At an alumni event in the Bay Area in late January 2020, shortly before the pandemic sent America into lockdown, Mr. Jewett stole the show with his humor and enthusiasm, as the alumni magazine put it, and improbably won the crowd over with a joke about trigonal planar molecules.. Logan hadnt known that her husband and emergency responders had allegedly waited for almost an hour together before he was taken away in an ambulancetwelve minutes later, he was declared dead. She was ashamed to tell people that shed been in foster care; she felt so alone that she thought about dropping out. Mackenzies friend Kate Minorini told me, Mackenzies mom was using the Whitfield buzz bookthe school directoryto plead her case, so the rumor mill would have happened regardless, but a lot of the hearsay seemed to be based off the defense arguments of our classmates dad. There were rumors that Mackenzies bruises were self-inflicted, that she had thrown herself down the stairs to get attention. Promotion and public events also did not come easily to Ms. Scott. MacKenzie continued writing and developed an early but lasting propensity for deep research. The week before, she had started work at an investment firm, with her future husband, Mr. Bezos. 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. Mackenzie is living proof of the parent coaching style in the book. She was infinitely more talented than anyone else in my class, and that was evident then, said Jeff Sloan, who taught her in sixth grade. What HBOs Chernobyl got right, and what it got terribly wrong. 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. Even her new last name, Scott, is one of her own choosing. Thats what I tasted, yeah, Mackenzie responded. had considered placing her with one of Morrisons sisters, but the Whitfield principal had called the D.S.S. Her first big statement as a newly single woman came less than five months later on the website of the Giving Pledge, started by Bill Gates, Melinda French Gates and Warren Buffett as a place where billionaires promised to give away at least half their wealth. I remember there was some blood with my lip, yeah, Mackenzie said. Sign up for our daily newsletter to receive the best stories from The New Yorker. She gave big. She Mackenzies parents had separated when she was six, and Mackenzie lived with her mother, Carrie Morrison, the director of breast imaging and mammography at St. Lukes Hospital, in Chesterfield, a wealthy suburb of St. Louis. I went off to college knowing I was going to have to work a variety of jobs to put myself through school, Ms. Scott has said, worrying about how she was going to juggle waiting tables with a full course load. notifying her that the university had requested an investigation because of concerns that you misrepresented and/or embellished your background. She was supposed to receive her social-work degree the following month, but the letter said that her records would automatically be placed on hold until this matter is resolved., Norton asked Rogers Smith, a colleague in the political-science department, if he would serve as Mackenzies adviser for the disciplinary proceedings. A month after the trial, the judge concluded, While it is possible that Petitioner was the cause of the alleged injuries, the court cannot make that finding by a preponderance of the evidence based on the evidence presented. The judge ordered that Morrisons name be struck from the state registry. Mackenzie Fierceton (@MFierceton) March 28, 2022 His mother was also a refined radiologist. Brandt wrote, The only thing she can think is Mackenzie did this to herself. When Brandt asked why Mackenzie would accuse her of such a thing, Morrison replied, I guess she has more problems than I thought. Brandt placed Morrison under arrest. In a letter to herself, an exercise assigned to all the scholars, Mackenzie wrote, I know that my first 18 years on this planet will always be a part of who I am, but how do I move on and start this new chapter of my life without pretending like it never happened?, Elizabeth Cannon, the senior associate director of Civic House, where the program is based, sensed that Mackenzie was more vulnerable than she acknowledged. At one point, as she approaches the bodyguards car, Jessica thinks, She will not try to influence this womans opinion. She said it felt like an attack on a student. Licht was disturbed that the conversation appeared to have been provoked by a mother possibly seeking vengeance. (The university has said that Winkelsteins questions were appropriate and that her manner was not aggressive. Mackenzie said that Penn First was one of the first spaces on campus where I felt, These are my people. An essay by Toni Morrison: The Work You Do, the Person You Are.. She showed up at the foster home, where three other children livedone was a foster child and two were the foster parents biological childrencarrying clothes in a plastic bag. Mackenzie was in an intensive-care unit for three days and was given a diagnosis of epilepsy. So, so wrong. Some of her high-school teachers had reassured her that she was part of their familytheir bonus child. But they stopped calling. I really dont have words, Mackenzie wrote in an e-mail to a mentor at the Penn Womens Center. (A hotline caseworker had notified the police.) The couple traveled to Florida in May 2018 for a glitzy celebration of Ms. Scotts parents 55th wedding anniversary. Through her high school graduation in 2017, Lisa Smith, her friends mother, recalled that, whenever Mackenzie stayed at her house, she would meticulously clean stuff. Im telling my story because I think its a microcosm of how institutions of power can manipulate truth, she told me. She had become important with no black-tie fund-raisers and no velvet dresses. 