Mackenzie Fierceton

One day in September 2014, she told the history teacher about Lovelace's abuse. They 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 herself and her daughter as "two peas in a pod". 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. Asked about Lovelace's alleged sexual abuse, specifically an incident the year before where Fierceton, having fallen asleep in her mother's bed, woke to find him caressing her breasts, 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; this time she said that her daughter had injured herself, saying "I guess she has more problems than I thought." Morrison was arrested and charged with felony child abuse and third-degree assault (a misdemeanor) in 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 3] 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 made a reference to an earlier discussion of Fierceton's mental illness; the teacher did not remember any such conversation.[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. This made Fierceton feel as if she were being watched for anything she did that could be used against the state's case by her mother. She felt as if it might have been an attempt to intimidate her. 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", the same theme as Morrison's many arguments in person and over the phone to other Whitfield parents.[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. The mother of a friend of Fierceton's recalls that when she told Morrison on the phone that she "was not interested" in hearing what Morrison had to say, she got angry and confrontational. Later, another Whitfield parent Morrison had talked to told this woman that she believed Fierceton had done this to get admitted to an Ivy League college, an idea which she found preposterous.[2]

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 4] 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. A college counselor suggested she apply through QuestBridge, a nonprofit that helps qualified students in need find schools that will give them full financial support.[2]

Fierceton was accepted at the University of Pennsylvania (commonly known as Penn) on a full scholarship, arranged through QuestBridge. Again 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[2] and her grandfather was a college graduate who had taught at the University of Missouri.[1]^: 64

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 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 5]

A spokesman for the D.A.'s office explained the decision to drop the charges against Morrison as based on new evidence that had emerged. 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. "I advised him that this was ridiculous, and this had to be a 'status thing", she said.[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. 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 well 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. "While it is possible that [she] was the cause of the alleged injuries," she wrote a month afterward, "the court cannot make that finding by a preponderance of the evidence based on the evidence presented." 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]

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 get a Ph.D. at Oxford University in England, 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, 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." 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."[2]

On her application, Fierceton recounted her background and the unexpected way it led to her becoming a foster child. Her account was not completely inaccurate—she 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. 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, 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."[12] 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:[13]

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 9] 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 10]

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, the father of one of Fierceton's Whitfield friends, and a high-school classmate using an anonymous email, 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. "She was falling apart under the academic stresses at school and was exhausted, and I believe looking for an out." Morrison told White in an email. Fierceton says she had not failed any tests; her 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 woman she could not speak or she 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] Fierceton and her mentor reconstructed the conversation and transcribed it; the university has claimed it is inaccurate but the mentor stands by it.[3]

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 wrote to SP2 dean Sara Bachman complaining about the interview, saying she felt "worthlessness, hopelessness, and shame" 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." 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."[2]

In December, an anonymous 22-page letter was sent to the U.S. office of the Rhodes Trust, which administers the scholarship program. 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. Fierceton believes it was likely sent by Morrison or one of her close relatives. "[I]t was probably from someone in my biological family," she told The Intercept, "because it had photos of me; it had very specific information that very few people would have—and I don't think many people would have random childhood photos of me."[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. "We have concluded that there is a basis for serious concern and that further investigation by the Rhodes Committee may be appropriate", she wrote. Attached were copies of the Missouri court orders expunging Morrison's arrest and removing her name from the DSS registry.[2]

The trust notified Fierceton at the beginning of 2021 that it was conducting an investigation into the allegations. "I really don't have words,'" she told a mentor at the Penn Women's Center. "It is seven years later, and I am still having to prove and prove and prove what has happened to me." She 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, 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 she was treated for in her September 2014 hospital stay 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 Penn might share its information with the government and 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]

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. At Norton's request, a fellow political science colleague, 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 and born of her fear of her biological family when she wrote it.[2][lower-alpha 11]

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 has 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.[14]

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, where SP2 is based and holds most of its classes, and how difficult it had been to get her out. 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. As in her case, first responders had experienced similar delays in finding and reaching the building, and difficulties removing Driver once they did due to the same accessibility issues. 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. As in Fierceton's case, 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][15]

After learning this, Fierceton and a fellow SP2 student began doing research. They took photographs of Caster's staircases and elevators, and interviewed witnesses and some of the Penn 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; in fact she had been given the impression he had been evacuated from the building 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]

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, constituting tortious interference with a business relationship and intentional and negligent infliction of emotional distress. Penn, she claimed, had leaked that 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.[16]

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]

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."[25]

"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.[26] 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."[27]