Her gifts were the talk of charitable circles. In the winter of her sophomore year of high school, Mackenzie Morrison sat in her bedroom closet and began a new diary. White, upper middle class, and in a position of power, Mackenzies mother was demographically dissimilar to most parents who come to the agencys attention. For her personal statement, Mackenzie responded to the prompt Describe an experience which caused you to change your perspective with an essay about finding herself in the pediatric intensive-care unit and looking at her bruised face in the mirror. There just might be a small part left that loves me in some way, at least I hope., In September, 2014, early in her junior year, Mackenzie drove to school and looked for her history teacher, who had become one of the few people in whom she felt comfortable confiding. According to her classmates, she was unconscious and intermittently seizing for roughly an hour, because it took emergency medical personnel that long to extract her from the building, as they struggled to fit a stretcher into the elevator or the stairway. She https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/10/business/mackenzie-scott-charity.html, Illustration by Israel G. Vargas; Photo: Taylor Hill/FilmMagic. There is currency to a story about a person who comes from nothing and thrives in a prestigious setting. In the winter of 2020, shed had a seizure in the basement of the Caster Building, where classes in the school of social work were held. The car was a Chevy Blazer, a gift from Mr. Bezos father. After noticing that the childrens book Watership Down was full of specific plant names, she hopped on my Schwinn and rode to the library to hunt down a botanical encyclopedia, and for the next year, all my stories were stuffed with extraneous mentions of trees and flowers, as she wrote in the afterword. Her complaint described another Penn studentMackenziewhose medical crisis in the Caster Building had exposed nearly identical problems. Liz, the wife of the protagonist, Luther, pins a clipping of a San Francisco Chronicle article about Bay Area philanthropy to the refrigerator, with a picture of her sister and two daughters on the porch of their hilltop Victorian. A stockbroker tried to phone Mr. Tuttles company in November 1987 and was told that the family was in Europe for the month, according to the S.E.C. I am grieving the idea of herthe idea I had once created for her., Mackenzie told me that, in the past year, shes experienced a state of self-doubt that she hadnt known since high school: There have been moments of almost panic where I am just cognitively questioning myself, like, Did I misremember something? Its easy to slide back into that state, because I want anything other than the realitythat it is my bio family who has caused so much harmso I will do backflips to try to make it not true. In her high-school journal, she had described this cycle of doubt. After Mackenzie had been in the hospital for a week, Brandt met Morrison at the police station and asked again about the circumstances of Mackenzies fall. Mackenzie went to Whitfield, a private prep school in St. Louis, where the schools wellness director, Ginny Fendell, called her the queen of compartmentalization. She got As, served in student government, played varsity soccer, managed the field-hockey team, and volunteered for the Special Olympics. I know that good part is still there somewhere, she wrote. Last fall, Mackenzie began the sociology Ph.D. program at Oxford, which had admitted her before she withdrew from the Rhodes; shed lost her funding, but a professor at Penn offered to pay for her first year. After filling a notebook with lists of surnames that she thought sounded bold (Fairstone, Stronghill, Silverfield), she submitted a petition with the Court of Common Pleas of Philadelphia County, changing her name to Mackenzie Fierceton. Dr. Morrison was arrested at the time but the case was dropped by prosecutors who said they could never prove Mackenzies claims. Mackenzie Fierceton didnt The New Yorker may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. Mackenzie was in an intensive-care unit for three days and was given a diagnosis of epilepsy. Mackenzie agreed to withdraw from the scholarship. Dr. Morrison was arrested at the time but the case was dropped by prosecutors who said they could never prove Mackenzies claims. Shes pretty much invincible. Mackenzie felt certain that, if she shared details about her mom or Lovelace, her mother would convince people that she was lying, or crazy. By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement. She explained she was helping her daughter remove gum from hair when and not another? With Moores permission, her story was put on fund-raising material sent to alumni, and Gutmann summarized Moores life story in a commencement address. Morrison told officers that her daughter asked her to extract some gum from her hair as she stood at the top of a staircase, and as she tried to, Fierceton jerked, fell down two steps, and then sat down. (Her doctors said that her head injuries in high school may have put her at greater risk for the disorder.) Ms. Scott did not have a foundation that would have to file detailed tax returns. It says that your hair is caked with dried blood. That didnt happen, did it?. . Did I do something wrong to make her not want to?, In her journal, Mackenzie described her mother as having two faces, one manipulative and aggressive, the other nurturing and kind. In 1991, in the celebratory mood after the Persian Gulf war, she was an organizer of the Palm Beach Fourth of July parade. Shortly before the pandemic hit, the chemistry teacher Dan Jewett took on a delicate, sometimes unpopular task. Walter Licht, the faculty director of the program, described Mackenzie as the sort of student who asks a question that makes everyone stop and brings the quality