Fiercetons mother denied the account and said the teen had accidentally gone down two or three steps while Morrison was helping remove gum from her hair. Norton and her partner, Deborah Harrold, live in a large house in northwest Philadelphia. She finished a draft of her first novel as her due date for their first child approached. Critics complained that she had retreated into less transparency rather than share more information, as nonprofit governance experts had called for. Mr. Sloan was a rigorous writing instructor who asked for weekly compositions from his pupils. Princeton classmates recalled her as passionate about books and deeply engaged in her studies. Some people said that she had been inspired by the movie Gone Girl, about a woman who stages her own murder. Mackenzies parents had separated when she was six, and Mackenzie lived with her mother, Carrie Morrison, the director of breast imaging and mammography at She broke me. She concluded, I was never broken. Mackenzie is making this all up. 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. An essay by Toni Morrison: The Work You Do, the Person You Are.. 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 ), Mackenzie did not know that anyone at Penn was communicating with her biological family. They rented a house in nearby Bellevue, Wash., where Amazon was founded in the garage in 1994. She has built a philanthropic operation that is notable not just for the monumental size and speed of its gifts but also for its seemingly impenetrable secrecy. A friend from Hotchkiss, Margot Bass, described her as original in everything from how she dressed eschewing the Laura Ashley prints many women wore on campus to how she saw the world. (Her doctors said that her head injuries in high school may have put her at greater risk for the disorder.) A privileged child, she left a Connecticut boarding school after her family declared bankruptcy. 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. Mackenzie Fierceton was championed as a former foster youth who had overcome an abusive childhood and won a prestigious Rhodes Scholarship. 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. I dont remember, but I was told I drove, Mackenzie said. Subscribe today ], Her mother was a respected figure in the St. Louis medical community, and, when Mackenzie was injured, she saw doctors affiliated with her hospital. 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. Three decades after worrying about making rent, she is now giving away billions all while trying to keep herself out of the spotlight. 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. 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. When youve grown up with privilegeand everything around you is pretty and pristine and predictableyour tolerance for anything outside that world isnt very high, Martinez said. In a psychological evaluation administered by the D.S.S., she was asked to share anything about her life that she wanted others to understand. There are 30+ professionals named "Mackenzie Morrison", who use LinkedIn to exchange information, ideas, and opportunities. Then she grabbed Brandts hand and asked her to keep Morrison out of the hospital room. (Her fine was withdrawn, because the universitys charter says that financial restitution cannot be imposed in cases involving academic integrity.) 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. But then, then theres a writer out there named MacKenzie and the profound pleasure of editing comes rushing back.. CreditIllustration by Israel G. Vargas; Photo: Taylor Hill/FilmMagic. 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. Her complaint described another Penn studentMackenziewhose medical crisis in the Caster Building had exposed nearly identical problems. 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. Mackenzie Fierceton's mother is a radiologist, and she was raised in an upper-middle-class household. Following that, her scholarship was forfeited and she lost her place in school. He was not able to provide a direct answer, she later wrote. At one point they paid for 50 friends to take part in a scavenger hunt at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for Mr. Bezos birthday. As you revise, I am at your service if, and only if, you want me to be, Ms. Morrison had written in a three-page typed letter of suggestions for her manuscript, a copy of which is in her archive at Princeton. The firm was covering his personal and business expenses, as well as four mortgages on three properties. Her preferences are shaping the face of American civil society because of the size of the funding shes providing, said Rob Reich, co-director of the Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society at Stanford University. The following year they gave $2.5 million in support of a same-sex marriage referendum. 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 just bursts out laughing, Mackenzie wrote. 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. 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. She had bruises all over her body in different stages of healingan obvious sign of child abuse.. Not only did she support his dream, she worked alongside him to build the company. She was listed alongside the graduating seniors in the class of 1987 yearbook, and where their colleges were named it said merely that she was bound for England. 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.. In 2014, A 17-year-old Mackenzie told police that her mother pushed her down stairs and struck her at their four bedroom, $750,000 suburban home. Some were groups that her mother might have gone to a luncheon for in Palm Beach, or her grandmother in El Paso. Normal! The second arrangement fell through, too, and she was moved into a third foster home, with a young couple. Mackenzie had been an organizer on campus for a variety of causesshe advocated for the university to defund campus police and to reimburse public schools for unpaid property taxesbut in the months before she applied for the Rhodes she had been involved in a more straightforward matter: improving building safety. Oh Luther, Liz answers. He is the son of the late boxer, Tommy Morrison. She worked on a toy drive for the children of farmworkers and on fund-raisers for breast cancer. Very pleasant and serious, the instructor, Carole Glickfeld, recalled in an interview. She was struck by the way other students relied on their parents, consulting them even about small choices, such as how to phrase an e-mail to a professor. Norton has tried to create new domestic routinesdoing puzzles; watching rock-climbing movies, a shared interestso that, she said, its not about her fitting into our life. Morrison denied that she had ever hit her daughter, whom she described as emotional and intense. Ms. Scott with Jeff Bezos, her husband from 1993 to 2019. But something unusual happened. In 1991, in the celebratory mood after the Persian Gulf war, she was an organizer of the Palm Beach Fourth of July parade. One of Mackenzies tenth-grade teachers shared that Mackenzie was afraid to talk about her home life, so the teacher had begun asking her if the weekend had been cloudy or stormy. Fendell, the wellness director, said that she had seen text messages in which Morrison had lashed out at Mackenzie, calling her a fucking piece of shit or telling her, Get your fat ass home. Brandt also spoke with Mackenzies pediatrician, who felt guilty that, at Mackenzies annual physical a month earlier, she hadnt X-rayed a large bruise on Mackenzies arm. She put herself out there but not at the public events that, by her own admission, made her uncomfortable, yet using the skill shed been honing since she was eating Oreos and reading botany books: her writing. MacKenzie Bezos and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos announced that they had finalized the terms of their divorce on Twitter on April 4. There were only seventy-one students in Mackenzies grade, and soon everyone seemed to have an opinion about her life. 