RG: Is that what sent you into a surreal state? Morrison's name was therefore ordered removed from the DSS registry. So normally the term FGLI, its just an umbrella term for both. So they didnt ask about that in this meeting. [2], The next morning, when Fierceton awoke, Morrison told her she was taking her car keys and telling the school she was sick. There were so many there are, I guess I should say so many moving pieces. She was hospitalized twice in 2014 due to injuries she says were inflicted by her mother; after the second stay, which lasted three weeks, the state removed her from the house and placed her in foster care. But they just assumed theres no way that it could have happened. Because thats not how we understand poverty. She wasn't poor and grew up in a wealthy household with a successful mother. She added the additional detail that at the time of her first hospitalization, Fierceton had just failed her first AP Chemistry test. And I asked again and just said: Ive had different experiences of harassment for the last four years at Penn. So thats the background of him. RG: And so where is your story now? 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? That is when I would trace it back to. In retrospect, I just honestly wish I had never written about those people, but it was kind of one of those things where I was like: OK, I need to make my point. After her graduation summa cum laude, political science professor Anne Norton invited Fierceton to stay with her and her partner in their large house in Northwest Philadelphia for as long as she needed to in order to complete her master's over the next year. Raised in Chesterfield, Missouri, a West County suburb of St. Louis, she attended and graduated from the Whitfield School in Creve Coeur. On Saturday afternoon, Fierceton said she found herself in a Zoom meeting for several hours with 10 other finalists from this region. 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. RG: Thats been my understanding of it. She didnt even know what building he had died in. Its, in my opinion, because they get overlooked and the kids like me are kind of rendered invisible by the privileges of our biological families. And so, just the immediate reaction was like: Theres no way. RG: so that people have the background there. 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. 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: I think for a lot of us, we have to sort of other poverty and abuse and put it in a box, partly, to protect ourselves. So that was what that specific sentence in The New Yorker was referencing is this kind of condensing this group of people and to one sentence. And, honestly, first-generation is never something Ive really identified with fully. 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. An article in The Philadelphia Inquirer erroneously wrote that she had grown up poor. They didnt respond, though Mackenzies biological mother has denied the allegations of abuse. 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. 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. Cops have accused the MTV star of stalking as well as violation of an order of protection. I think [its] called Penn First, I believe, and it seems like you socially spent a lot of time with them? 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. She was an independent student when she applied. And at the time I was like: Why what? [2], Morrison, no longer employed by St. Luke's, then began the process of trying to restore her reputation by having all references to it removed from the public record. If youd like to support our work, go to theintercept.com/give your donation, no matter what the amount, makes a real difference. But when you're filling out a box where it's "yes" or "no" and there's no more information or "kind of!" As an anonymous letter writer revealed, however, she was also the privately educated child of a radiologist, brought up in an affluent suburb. And still, it was just like: Nope. 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. And that dynamic, I would say, [laughs] probably played a big part in all of this. Am I right about that? You have a good education and youre clearly smart. So I could imagine why at some point youd be like, you know what, Im just not going to keep taking Ls here. And I ended up reaching out to his widow I found her on Facebook and sent her a message just to say: You know, I think I found some information. 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. RG: Mhmm. So those questions came like later on and were really a part of the initial interrogation. [5] Lovelace was also arrested and charged with sexual abuse. Raised in Chesterfield, Missouri, a West County suburb of St. Louis, she attended and graduated from the Whitfield School in Creve Coeur. 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. 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". According to an investigation by the Chronicle of Higher Education, University of Pennsylvania student Mackenzie Fierceton lost her Rhodes scholarship and her master's degree was withheld after. The 23-year-old planned to use. A picture of her was posted at the nurse's station should she make the attempt. So they heard from her and immediately they call you into a meeting with the deputy provost at the time, Beth Winkelstein . MF: So thats the background of him. 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? And we spoke for a long time and I went through everything I had found. At school, she began confiding about her situation with a history teacher, telling them about her mother's physical abuse. And whats the difference between the U.S. and English system? 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! Like what does Penn say when you tell them: Hey, the Penn official who helped me fill this out said that these are the categories that I fit. Our grad school had no specific definitions or instructions, but I did have a relationship with the associate director of admissions at the time. 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. In other words, if you are parent who says that you are wishing your daughter well and youre telling the authorities that shes just mentally ill and its just a really, really sad and tragic case that shes making up all of these allegations of abuse and throwing herself down stairs, and beating herself up all for cries for help, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera you wouldnt then also pursue a multi-year long effort to destroy her life. [2][g], The packages she says she received were supplemented by hangup calls, which a faculty member Fierceton occasionally lived with recalled her receiving in the months preceding the trial of her mother's lawsuit against DSS later in her junior year. Its a very different lifestyle. [H]onestly, first-generation is never something I've really identified with fully. MF: So to me it was pretty clear that it likely came from them. 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. MF: You know, in my personal experience, there were not very many kids who came from a background like me. I identify with the FGLI umbrella term and definitely being a low-income student, but Ive never really called myself a standalone first-generation. 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? 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?" 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 and born of her fear of her biological family when she wrote it. 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, to "continue to try to move forward in my life. Michael Hayes, who had prosecuted Morrison, told the Chronicle that "The more I learned, the less certain I became about what really happened. 's office explained the decision to drop the charges against Morrison as based on new evidence that had emerged. RG: Right. She had had a fairly upper middle class life yet was working at multiple fast food restaurants and barely getting by. And we do know for sure that she was in touch with the university. And I didnt really know any information, except for that he had had a medical emergency in class and then been pronounced dead at the hospital. She definitely asked some questions about it. And so they had to see some benefit to them in doing this. Mackenzies critics even began nitpicking how much blood was in her hair while she was in the intensive care unit. Yeah. So one question was: Are you from a low-income family? I tried to help as much as I could. Because processes become Kafkaesque very quickly. You didnt grow up in crumbling projects your entire life. January 7, 2022. 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. Or is this something thats been overlooked? Its practically half of Americans, or more. 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