of conversation to a different pitch. The Civic Scholars were encouraged to analyze how their identities intersected with systems of oppression and privilege. If the U.S. Attorneys Office is getting their information from general counsel at the University of Pennsylvania, he told me, they might act differently based on where they are getting that tip, and there is no quick way out of a federal criminal prosecution.. If this was a difficult period for Ms. Scott, it was also an intellectually rewarding one. The following year they gave $2.5 million in support of a same-sex marriage referendum. Sherry McLain, a nurse assigned to her, told me, She had two black eyes, and her hair was full of blood. There were only four witnesses: a psychologist, a D.S.S. Brandt stood beside Mackenzies bed and asked who had hurt her. We wanted to push the university to understand: if youre going to accept more and more high-need students, you have to be prepared to sustain them throughout their time here, she said. I had that feeling of stage fright before a firing squad for my first reading.. Mackenzie was crying, and Winkelstein asked again, What happened?, Sobbing, Mackenzie responded, My mom tried to kill me., Winkelstein paused, so that Mackenzie could catch her breath, and then asked, Do you think these documentations were an accurate representation of your experiences?, After the meeting, Walter Licht, the faculty director of the Civic Scholars program, said that the staff memberwho didnt want to use her name, because her job at Penn is not securecalled him distraught. Critics complained that she had retreated into less transparency rather than share more information, as nonprofit governance experts had called for. Yet the more she avoided the spotlight, the more it seemed to find her. Norton said, Mackenzie always tried to say, Im fine, Im fineafter she and her roommates gave up their apartment off campus, she lived with a roommates family in Ohio and then stayed at a classmates home in Philadelphiabut eventually it became clear she was just couch-surfing at friends houses, and you cant couch-surf in a pandemic. In late May, Norton invited Mackenzie, who had just graduated with a B.A. The Giving Pledge is a public promise and little more. In a 2003 ruling regarding race-conscious admissions at the University of Michigan Law School, the Supreme Court narrowly upheld affirmative action but wrote that the practice should not continue indefinitely. Mr. Bezos later said he would find her writing in hotel bathrooms when he woke up on vacation. WebHer father is Mike Morrison. She wrote to the dean of the social-work school with a list of concerns, including the appearance of retaliation against Mackenzie for giving a deposition in wrongful death lawsuit against the University. (The university has denied that its dealings with Mackenzie had anything to do with the lawsuit. Promotion and public events also did not come easily to Ms. Scott. investigators were reviewing e-mails between Mackenzie and Penn faculty, presumably to see if she had portrayed her life accurately; they also interviewed Morrison and the St. Louis prosecutor who dropped her criminal casewithout telling Mackenzie. One student died, and another could have died, because of issues of access in this basement. Mackenzie wrote letters to the social-work school and to Gutmann, the universitys president, expressing her concerns. The district leaders and the community came together on Thursday to watch Mackenzie Morrison receive her diploma after her family car was hit on the way to People didnt want to deal with it anymore. the one who is my mother. During their investigation of Fierceton, Penn's general counsel spoke to "Michael Hayes, the prosecutor in St. Louis who had charged Dr. Morrison with child (In a separate interview, Lovelace, who had been the subject of complaints to the police by Morrison and two other women with whom hed been romantically involved, denied ever touching Mackenzie.). She described in detail how she had been at the top of her carpeted staircase trying to tease gum out of Mackenzies hair with a comb: She immediately screamed, ow, jerked her head back, and, after stepping back two or three stairs, stomped off to her room and slammed the door. Smith was hoping that the panellists would consider how Penns F.G.L.I. Another hallmark of Ms. Scotts personality on display in her writing life was her dedication to intense research. For comparison, the Gates Foundation said it paid out $5.8 billion in grants in 2020, the most recent year for which complete data is available. We are not all inner-city children who live in filthy ghettos and attend crumbling, rat-infested public schools as the wider media may portray us to be., Moore, who had been chosen to become a Rhodes Scholar two years earlier, had been surprised to see how her personal story was packaged for the media. She called me and was like, Oh my god, my kids being bullied, and as a parent Ive found theres not a lot of resources, said Dr. Espelage, now a professor at the University of North Carolina. studentan abbreviation that may invite confusion, because it can refer to people who are either low-income or first-generation, not necessarily both. Morrison denied that she had ever hit her daughter, whom she described as emotional and intense. In November, 2020, the Rhodes Trust named Mackenzie one of thirty-two scholar-elects from the United States. It is a deliberate indifference to evidence. Smith and Hillier signed the grievance, too. But one young Black lady with dead parents using a multibillion-dollar Ivy League institution feels entirely different than the institution using her., Mackenzie understood that her abuse allegations would be investigated all over again, and she found two lawyers who agreed to help her pro bono. Her mom knocked on the door and told her, Im takingyour keys and Im calling