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. In August, 2020, Logan filed a lawsuit, asserting that her husbands death was owing to system-wide logistical and structural failures created by the negligence and recklessness of the university. 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. When she got home, a caseworker was at her house, chatting with her mother. Fierceton, who was born Mackenzie Morrison, grew up with her mother in St. Louis, Missouri where she attended a $30,000-a-year private school A new report 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. She petitioned a circuit court in St. Louis to remove her from the registry, arguing that the boards finding was based on insufficient evidence and would compromise her employment. O ne Monday morning in the fall of 2020, Mackenzie Fierceton received an email asking her to meet with Beth Winkelstein, deputy provost of the University of When White learned that Mackenzie had been telling professors that she felt the university was threatening her, she added a new requirement. Mom heard her tumble, thought maybe tripped going up the stairs, the medical records said. Ruderman acknowledged that Mackenzie didnt use those exact words, but she said that Mackenzie did describe herself as an F.G.L.I. 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. Norton, with whom Mackenzie had been living for nearly a year, told me, I cannot avoid the sense that Mackenzie is being faulted for not having suffered enough. 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.. And ultimately you say it was your mother. She gave fast. She was invited for an interview at a hedge fund, D. E. Shaw. Parents and teachers from Whitfield gave her new clothes and school supplies. As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. It was, like, Oh, yay, Penn has a Black Rhodes Scholar with dead parents who grew up working class. (Penn says that Moore was never made to do an interview or told what to say.) She is brilliant and can charm anyone, Mackenzie wrote. Its hard to breathe because my ribs are so severely bruised, and I cant laugh, smile, or chew without it hurting, Mackenzie wrote in a journal she kept at the hospital. She is poor, but she has not been poor for long enough. 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. He lies about his work and showers his wife with expensive home appliances to compensate. The father of one of Mackenzies high-school peers reached out to a Penn official, to explain that the news coverage about Mackenzie was inaccurate. They liked to imagine themselves as the Gilmore Girls: the single mother and her precocious daughter, so close they were nearly fused. When Mackenzie returned to school, she learned that her mother had hired William Margulis, who had sent four children to Whitfield and later served on the schools board of trustees, as her defense attorney. With Moores permission, her story was put on fund-raising material sent to alumni, and Gutmann summarized Moores life story in a commencement address. notified Mackenzies lawyer of the decision, writing, I am very saddened by the result in this case as I have always believed Mackenzie 100% on everything and I always will., Morrison declined to speak with me on the record, except to write, Our greatest desire is that Mackenzie chooses to live a happy, healthy, honest and productive life, using her extraordinary gifts for the highest good. Speaking for her side of the family, she added, We will always be here for her., After the trial, Mackenzie decided to change her last name. 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. After finishing her second term at Oxford, she had returned to Nortons house for a few weeks. Those concerns were temporarily overshadowed when, less than five months later, on Dec. 15, 2020, Ms. Scott announced another, even bigger round of giving, $4.2 billion to 384 organizations, including hundreds of Easterseals, United Way, Y.W.C.A. According to a one-page form signed by a judge, there was no probable cause to believe that the petitioner committed the offense. The arrest had been based on false information., Once the charges were dropped, Mackenzies Spanish teacher, Catalina Martinez, sensed that community sentiment toward Mackenzie had shifted. Morrison petitioned the St. Louis County Circuit Court to expunge her arrest record. In talking about her childhood, Mackenzie was fragile, sometimes narrowly avoiding tears, but when she reflected on how her life intersected with her political ideals she became focussed and self-possessed. That clamor may have driven Ms. Scotts already discreet operation further underground, with recent philanthropic announcements akin to sudden lightning bolts for unsuspecting recipients. It felt like an equation of where I would feel the least uncomfortable and the least excluded, she said. They were talking about work and school and whatever else and having a great time just like they were old friends, Mackenzie wrote. She had become estranged from her father, a former soap-opera actor, against whom her mother had filed an order of protection, alleging that he posed a physical threat to Mackenzie; a guardian ad litem had been appointed to protect Mackenzies interests during the custody proceedings, which were prolonged and bitter. Ms. Scott landed in the office next to him. Nonprofits soon began receiving calls and emails about enormous grants from an anonymous donor, often the biggest donation in the groups history or the equivalent of a full years budget. Mr. Jewett was the kind of teacher students appreciated, jovial in manner and serious about his subject. . 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. Eventually, the theory became impossible to avoid. She was MacKenzie Scott, the novelist upending philanthropy. The story was quickly picked up by other news outlets. And in her, Korzen sees a sense of belonging that shes never felt. This article is also based on previously unpublished letters between Ms. Scott and Ms. Morrison, kept in the Nobel laureates archive at the Princeton University library. 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