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. With the sought-after prize of Ms. Morrison as her thesis adviser, Ms. Scott had written a 168-page work of fiction called The Fathering Water, in which the father, Luther Augery, keeps hidden that he has quit his job and settled for a low-paying one. As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. It felt like such a calculated move to exert power over me, she said. Another hallmark of Ms. Scotts personality on display in her writing life was her dedication to intense research. 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. It quickly became clear, he said, that this was a very unusual process, and my knowledge of standard disciplinary processes was of limited relevance. O.S.C. Mackenzie is making this all up. His wife, Dorothy, volunteered with the March of Dimes and with an organization for breast-cancer survivors. Some of those approaches were from staff at the influential nonprofit consultancy Bridgespan, others from representatives at Lost Horse. Its just difficult to describe what its like to go through the world feeling like you dont have some sort of anchor., Mackenzie moved around Nortons house lightly and with deference. and had one more year until she completed her M.S.W., to move in. I still just dont understand why she wont protect me, Mackenzie wrote. The Trust determined that, in Mackenzies medical records, there is no reference to dried blood, distorted facial features, or cessation of breathing. The report also pointed to inconsistent descriptions of the length of time Mackenzie had spent in foster care. When Mackenzie had come home that night, she said, her mother told her, I know you have been talking, and pushed her down their staircase and struck her several times in the face. Mackenzie appealed the decision, arguing that the first-generation question had not felt straightforward. (She also spent long stretches sleeping at friends houses.) Kitty Bennett contributed research. That summer, Mackenzie decided to apply for a Rhodes Scholarship, to get a Ph.D. at the University of Oxford. ), Mackenzie said her reaction to the question about family was Fuck thatI dont have one of those. Without providing context, she marked that she was the first in her family to go to college. We had never talked about her being mentally ill. Webb had hoped that the elementary school would rally around Mackenzie. A consulting physician said that Mackenzie most likely fell down the steps at home and hit her head. He observed, She appears scared., In the months since her head injury, Mackenzie had regained memories from the weekend before her fall, and she recalled that she and her mom had been fighting about Lovelace. 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. She said that she was usually glad not to have to line edit for a living anymore. Ms. Scott was attending the Hotchkiss boarding school in Connecticut, while her older brother was at Georgetown University. Annie Korzen and As many other working students have found before her (and, with soaring tuition costs, even more since) it wasnt easy. I dont ever want to cause her any pain or anything, which is why Ill probably end up burning this, Mackenzie wrote in the journal. 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. (Her doctors said that her head injuries in high school may have put her at greater risk for the disorder.) She really wanted constructive criticism.. Mr. Jewett was the kind of teacher students appreciated, jovial in manner and serious about his subject. Or the propaganda campaign that they can put behind her story?. 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. 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. Mr. Jewett had been scheduled to teach this academic year, according to a former colleague, but at the end of the 2021 school year, just a few months after the marriage was announced, he left Lakeside. In college, a loan from a friend helped keep her from dropping out. But Mackenzies friends and teachers noticed that in her mothers presence Mackenzie physically recoiled. 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. She gave fast. She finished a draft of her first novel as her due date for their first child approached. MacKenzie Bezos has authored two novels, so far. When he called again in December the phone number was out of service, and a subsequent letter came back marked Moved Left No Address, according to commission documents. 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. Husband of Private. Their gift was incredibly consequential, said Zach Silk, campaign manager of Washington United for Marriage, completely changing the scale of what had been a pretty scrappy but somewhat underfunded effort. On paper, Lost Horses headquarters are a law firm office in a downtown Seattle skyscraper and a tax firm in Los Angeles that handles family offices for high-net-worth individuals. They told the schools how Mackenzie - whose previous name was Mackenzie Morrison - went to the $30,000-a-year Whitfield private school in St. Louis, Missouri. Smith was hoping that the panellists would consider how Penns F.G.L.I. Mr. Bezos later said he would find her writing in hotel bathrooms when he woke up on vacation. 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. If this was a difficult period for Ms. Scott, it was also an intellectually rewarding one. 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. 