There were only four witnesses: a psychologist, a D.S.S. She has become arguably the most consequential philanthropist in the world right now one who is very much operating on her own terms. 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. Ms. Scott was attending the Hotchkiss boarding school in Connecticut, while her older brother was at Georgetown University. In keeping with the absolute secrecy surrounding Lost Horses operations, there is no nameplate in the lobby and the slim rectangular window on the Lost Horse floor is papered over. In April, 2021, an investigative subcommittee for the Rhodes Trust issued a report recommending that Mackenzies scholarship be rescinded. to express grave concerns that Mackenzie would not be protected there. I am not a natural for big groups because I am such an introvert, she told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Mr. Bezos later said he would find her writing in hotel bathrooms when he woke up on vacation. Bet the daughter is an entitled brat, one said. Mr. Tuttle worked as a financial adviser while his wife stayed home with the kids. In another letter to Ms. Morrison, she wrote that he hired her based largely on a transcript of your phone recommendation.. He was informing friends, he told them at the time, because the news was about to come out in the tabloids. In January 2019, Ms. Scott and Mr. Bezos jointly announced on his Twitter account that they were divorcing. After Lovelace bought Morrison a gun for her birthday, Mackenzie wrote, If Im being perfectly honest, Im terrified. She described an incident, a year earlier, when she had fallen asleep watching a movie in her moms bed and woke up to Lovelace on top of her, feeling my boobs, running his hand around my inner thighs & exploring other places. She got out from under him, ran into her own room, and eventually called her mother, who wasnt home, and related what had happened. When Smith realized this, he wrote the O.S.C., I am profoundly ashamed of us all. (The university says the O.S.C. Morrison has a record of 20 She described the one who almost killed me. And this next question may be tough. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Cond Nast. The D.S.S. The next morning, Morrison left the house before seeing her daughters face, she said. She imagined that starting over would be the easiest thing b/c I wasnt leaving behind a regular family like so many others, she wrote in her journal, two weeks after arriving at Penn. Her mother began working at a womens boutique on fashionable Worth Avenue a short walk away. Ms. Scotts father ran an investment advising firm called J. Baker Tuttle Corporation, which by her teenage years was paying him about $360,000, or over $900,000 in todays dollars, according to the Securities and Exchange Commission. ), Logan said that her lawyers did not want her to talk with me. It is seven years later, and I am still having to prove and prove and prove what has happened to me., Anea Moore, who helped found Penn First, wrote the Rhodes Trust a letter about Mackenzie. She sent the Rhodes Trust medical and family-court records, along with letters from twenty-six people in her life. For some nonprofits, curiosity has curdled into fear, as leaders fret that when their peers receive grants from Ms. Scott and they are passed over, it could imply that they are mismanaged or ineffective. WebDecember 13, 1928. She Im not a businessperson, but to me what I am hearing when he tells that idea is the passion and the excitement, Ms. Scott herself has said. Fierceton resided in Chesterfield, a rich suburb of St. Louis, with her mother, Carrie Morrison, the director of breast imaging and mammography at St. Luke's Hospital. She gave overwhelmingly to groups led by women, people of color, members of the L.G.B.T.Q. Her opaque methodology is the subject of regular hushed conversations in the nonprofit field. That summer, Mackenzie decided to apply for a Rhodes Scholarship, to get a Ph.D. at the University of Oxford. This is my #MeToo This is my story. Lee informed Mackenzie that the tube was plastic. Mackenzie said that her college counsellor had told her that, as an independent student estranged from her family, this information was not required. Mr. Jewett posted his own letter on Ms. Scotts Giving Pledge page. Couldnt wait to hop in the car.. Ms. Scott did not have a foundation that would have to file detailed tax returns. ), 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. Before that could happen, the couple announced their wedding in a backhanded way. Even her new last name, Scott, is one of her own choosing. . It can also be read as a summary of her philosophy. Shortly after a reporter appeared at those addresses seeking comment last month, Ms. Scott published her latest missive on Medium, announcing another $3.86 billion in gifts, and returning to her practice of noting the total dollar value of her gifts. Mr. Jewett lived in a modest house and had separated from his wife in 2018. They dated for three months before getting engaged and were married three months after that. To be fair, I was using Penn, tooit gave me economic and social