[Laughs.]. The battle between her and the school was chronicled by Rachel Aviv in the New Yorker earlier this month. And I just want to read this for people. You have a good education and youre clearly smart. [5] Lovelace was also arrested and charged with sexual abuse. And it felt very similar that, well, this cant be real. She bounced from one foster home to the next. But it was just kind of this rapid fire of: If we look at your medical records, are we going to see you had broken ribs and severe facial injuries? 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. And so I was like, of course, Im going to respond again. So one of the questions that you mentioned that they asked was about your essay , which, correct me if Im wrong, but I think it begins saying something along the lines of: Youre in the hospital, you looked in the mirror, and you couldnt recognize yourself, you couldnt recognize your features. One trigger for the beatings was sexual abuse by one of her mother's boyfriends, Henry Lovelace, Jr., a fitness trainer and multiple winner of the Missouri's Strongest Man competition in his weight class, which her mother warned her never to talk about. And still, it was just like: Nope. [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. So Im not sure if it was Penn who reached out to her or vice versa, which I think is also an important question in all of this. "Without her trauma, she didnt matter", wrote a commentator in the Tulane Hullabaloo. Her mentor told Licht afterwards that "it felt like an attack on a student" and that she had never experienced anything like it. As in Fierceton's case, it took an hour to remove Driver from the building. And we cant acknowledge that, so we then have to pick apart the other pieces of it, and say that well this, this just cant be real. And it has, has she stuck by that? 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. The prosecutor eventually dropped the charges and the arrest record was expunged. Fierceton finished her Whitfield education on a scholarship while living in foster homes. If you want to give us additional feedback, email us at. Fierceton says she had not failed any tests; her Whitfield transcript shows she got a B+ in the class. But part of it is funding decisions. After a teacher reported what they felt was abuse, a social worker came by and your mother was able to just charm the pants off her. [2], In the early 2000s the couple went through a protracted divorce during which a guardian ad litem was appointed to represent their daughter's interests at the custody hearing. Mackenzie, for her part, was accepted to the University of Pennsylvania and, in her sophomore year, won a Rhodes Scholarship. But it doesnt mean you were always low-income, just that you are now. And Ive brought my mentor with me. Like some students do have a story, more like me where they had some kind of separation from their family; other students their parents were doctors or lawyers or Ph.D. students in other countries, but then they came here and their degrees no longer, essentially, counted or people who are just first-generation and not necessarily low-income or people who are low-income, but not first-generation. Fierceton had also brought her mentor, a staff member at the university's Civic House, into the meeting; at the outset Winkelstein told the woman she could not speak or she would be disconnected immediately. He died of his heart attack within 12 minutes of arrival at the hospital. Also, there was a delay in getting the Penn Police there because they didnt know where the building was. And in the U.S., there is much more pressure to pull kids out of homes, right? RG: And The New Yorker article also alluded to a few things that you had gotten loose with in a couple of paragraphs. Our producer is Zach Young. Mhmm. And theyll openly talk about this. Fierceton said later that she had never used the word "poor" to describe herself or her childhood. And theres also literature thats economic literature versus sociology, different fields have different perspectives on what that relationship between foster care and the criminal justice system is and what the causes are. A trial was held in early 2019 at which she, Fierceton, a psychologist and a DSS investigator testified. RG: so that people have the background there. MF: And with that, like you said, notion of: Well, theres no way that you went to private school and all of this could have still happened, or that you could be low-income now and this idea that socioeconomic status is permanent. Fellow students, their parents and Whitfield faculty also noticed signs which led them to suspect abuse. "I had so much anger and grief, and I didn't want them to be affiliated in any way with this new life I was building. 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 think said something along the lines of there were things missing and it was distorted. The show was mixed by William Stanton. "Once you do something that the University sees as undermining its quest for power and prestige, it will not think twice about discarding you, humiliating you, and retaliating against you, which is exactly what they did" said one SP2 student in support of Fierceton. Her sister also wrote White as well, alleging that Fierceton "deliberately tried to frame Carrie and planted 'evidence' around the house, including her own blood. So, yes, an article came out in the local paper saying that she had been arrested. He died after a medical emergency in a basement of UPenn's Caster Building in 2018. Its just so obvious that you fit the criteria for low-income, but it seems like they feel like you dont fit it in the spirit of how they want it. So now Im looking at one American city and one English city and comparing the experiences of youth who crossed over from