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. Rachel Webb, one of Mackenzies teachers from elementary school, said that Morrison left a message on her voice mail. I had bruising around my face, Mackenzie replied. 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. Mackenzie had been invited to a pre-orientation program for first-generation and/or low-income (F.G.L.I.) Down-to-earth! They are the people that support you, look out for you, & love you unconditionally. She went on, By those standards, the standards of real family, not one person Im related to by blood meets those requirements or even comes close., Still, she was sometimes hopeful that the kind face her mother presented could actually be real. And ultimately you say it was your mother. The Giving Pledge is a public promise and little more. It was the local dentist who offered me free dental work when he saw me securing a broken tooth with denture glue in college, she said. After she was released, her classmates told her how long they believed she had waited for medical care. It says that your hair is caked with dried blood. That didnt happen, did it?. He had died. Personal wealth is the product of collective effort, she wrote, and of social structures which present opportunities to some people, and obstacles to countless others.. That same year, her mother made headlines in the local papers fighting to save neighborhood trees threatened by Dutch elm disease. They rented a house in nearby Bellevue, Wash., where Amazon was founded in the garage in 1994. She was five feet ten with long curly blond hairthe picture of Americana, as one friend described her. Well, you could tell them apart, right?. Shed tried to cover it up with concealer, but her teachers noticed, and Fendell pulled Mackenzie out of her Spanish class. In an interview, she described how she, too, had been a first-generation, low-income student.. Using her phone to light the pages, she listed the pros of telling: no more physical/emotional attacks, I get out of this dangerous house, the truth is finally out, I dont have to lie or cover things up. Under cons of telling, she wrote, damaging moms life, could go into foster care, basically I would probably lose everything. After she finished, she loosened the screws of a vent panel on the wall outside her closet and slipped the notebook behind it. A detective named Carrie Brandt had been planning to follow up with Mackenzie at school that day, but instead she came to the hospital. I wasnt quite ready to write a book. Karen Weise contributed reporting. After three weeks at the hospital, Mackenzie was discharged into a foster home. She was abused, but there is not enough blood. Penn had once celebrated her story, but, when it proved more complex than institutional categories for disadvantage could capture, it seemed to quickly disown her. Mackenzie took another sip of water. Mackenzie Fierceton's mother is a radiologist, and she was raised in an upper-middle-class household. Her grandfather had graduated from college. She mentioned in her application that she was hospitalized after her mother pushed her through the staircase. There are 30+ professionals named "Mackenzie Morrison", who use LinkedIn to exchange information, ideas, and opportunities. After the caseworkers visit, Mackenzie was on high alert, trying not to set anyone or anything off, she wrote in her diary. Lisa Smith, the mother of one of Mackenzies best friends at Whitfield, said that her daughter once asked why Mackenzie was always injured: My daughter kind of looked at me funny, and I looked back at her and said, What are you trying to say?, When Fendell asked Mackenzie about her bruises, Mackenzie offered vague comments about being clumsy. One of young MacKenzies own first public appearances was with her fourth-grade class in December 1979 at a Ross Town Council meeting, where she presented a class project to raise money to plant a new tree. Fendell did not accept the explanation, and she later told Mackenzie that she was legally obligated to notify Missouris Department of Social Services. But, she wrote, if I truly cant do this, where am I supposed to return to?, Holiday breaks were a source of panic. 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. and Y.M.C.A. 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. 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. This writer that I admired so much also turned out to be such a gifted and devoted teacher, Ms. Scott said. And why would an Ivy League school say, O.K., youve been abusedwere going to let you in. Thats not even a thing.. This is my #MeToo This is my story. Scott was her grandfather. She lies better than I can tell the truth.. Three decades after worrying about making rent, she is now giving away billions all while trying to keep herself out of the spotlight. She broke me. She concluded, I was never broken. 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 The Times columnist Nicholas Kristof tweeted the Inquirer article, saying it was thrilling that a Rhodes Scholarship had gone to a first-gen low-income foster youth, and Mackenzie retweeted what he wrote. When Smith realized this, he wrote the O.S.C., I am profoundly ashamed of us all. (The university says the O.S.C. The youth should select into the option that provides them access to the most fundingwhich would be to indicate that they are a first-generation college student., Anthony Jack, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education who studies low-income and first-generation college students, told me that he would not consider a student like Mackenzie first-generation. 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. 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