capital, Moore said. He was known among fellow teachers for giving high-fives to all the faculty members on Friday afternoons. Carrie Morrison Mackenzies biological mother had graduated from college and was a successful doctor. When we allow stereotype to be our stand-in for disadvantaged groups, we are actually doing them a disservice, he said. A month later, the Rhodes Trust informed Mackenzie that it was launching an investigation into her personal history. She has given me a real example of a life of passionate devotion to more than one calling.. Well, you could tell them apart, right?. Ruderman acknowledged that Mackenzie didnt use those exact words, but she said that Mackenzie did describe herself as an F.G.L.I. Attempts to reach Ms. Scott and her husband, Dan Jewett, a chemistry teacher, for this article by phone, email and letter, directly and through intermediaries, were met with silence. Mackenzie agreed to withdraw from the scholarship. Mackenzie Fierceton didnt 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. In a supplement to the grievance, Smith wrote that Penns disciplinary procedures served to shelter the University from review of its role in encouraging the decisions for which it is now punishing her., Mackenzies social-work degree is still being withheld. Instead, she gave through the lightly regulated vehicles known as donor-advised funds, which meant she could make massive, tax-deductible donations with no transparency requirements. Mike Morrison Mikes passion centers on developing leaders at all ages, from the She had a feeding tube inserted, and was given a diagnosis of post-concussion syndrome. Molly Mudd, a nurse assigned to her case, told me, There was the physical component happening with her head injury, but there was also the emotional component of someone who has been fearful for a long time and has tried to push it down, and all of a sudden it catches up to her. It felt like an equation of where I would feel the least uncomfortable and the least excluded, she said. CreditIllustration by Israel G. Vargas; Photo: Taylor Hill/FilmMagic. WebView the profiles of professionals named "Mackenzie Morrison" on LinkedIn. They liked to imagine themselves as the Gilmore Girls: the single mother and her precocious daughter, so close they were nearly fused. What happened after that? Winkelstein asked. She showed up at my classroom door with a bloodied and battered face and then fainted, the teacher wrote. She felt relieved to be back in Philadelphia, where Norton and a handful of friends and professors constitute what she calls her chosen family. I dont want to be gone from them too long, because then, like, they might move on, she told me. and Y.M.C.A. She had straight blond shoulder-length hair, and her teeth were impeccably white. But she said that Mackenzie concluded, Im going to continue to try to move forward in my life., In a form that Mackenzie submitted to Penn, which formally nominates students for the Rhodes, she described her sense that students applying for scholarships sometimes felt confused and pressured to be someone they were not amidst their application process. In an interview with a writer working on a guidebook for F.G.L.I. Damianos said, She asked me, I wonder if this litigation will come back to bite me. Damianos and Moore both assured her that institutional endorsement for scholarships was handled by an office that was not likely to be concerned with lawsuits against the university. After you talked to the school. chapters, groups that were doing a lot of good on the front lines during the pandemic but not the kind of innovation-focused giving that the Silicon Valley set prioritizes. Im a Black woman, Im middle-aged, Im a single parent of a special-needs child, and I cant do anything that would jeopardize the lawsuit, she said. In an e-mail, she said that Mackenzie would have to write a statement saying shed agreed to withdraw from the scholarship voluntarily and without pressure., Mackenzie rejected the offer. I cannot avoid the sense that Mackenzie is being faulted for not having suffered enough, one of her professors said. In an e-mail, an attorney for the D.S.S. To revisit this article, select My Account, thenView saved stories, To revisit this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories. Im telling my story because I think its a microcosm of how institutions of power can manipulate truth, she told me. Margulis told me, I spent a lot of time meeting with the prosecutor and convincing him that the daughter had no credibility and made all of this up.. Mackenzie Fierceton's mother is a radiologist, and she was raised in an upper-middle-class household. 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 Mr. Bezos wanted to quit his job at D. E. Shaw to take a flier on selling books over the primitive dial-up version of the internet. I wanted so deeply for people to understand what it means to not have a family, and I had this fear of people being, like, What happened to youthat doesnt count.. Her husband was by then one of the most famous men in America, but he was best known at the time for destabilizing the staid publishing industry to the detriment of local bookstores. Im finding I have much time to write, all in the early morning, which probably displeases the accountant who lives below me although I recently invested in a rug to muffle my 5 am trips to the kitchen for coffee, she wrote to Ms. Morrison. 