Last year, Ms. Scott recalled that period and the help she received to make it through. Karen Weise contributed reporting. She described the one who almost killed me. The car was a Chevy Blazer, a gift from Mr. Bezos father. 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.) Waitressing was hard, and something was not clicking yet with her goal of writing a novel. ), Three of the people who had written Mackenzie recommendations for the Rhodes composed new letters affirming that she had never misrepresented her life to them. And why would an Ivy League school say, O.K., youve been abusedwere going to let you in. Thats not even a thing.. But her mother and Wendy White apparently stayed in touchin an e-mail after Mackenzie was questioned, Morrison said that she was saddened to learn that M stuck to her story. She wrote, She has become emboldened over time, and has been successful with her evolving tale for 6 yrs. She offered that White or her staff could visit her home, in St. Louis. 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. The next morning, Morrison left the house before seeing her daughters face, she said. One of the main characters in Traps is a famous actress named Jessica, who worries about security and employs a bodyguard. 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. 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. 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 the tweet, she added in a parenthetical: (Note my Medium account is under my new last name changed back to middle name I grew up with, after my grandfather Scott. According to Mackenzie, Logan, who had been pregnant when her husband died, asked her to meet. The story was quickly picked up by other news outlets. That power deserves civic scrutiny and attention.. She gave big. She had distinct advantages over other first-time authors when the novel came out in 2005. She had meant to say that her team was building a website, the plans for which included a searchable database of gifts.. She had bruises all over her body in different stages of healingan obvious sign of child abuse.. I am not a natural for big groups because I am such an introvert, she told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. The acclaimed novelist Toni Morrison was Ms. Scotts mentor at Princeton University. Rachel Webb, one of Mackenzies teachers from elementary school, said that Morrison left a message on her voice mail. 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 and Mr. Bezos began to make their own forays into the charitable world. 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. I know that good part is still there somewhere, she wrote. That same year, her mother made headlines in the local papers fighting to save neighborhood trees threatened by Dutch elm disease. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Cond Nast. I could tell that she was embarrassed, and she didnt want to be a burden, Cannon said. She took a sip of water and began crying. Morrison denied that she had ever hit her daughter, whom she described as emotional and intense. 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. But, she said, I think they didnt want to make our school look bad, like we had missed anything when Mackenzie was with us. How an unemployed blogger confirmed that Syria had used chemical weapons. 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.. Soon, representatives from Lost Horse were calling nonprofits around the country about multimillion-dollar donations from an anonymous giver. There was also a nascent sense in the book of philanthropy as a good. The pediatrician felt awful for not pushing the issue, Brandt wrote. Last June, Ms. Scott announced another round of giving, $2.7 billion this time. A few months after their divorce was finalized in 2019, a new shell company was quietly set up in Delaware called Lost Horse. That summer, Mackenzie decided to apply for a Rhodes Scholarship, to get a Ph.D. at the University of Oxford. She felt as if her mother were both sanctioning his abuseoffering me up to him on a silver platter, as she later described itand punishing her for attracting Lovelaces attention. Yet, I was wrong. 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. The two friends painted, with Ms. Scott producing a memorable portrait of her younger brother. Schneider told me, We wanted to document everything, because we were, like, This is a pattern. 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 Forbes in January calculated that he had paid out $2.1 billion in charitable giving so far. 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. There was commonality in the fact that a lot of us had different relationships with home or family. When she got into Penn, she said, I had never heard of F.G.L.I., but these labels resonated with a story I was still trying to process., Mackenzie was one of fifteen freshmen selected for Penns Civic Scholars, a program for students committed to social justice and community service. Unlike Laurene Powell Jobss Emerson Collective or Ms. French Gatess Pivotal Ventures, Ms. Scott avoided establishing a website or advertising any contact information. My mom, Mackenzie responded. . G. Scott Cuming was an executive and general counsel at El Paso Natural Gas, a powerful energy company that faced antitrust actions over its acquisition of a pipeline company. 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. Morrison said that Lovelace had made an innocent mistake. But then, then theres a writer out there named MacKenzie and the profound pleasure of editing comes rushing back.. Oh Luther, Liz answers. The D.S.S. 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. 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. She had not seen her mother in private since the day she was hospitalizeda court had ordered family therapy, but Mackenzie was terrifiedand had no financial support from her family. After Morrisons arrest, St.Lukes announced that it no longer employed her, but within a year she had been granted privileges by another local hospital. 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. 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. People Projects Discussions Surnames Thats what I tasted, yeah, Mackenzie responded. Mackenzies parents had separated when she was six, and Mackenzie lived with her mother, Carrie Morrison, the director of breast imaging and mammography at Why one chapter of the Y.M.C.A. It did not escape notice at the Ford Foundation, for instance, that more than half the groups she had given to were among its grantees. 