you in sick to school. When Mackenzie heard her mother leave the house, she got a spare key and drove to school, though she had no memory of doing so. Mackenzies parents had separated when she was six, and Mackenzie lived with her mother, Carrie Morrison, the director of breast imaging and mammography at This is not simply a matter of believing survivors or showing a decent deference to a persons understanding of their life experience, she wrote. barred her father from associating with any investment adviser for fraudulent, deceptive actions, shutting the door on an easy comeback for the familys fortunes. Norton said, I told Mackenzie, You dont have to spend any time with us if you dont want to, but you need to be safe.. In an evaluation for QuestBridge, Mackenzies history teacher wrote that Mackenzie, after escaping her wealthy but abusive parent, was on her own in every way., Mackenzie explained in a biographical essay that her private school was among the most lite in St. Louis. You should know that I dont feel I got there, she wrote to Ms. Morrison in 2000. She finished a draft of her first novel as her due date for their first child approached. But then, then theres a writer out there named MacKenzie and the profound pleasure of editing comes rushing back.. Photograph by Robbie Lawrence for The New Yorker, Heres an apocryphal story that I figure prominently in., Can I help you find anything or prevent you from folding that shirt in such a way that I will immediately have to refold it?, I just hope the world doesnt end before people can see our outfits., Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us. She showed up at my classroom door with a bloodied and battered face and then fainted, the teacher wrote. The D.S.S. Ms. Scotts parents, Jason Baker Tuttle and Holiday Tuttle. She interviewed Drivers classmates about what had happened to him, and she and another student, Kate Schneider, took photographs of the buildings entryways. She lies better than I can tell the truth.. She wondered if the kind face was a type of ego defense mechanism that her mother would use in an attempt to undo the wrong she has most recently done. Sometimes, in the journal, Mackenzie used the word family in quotes. In California, Ms. Tuttle had worked on fund-raisers for a museum and a private school as well as volunteering to save the trees. Carrie Morrison Mackenzies biological mother had graduated from college and was a successful doctor. We want to salute our veterans and show them the respect and gratitude that they deserve, Ms. Tuttle told the Palm Beach Daily News, four years after the bankruptcy filing. She was five feet ten with long curly blond hairthe picture of Americana, as one friend described her. In addition to having an excellent academic record, Mackenzie was a policy fellow for a Philadelphia City Council member, a volunteer birthing doula with the Philadelphia Alliance for Labor Support, and a social-work intern at the Childrens Hospital of Philadelphia. The Hotchkiss School, the Connecticut boarding school Ms. Scott attended. And Ms. Scott changed her author bio on the Amazon website to read: She lives in Seattle with her four children and her husband, Dan. Mr. Jewetts Twitter page abruptly vanished, leaving behind ghostly traces of an account where colleagues had bantered with him about science. In another letter, Mackenzies lawyers argued that she had not constructed a narrative about herself to deceive anyone, but instead had tried to build a new identity after a trauma that had made her question nearly every aspect of her life. (A hotline caseworker had notified the police.) And why would an Ivy League school say, O.K., youve been abusedwere going to let you in. Thats not even a thing.. But, she said, I think they didnt want to make our school look bad, like we had missed anything when Mackenzie was with us. But something unusual happened. Such a shame this angry teenage girl just destroyed her mothers career, another wrote. Her degree will not be granted until she submits a letter of apology, a requirement imposed by an appeals panel. In April, 2021, an investigative subcommittee for the Rhodes Trust issued a report recommending that Mackenzies scholarship be rescinded. Rachel Webb, one of Mackenzies teachers from elementary school, said that Morrison left a message on her voice mail. A few months after their divorce was finalized in 2019, a new shell company was quietly set up in Delaware called Lost Horse. He was asked to run a fund-raising campaign at Seattles prestigious Lakeside School, where he taught and which seeks donations from the moderately paid faculty and staff members to a school with assets of $325 million and multiple billionaires in its tightknit community. WebView the profiles of people named Mackenzie Morrison. In the weeks before John Wayne Gacys scheduled execution, he was far from reconciled to his fate. I had bruising around my face, Mackenzie replied. Bet the daughter is an entitled brat, one said. ), In her Rhodes application, Mackenzie proposed studying the entanglement between the child-welfare and juvenile-justice systems (the subject of her undergraduate thesis, too)a project she hoped would uplift the voices of my foster peers. But, in two paragraphs that drew connections between her personal background and scholarly interests, she took some liberties, such as describing a kid at one of her foster homes as a foster child, even though he was actually her foster parents biological child. Mackenzie grew up in St. Louis, Missouri with her mother, Carrie Morrison, left, who allegedly abused her, as her boyfriend, Henry Lovelace Jr., right, sexually abused her Mackenzie attended the $30,000-a-year Whitfield private school in St. Louis Class of 88: Ill miss being with you, she wrote. The two flew to Fort Worth, where they picked it up. 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