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. Truthfully it wasnt going that well and I was having a lot of trouble making ends meet, she said of that period. 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. Would I have ever considered a job in finance if I hadnt been having those difficulties? she asked. After she was released, her classmates told her how long they believed she had waited for medical care. She left the company, making appearances at holiday parties and summer picnics, and began working on her fiction full time again. It says that your facial features are so distorted and swollen that I cannot tell them apartdid you write that? she asked. In her final year, she took on extra coursework, completing a special seminar in fiction-writing arranged by the head of the English department that ensured she met the schools four-year English requirement. She just bursts out laughing, Mackenzie wrote. She lies better than I can tell the truth.. 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 While Mackenzie was in the hospital, Morrison was released on bond, and she began calling people close to Mackenzie to tell her side of the story. The Lakeside School in Seattle, where Dan Jewett, Ms. Scotts new husband, used to teach. She has been in therapy since she went into foster care, and she attributes her capacity to heal, at least to some degree, to her sense of fellowship with other children and women who have not been believed. The acclaimed novelist Toni Morrison was Ms. Scotts mentor at Princeton University. The one that I feared most. She didnt elaborate on the thought, because, she added, Im literally getting nauseous thinking about it., [Support The New Yorkers award-winning journalism. When she visited friends and former teachers, she tried to take up as little space as possible. 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. Then, like Princetonians at least as far back as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ms. Scott moved to New York City to pursue a career as a novelist. Dr. Morrison was arrested at the time but the case was dropped by prosecutors who said they could never prove Mackenzies claims. She was trying so hard to please, to get acceptance. At Penn, Mackenzie began to realize, Oh, I actually have no idea who I am., When Mackenzie had applied to Penn, the universitys automatic coding system had categorized her application as first generation, because she had not filled in personal data about her biological parents. Good luck, bad luck, its not the way that we really need to look at things, she told the television host Charlie Rose in 2013, after relating the parable to him. There is so much there to see., Ms. Bass said she knew the Tuttles were going through a difficult time, calling Ms. Scott beloved and the prospect of leaving a place where she had been thriving traumatic., One thing I regret is the Hotchkiss community did not rally to support her, Ms. Bass said. All rights reserved. In college, a loan from a friend helped keep her from dropping out. Um, eventually, yes, Mackenzie said. I personally believe the education level (or/and financial status) of the biological parents would be irrelevant, the associate director responded. She really wanted constructive criticism.. Waitressing was hard, and something was not clicking yet with her goal of writing a novel. The writing program was competitive. She said, You know meI would never hurt my beautiful girl. We read, you know, enumerable books on the difficult child, the spirited child, the willful child, she said. She had meant to say that her team was building a website, the plans for which included a searchable database of gifts.. It came as a huge surprise even to many at the school when the news emerged in March 2021 that the billionaire philanthropist and the chemistry teacher had wed a few weeks earlier. the one who is my mother. She did recall that, once she was inside, there was a kind of commotion, and eventually, like, a bunch of administrators kind of rushed into the room, and somebody said, Call 911.. It was shortly thereafter that the couple entered the rarest lore of high-tech start-ups. Mackenzie told the hospital staff that she didnt remember what had happened. There are 30+ professionals named "Mackenzie Morrison", who use LinkedIn to exchange information, ideas, and opportunities. Yet, I was wrong. A small team led by a recent Princeton graduate helped produce video testimonials by a range of public figures, including Monica Lewinsky and the actor Jared Leto. Make the most of the year, and look twice before you leave. She is brilliant and can charm anyone, Mackenzie wrote. Smith was hoping that the panellists would consider how Penns F.G.L.I. When she got home, a caseworker was at her house, chatting with her mother. 