the child welfare system to the criminal justice system in both of those cities and kind of how the geopolitical environment and local policies and practices might impact the rate of youth crossing over and their experiences.Then its going to be a qualitative study in just really trying to understand their experiences from their voices, which is something that I often find missing from research. And where are you at school? Mhmm. [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. No, I cant. Her mother was arrested and charged with abuse, and Mackenzie went into foster care. Even though I had, again, written statements from two ICU nurses who took care of me saying: Yes, there was blood, [laughs] theres photographs, and there still was the argument of like, there wasnt enough blood or your face wasnt so distorted you could couldnt tell who you were. And then the other question was: Are you the first in your family to attend college? Yeah. Those investigations revealed that for the first 17 years of her life, Fierceton was raised by her mother, Dr. Carrie Morrison, an accomplished physician. Anything in particular jump out at you after having read back over that transcript? Am I right about that? Deconstructed is a production of First Look Media and The Intercept. 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. Cause then you cant think that it could be you. I took photos of the building and sent it to them, and I was connecting them with different people who were in my class, who were in his class. And then again there was trouble getting him out of the basement. And you experienced that yourself, right? They demanded that the university remove the notation from her file. [2], Over the middle of 2020, Fierceton became active in the Black Lives Matter protests at Penn. [2] Fierceton and her mentor reconstructed the conversation and transcribed it; the university has claimed it is inaccurate but the mentor stands by it. And, honestly, first-generation is never something Ive really identified with fully. 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. Mackenzie Fierceton has lost her Rhodes Scholarship and her University of Pennsylvania master's degree is being held after an anonymous tipster called out alleged inaccuracies in her school. And especially, again, like these stereotypes of black and brown, low-income families, the knee-jerk reaction is like: Oh, well, theyre unequipped to be a parent. What was the response from the readers of the paper? And then instantly people started picking her story apart. Then, the first-generation box. 2020 College graduate Mackenzie Fierceton (Photo from Mackenzie Fierceton). And so they had to see some benefit to them in doing this. How did you get to school? Not as something that is for the benefit of the MacKenzies, the people who were being brought into the school, but actually for the benefit of the university itself, its image and also for the students. And Im kind of one of the lucky ones where I had really expansive and thorough documentation for all the parts of this story. box, it's like you have to fit yourself in, saying: Are you the first in your family to attend? Yeah, so Penn First for the whole FGLI community. I was in this private school with a lot of upper-middle class or wealthy white students. Her junior year at Whitfield, a prestigious prep school, Mackenzie showed up to school one day in a terrible state. 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 so can you talk a little bit about your research? And how much confidence do you have that that anonymous complainer was Carrie, your biological mother. [1]:111112, Penn's investigators asked Fierceton why she had pretended to be asking on another's behalf when she made her queries within the university. [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. If we review your medical records, are we going to see you had broken ribs and facial injuries? [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. "How much does one have to suffer to have value? Picture: University of Pennsylvania/Instagram. They had done their own investigation again, quotes on investigation and then I had submitted over a hundred pages of documents to them. Uh, my lawyer. I have some of my own theories, but I want to hear yours. Mackenzie is currently suing the university. 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. [Laughs.]. 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. It's from there the story unraveled. Well, Mackenzie, thank you so much for joining me and sharing your story. And that felt very powerful in an institution where the overwhelming majority of people are coming from two-parent households, extremely wealthy, like a whole nother level of wealth that I have really ever seen, in my life in terms of just around me, like the 1 percent to the 0.001 percent. Mackenzie Fierceton is the child of a doctor who attended a private prep school in a wealthy suburb. [2], To White, Morrison repeated her story that her daughter had fabricated the abuse allegations. "You can't couch-surf in a pandemic", Norton said. 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 program's application asked "Are you the first generation in your family to attend college? And all of us, no matter what our situation, are not completely safe from it. And we do know for sure that she was in touch with the university. You know, I believe the first people who said that was the Rhodes Trust. Fierceton grew up in a wealthy community and attended an elite private school in a St. Louis suburb. What kind of a group is that? Youre engaged in a lawsuit with Penn. 207 1,590 6,062 Show this thread Mackenzie Fierceton @MFierceton Aug 8 Will never not make my day to see this on the shelf. 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