very many kids who came from a background like me. 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. She arrives as a new student at Erinsborough High School and is connected to the . [f] Fierceton felt no ambivalence about her answer. Like one of them was describing a biological child in a house as another foster child, and something about a half-brother or something.What were those and how were those errors kind of deployed against you? And still, it was just like: Nope. How many covert wars, miscarriages of justice, and dystopian technologies would remain hidden if our reporters werent on the beat? And I ended up reading the comments, and the comments were just horrendous. It's a hard scholarship to win, but Fierceton. So I was like: OK, fine. One of them, to me, felt pretty clear that it was probably from someone in my biological family, because it had photos of me; it had very specific information that very few people would have and I dont think many people would have random childhood photos of me. She was then admitted to Penn on a full scholarship, where she identified as a first-generation low-income (FGLI) student despite her background due to her estrangement from her parents and lack of financial support from them, a classification she says Penn officials told her was acceptable in those circumstances. So I could imagine why at some point youd be like, you know what, Im just not going to keep taking Ls here. And it felt very similar that, well, this cant be real. But I just had a bad feeling and I started to try to find more information. And they released this quote-unquote report in April of 2021 with their findings. Have you ever heard of her case? So first-generation and/or low-income, again, is the acronym. MF: So those questions really came later. I think [its] called Penn First, I believe, and it seems like you socially spent a lot of time with them? So that was what that specific sentence in The New Yorker was referencing is this kind of condensing this group of people and to one sentence. So, yes. Were close to done. And it was a very similar situation where it took everyone a long time to get to the building. And it started with, this paragraph-and-a-half of waking up in the hospital and then, like you said, looking at my face, not recognizing myself, and kind of describing what I felt like and what the room looked like. Shes lying, shes a spoiled brat, this, that, and the other which looking back at the time I just felt absolutely horrible. And thats an unfortunate reality so many survivors experience, not having a lot of documentation. And that dynamic, I would say, [laughs] probably played a big part in all of this. In The New Yorker article, one teacher had written: She showed up at my classroom door with a bloodied and battered face and then fainted., RG: And then, Rachel Aviv, the reporter also quotes Sherry McClain, who was a nurse who was assigned to you, she said: She had two black eyes, and her hair was full of blood. The university, in its response to Mackenzies lawsuit, referred to Mackenzies mother as an accomplished physician and claimed that a court had found her allegations not to be credible. And whats the difference between the U.S. and English system? And then theres also foster siblings in the sense of other people who are in the foster care system who youre living with. Which as Im sure youve learned since is a complete and fundamental misunderstanding of poverty . And so, like I mentioned earlier, I dont want to go over too much of the history that led up to your battle with Penn and with the Rhodes trust, because people can find that in The New Yorker article that came out recently, you went over that in some pretty decent length; in Katie Courics podcast in a recent interview there. And I was having flashbacks to cross-examinations and depositions Id given about this which later made sense, because we found out that Wendy White had spoken with one of Carries defense lawyers. She is poor, but she has not been poor for long enough. You had mentioned that you actually made a transcript of your interview with Deputy Provost Finkelstein shortly after the conversation. Enough blood? 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. 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