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. Her room, on the third floor, was mostly bare, though she had hung seventeen photographs, mostly of college friends. Eventually, the theory became impossible to avoid. Perhaps her access to privilege helped her understand, in a way that other disadvantaged students might not, the ways that lite institutions valorize certain kinds of identities. Nevertheless, Raffaele encouraged her not to take any risks. Mackenzes mother, Dr Carrie Morrison, a radiologist 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. After graduation, Ms. Scott went back to Hotchkiss and taught a summer creative writing program. 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. It was bad, she said. She had been hospitalized for four days at St.Lukes, where her mother worked. She worked on a toy drive for the children of farmworkers and on fund-raisers for breast cancer. The total amount of grants she was announcing came to $1.7 billion. The universitys pleading portrayed Mackenzie as a discredited person who cannily concocted a tale of abuse: as a child, she had regular temper tantrums, beyond the normal range for an adolescent. Then she had claimed to fall ill at school and presented a fictitious account of abuse by her mother. According to the pleading, her claims of abuse kept her family muzzled, leaving her in control of her narrative., Four days after the response was filed, the Chronicle published its article, giving ample weight to each side and quoting from the universitys pleading. 2023 Cond Nast. Norton wrote a letter to Gutmann, Penns president, warning that the university had been made complicit in a long campaign of continuing abuse. Norton says that Gutmann did not respond. Dorothy L. Espelage, a psychologist specializing in bullying prevention, recalled in an interview how she was sitting in a parking lot at the University of Illinois, where she worked at the time, when her phone rang. The week after the meeting, Winkelstein sent a letter to the Rhodes Trust expressing concern that Mackenzie (whose birth name and place of birth she got wrong) may have misrepresented her childhood. She was 23 and he was 29. Mackenzie was deposed in Logans lawsuit in March, 2021, a month before she gave up the Rhodes. Then, she drove them to Seattle while Mr. Bezos worked on the business plan in the passenger seat. I envy her because shes so important.. People didnt want to deal with it anymore. Now a Nobel laureate, Ms. Morrison connected her own powerful agent, Amanda Urban, with her mentee and even gave her a coveted blurb for the cover of the book. He edited what was my first and, happily, last piece of financial marketing literature, and after our wedding I started working full time on a novel, she wrote to Ms. Morrison of that period. Sign up for our daily newsletter to receive the best stories from The New Yorker. Then the University of Pennsylvania accused her of lying. And as a recent college graduate, working in recruitment at a financial firm, she married the man in the office next to hers, Jeff Bezos, and moved to Seattle to help him pursue his dream of an online retail empire one that would make each of them among the wealthiest people in the world even after their marriage dissolved. Ms. Tuttle has been actively involved in a womens group associated with St. Edwards Roman Catholic Church, where the Kennedy family was once known to attend Mass, and Mr. Tuttle has served on the board of directors for the couples condominium association in a gated community with a golf course in West Palm Beach. Its a funny thing about the truth. 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. On TLC's Unexpected , Caelan Morrison had to deal with being a teen dad while also navigating his declining relationship with the mother of his children, McKayla Adkins. Many in publishing were resentful. People who had once supported her were finding excuses to turn their backs or walk away., Mackenzie moved into a second foster home, because the first was chaotic; while she was there, the other foster child had attempted suicide. Ambassador to Germany, a position she began last month, and Winkelstein had been promoted to interim provost. At the end of the interview, she offered to connect Mackenzie with support. Both her parents had recently died, and she was going through a severe depression, but, she told me, Penn dragged me to every single news outlet that asked for an interview and sent a Penn communications person with me to make sure I said the right things. However, an anonymous father reported that she belonged to a rich family and an investigation was put upon her. The questionnaire for the Free Application for Federal Student Aid asks, 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? Mackenzie had correctly answered yes, which put her in the category of an independent student. I helped organize a storytelling event for a friends church at a board and care institute, where [I met] Mackenzie Morrison, the daughter of the church lady who That same year, her mother made headlines in the local papers fighting to save neighborhood trees threatened by Dutch elm disease.

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