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. With Moores permission, her story was put on fund-raising material sent to alumni, and Gutmann summarized Moores life story in a commencement address. In 2011, Mr. Bezos and Ms. Scott donated $15 million to Princeton for a center to study the brain. After graduation, Ms. Scott went back to Hotchkiss and taught a summer creative writing program. If this was a difficult period for Ms. Scott, it was also an intellectually rewarding one. In 2004, the couple joined the board of the Bezos Family Foundation, a charitable vehicle of Mr. Bezos parents, who became extraordinarily rich in their own right from their early infusions of capital into the fledgling Amazon.com. I didnt even know what to make of it. Two days after starting the journal, in March, 2014, she wrote an entry about a head injury shed suffered three months earlier. 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. It can also be read as a summary of her philosophy. MacKenzie Bezos has authored two novels, so far. She has become arguably the most consequential philanthropist in the world right now one who is very much operating on her own terms. There are 30+ professionals named "Mackenzie Morrison", who use LinkedIn to exchange information, ideas, and opportunities. Bill Gates is among its alumni, and Jeff Bezos and MacKenzie Scott are among the parents. She sent the Rhodes Trust medical and family-court records, along with letters from twenty-six people in her life. Its a funny thing about the truth. Some were groups that her mother might have gone to a luncheon for in Palm Beach, or her grandmother in El Paso. Though the Trust said that Mackenzies abuse allegations were beyond the scope of its investigation, it repeated an argument originally advanced by Morrisons lawyer at trial: that there were discrepancies between Mackenzies medical records and an essay shed written to get into collegeevidence, it said, of a broader pattern of misrepresentation. I just remember her being fixated on worry that her mom was going to come into the hospital. At the nurses station, a small picture of Morrison was taped to the wall, so that, if she entered the building, nurses could alert security. Ms. Scott is friendly with Ms. French Gates, people in philanthropic circles in Seattle say, and the two billionaires have worked together on programs like the Equality Cant Wait Challenge, a $40 million gender-equality initiative. 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. 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. Marguliss son was in Mackenzies math class, and she worried that, if she did anything out of the ordinary in the boys presence, her behavior could be used against her. Its about trying to construct a common life together. Occasionally, Mackenzie has a painful longing for the mother she remembers as a young child, but it is not her that I am grieving, she said. An essay by Toni Morrison: The Work You Do, the Person You Are.. Did she actually have something to do with it? (Her doctors said that her head injuries in high school may have put her at greater risk for the disorder.) It just seems like, if nothing else, Mackenzie's father might have been able to corroborate her story because Cindy may very well have been abusive to him too. Winkelstein asked what happened the night before she was hospitalized. Mackenzie said that her college counsellor had told her that, as an independent student estranged from her family, this information was not required. Norton and her partner, Deborah Harrold, live in a large house in northwest Philadelphia. Within a half hour, police officers arrived at the hospital. 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. As you know, shes mentally ill. But heres the thing, Webb said. 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. 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. Her gifts were the talk of charitable circles. You should know that I dont feel I got there, she wrote to Ms. Morrison in 2000. 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. 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. 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. If we review your medical records, is it going to show broken ribs and injuries to your facial area?. Dr. Morrison was arrested at the time but the case was dropped by prosecutors who said they could never prove Mackenzies claims. It has no donation schedules, no reporting requirements and no enforcement mechanisms. Its, like, Youre not giving us the right sob story of what it means to be poor. The university is so focussed on what box she checked, and not the conditionsher lack of access to the material, emotional, and social resources of a familythat made her identify with that box. He went on, Colleges are in such a rush to celebrate their first Black, their first First Gen for achievements, but do they actually care about the student? Truthfully it wasnt going that well and I was having a lot of trouble making ends meet, she said of that period. Professional career. In the hallways she seemed introverted, but would come alive during the classroom discussions, said Jonathan Usuka, who met her during freshman orientation and also studied creative writing. Lisa Smith, the mother of Mackenzies friend, said that Morrison called and tried to be really sweet with me and get me to change my mind about what had happened, but when I said, Im not interested in hearing what you have to say, she got ugly. Once, at the airport, Smith ran into another Whitfield parent, who commented that Mackenzie wanted to go to an Ivy League school, and this was her way in. Smith said, I was, like, Youve got to be kidding me. 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. They learned that, the previous day, the history teacher had called Missouris Child Abuse and Neglect hotline, because Mackenzie had revealed details to her about being sexually abused by Lovelace. Her approach to public life and charitable giving has echoed her approach to storytelling. 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. (Her fine was withdrawn, because the universitys charter says that financial restitution cannot be imposed in cases involving academic integrity.) Two months later, in December, 2021, she filed a lawsuit against Penn, accusing it of retaliating against her and discrediting her for Penns institutional protection. By then, Gutmann had been appointed the U.S. 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. She was tirelessshe seemed to be fighting the worlds fight and really engaged in the struggle for a more just world, he said. 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