It was more, I think, in the times after and the months after where I ended up like giving different medical records and all of these things to corroborate my account, but there were a few questions that were very specific to what had happened. 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., 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. Others echoed the criticism. 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. After her mother left, Fierceton got out of bed, found a spare set of keys and drove herself to school. And it felt very similar that, well, this cant be real. Theres a lot of chaos. 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 in the U.S., there is much more pressure to pull kids out of homes, right? Photograph by Robbie Lawrence for The New Yorker Mackenzie Fierceton grew up in a middle-class suburb of St. Louis. 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. 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. MF: Yeah. Mackenzie Fierceton of St. Louis was an Oxford student who had to offer her a Rhodes scholarship after the university caught her lying about her financial condition and her unpleasant teenage years on her application reports. But afterwards she was anxious enough about how her mother might react to remain on the other side of the kitchen counter island from Morrison while they talked in the kitchen, "bracing for impact", she wrote in her diary. RG: So how is a person who is filling out this application supposed to know what definition youre supposed to use? 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. Fierceton clarified her identity during the interview:[4]. So, yes. MF: So [laughs] I feel like I could go on for hours about that. Are we going to see these injuries? Is that your experience with it as well? She expressed some concern to Penn staff that if she won, the media attention might incite her mother and her family to attack her reputation, and expressed on a form she filed with Penn as part of the process a concern of hers that FGLI students such as herself were "pressured to be someone they were not amidst their application process." [14], The publicity led 150 Penn students to stage a walkout from classes to demonstrate in support of Fierceton. So I was like: OK, fine. And then theres the part that felt like: I have no idea whats going to convince these people if I gave them medical records, I gave them forensic photos of me taken in the hospital, I gave them again like corroboration from professors of like how I described myself, from leaders in the FIGLY community. 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. 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. 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 I just want to read this for people. So they didnt ask about that in this meeting. Yes. RG: Right. 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. "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? 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. I tried to help as much as I could. 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. In between those placements, she slept at friends' houses for long periods. So those questions really came later. At first she went to a friend's home in Ohio and then returned to the Philadelphia area as May and graduation approached to live with a classmate's family. And it became pretty clear to me that they had spoken to Carrie and or seen medical records. [5] Lovelace was also arrested and charged with sexual abuse. It's a hard scholarship to win, but Fierceton. I mean, part of it is honestly like its looking at cause we just wanted to be as thorough as possible of when [laughs] I was crying, and then I was crying and taking breaths. The award brings the number of Penn Rhodes Scholars to 31 since the scholarship's inception in 1902. And Im like: I dont 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. 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. After Fierceton was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship during her senior year, questions about whether she had accurately represented her background led to investigations by both the Rhodes Trust and Penn that concluded she had at times suggested or failed to correct the impression left by some statements about her, and her own application essays, that she had grown up a poor foster child. MF: At first there was actually, there was contention. So Rachel had it and Penn disputed it. Are we going to see these injuries? Did she lie? [2] Afterwards Morrison changed her daughter's last name to her own. Or is that it separates two into one? To me, it seems like any reader of the English language would read that in a literary sense , of its self-exploration, self-doubt, trauma. Like there is more attention to systemic poverty and trying to keep children in their homes to begin with, I would say, which is important, because if you can keep kids in their homes, then theyre not in the system and facing that foster-to-prison pipeline. Brandt, the Chesterfield police detective who had originally investigated the case, said later that the prosecutor never explained to her what that new evidence was. She got straight A's, served in student government, managed the field hockey team, played varsity soccer, and volunteered to assist with the local Special Olympics. So yes, I know that is me. So normally the term FGLI, its just an umbrella term for both. [2], Fierceton was accepted at the University of Pennsylvania (commonly known as Penn) on a full scholarship, arranged through QuestBridge. Aviv tells the story of Mackenzie Fierceton, a former student at the University of Pennsylvania. There were so many there are, I guess I should say so many moving pieces. The university writes: After those who knew Fierceton raised questions about her story, it was investigated not just once, but several times, and not just by Penn faculty and staff, but also the Rhodes Trust. So I kind of simplified that in a sentence to make my point of what I wanted to study, which was the foster-care-to-prison pipeline, which is also what I ultimately ended up doing my Ph.D. on and what I just started this year. Thats why Im pausing to let her catch her breath. How much research has been done on the foster-care-to-prison-pipeline? 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 thats an unfortunate reality so many survivors experience, not having a lot of documentation. [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. Cause then you cant think that it could be you. box, it's like you have to fit yourself in, saying: Are you the first in your family to attend? This was about a week after. But the outline of the story is this: Mackenzie was raised in a wealthy St. Louis suburb by a single mother who was repeatedly abusive, according to two state agencies. [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. She ruined her moms career. 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. I think they do have a richer experience if they have more diversity around them, but that is more the point. And back in high school, it was a similar thing. 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, "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. MF: No, I found it before. RG: Mhmm. 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. [2] Her father, Billy Terrell,[1] had been an actor in soap operas. [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. Penn officials, of course, have said the interview was appropriate. Like you said, I was called into a meeting. And I was the one who uncovered my classmates death. And to me, I'm like I am a household of one, so I am the only person in my family. Why were you in the hospital that long? It, too, alleged that Fierceton was misrepresenting herself as having been poor and grown up entirely in foster care, with many photos of Fierceton as a little girl on the beach and riding horses, and other activities usually associated with affluence. And 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. And then as the different internships, and then I went to get my masters in social work and all of this happened, I started to see that continue in different capacities while I was in different roles, seeing that theme in this relationship between foster care and the criminal justice system. Two weeks into the school year, she realized she had been wrong. Then the University of Pennsylvania accused her of lying. And I think said something along the lines of there were things missing and it was distorted. [9] In a news release, Penn's then-president Amy Gutmann, a daughter of Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany who had herself been the first in her family to attend college,[11] spoke admiringly of Fierceton as "a first-generation low-income student and a former foster youth. "[20][m] A syndicated morning radio show named Fierceton its "donkey of the day". It was: Shes a spoiled little brat. 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. as a kid. 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. 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. MF: So to me it was pretty clear that it likely came from them. At first she explained Fierceton's injuries as either having been caused by an intruder or somehow self-inflicted, then said her daughter had fallen downstairs while she was trying to help her get some chewing gum out of her hair. [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. But it doesnt mean you were always low-income, just that you are now. The Inquirer story came out in November 2020. 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. "[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, found it to have seriously diverged from the reality of her life, with the abuse allegations quite possibly fabricated. [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. 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. "Fuck thatI don't have [a family]" she said later. Thats been my understanding of it. 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. Then, the first-generation box. [2] Morrison's bond was originally set at $40,000, but lowered to $5,000 over prosecutors' strenuous objections. Enough bruises? So they didnt ask about that in this meeting. 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. The nurse also reported bruises all over Fierceton's body, in different stages of healing, considered an indicator of possible physical abuse. Morrison then brought suit in circuit court to have the board's decision reviewed and reversed. RG: And it has, has she stuck by that? RG: And what was the first-generation community like on campus? RG: who was, I believe now, the acting provost. And we spoke for a long time and I went through everything I had found. And eventually they filed a big wrongful death lawsuit in August 2020. Period." I think this is a conversation not necessarily for people who are still in question about what happened here. And then theres also foster siblings in the sense of other people who are in the foster care system who youre living with. She entered foster care only at the age of 17, after making a complaint of abuse against Dr. Morrison a complaint that a court later found not to be credible. RG: That was Mackenzie Fierceton and thats our show. They demanded that the university remove the notation from her file. Our grad school had no specific definitions or instructions, but I did have a relationship with the associate director of admissions at the time. [2], Morrison retained William Margulis, a former member of Whitfield's board who had sent four of his children there, including one of her daughter's classmates, as her attorney. 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. RG: Who will spend some significant amount of time in poverty. MF: Yeah. By the end of the year she was in a third foster home. That was Mackenzie Fierceton and thats our show. Although she had not attended an orientation session for first-generation/low-income (FGLI) students she had been invited to, on campus she began attending meetings and gatherings of Penn First, an FGLI student group founded the preceding year to pressure Penn to better accommodate their needs, such as not closing dormitories and cafeterias over breaks since many FGLI students could not, for various reasons, return home during those periods. And I think psychologically one way people feel safer about it is to say: No, that happens to other people. @RachelAviv for @NewYorker Or is this something thats been overlooked? And its striking to see just the continuing to push of what happened. Mackenzie Fierceton was deposed after seeking justice for a mature student, Cameron Driver, 38. In a 25-minute conversation, she went into detail with Fierceton about her past and what she planned to do with her scholarship. RG: Talk just a little bit about that case . 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