Ms. Scott did not have a foundation that would have to file detailed tax returns. 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. In the winter of her sophomore year of high school, Mackenzie Morrison sat in her bedroom closet and began a new diary. As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. She said she had never been party to such an interrogation, he said. That same year, her mother made headlines in the local papers fighting to save neighborhood trees threatened by Dutch elm disease. But Mackenzies friends and teachers noticed that in her mothers presence Mackenzie physically recoiled. She was invited for an interview at a hedge fund, D. E. Shaw. During conversations with her mother in the kitchen, she made sure to keep the kitchen island in between us, while also bracing for impact. She thought about running away, but she didnt have anywhere to go. The writing program was competitive. Her foster parents had had a baby, and Mackenzie felt increasingly peripheral to their lives. She lies better than I can tell the truth.. On July 28, 2020, Ms. Scott tweeted a link to a post on the website Medium, where she unveiled the scale of her ambition as a philanthropist. God, I dont know, she wrote. 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. El-Fahmawi told me, I was genuinely worried and surprisedshe was completely on her own., During her sophomore year, Mackenzie decided to apply for a masters at Penns school of social workshe could begin the program while completing her undergraduate degreebecause she wanted to help young people who had aged out of foster care. Like the child riffling through the botany book for plant species, she reached out to a plumber to understand her protagonists home repairs and spent time with an engineer to grasp the details of his work building dams. Family is not the people you are related to by blood, she wrote. That allowed her to carry on studying creative writing under the acclaimed novelist Toni Morrison, who would become her mentor and help her achieve her own lifes goal of becoming a novelist as well. Her ex-husband, Mr. Bezos, has pledged $10 billion to combat climate change. 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 was removing the spectacle from the proceedings. Then the University of Pennsylvania accused her of lying. She met with the associate director of special services within Penns Division of Public Safety to share her fear that her family had discovered where she lived. MacKenzie continued writing and developed an early but lasting propensity for deep research. 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. Scott was her grandfather. 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. Brandt demanded an explanation. When White learned that Mackenzie had been telling professors that she felt the university was threatening her, she added a new requirement. Mackenzie Morrison was born Mackenzie Terrell but took her mothers name after her father, Billy Terrell, who worked in soap operas, left. 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. 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. In the essay, Mackenzie referred to the metallic taste of the feeding tube. Lee asked her, It was metallic?. One of Mackenzies professors, Anne Norton, who teaches political science, checked in on students who she suspected might be stranded. How did you get to school the next morning?. In another letter to Ms. Morrison, she wrote that he hired her based largely on a transcript of your phone recommendation.. 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. By most measures the worlds largest charitable foundation, Gates made those grants with a staff of over 1,700 employees. Raffaele was reminded of a line in the space movie Serenity, in which an agent called the Operative advises that, in order to trap a rival, one should leave no ground to go to. Raffaele said it seemed as if Morrison were trying to manufacture a situation in which Mackenzie must go home to her mother, because she has no ground to go toif shes personally ruined., Mackenzies lawyers learned that the university was considering initiating a process in which Mackenzies bachelors degree could be revoked. Three days later, on Dec. 18, 2020, the change of her last name to Scott was legal and official, according to court records from Bellevue, Wash. Parents and teachers from Whitfield gave her new clothes and school supplies. 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. 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. Unlike Laurene Powell Jobss Emerson Collective or Ms. French Gatess Pivotal Ventures, Ms. Scott avoided establishing a website or advertising any contact information. We had never talked about her being mentally ill. Webb had hoped that the elementary school would rally around Mackenzie. After finishing her second term at Oxford, she had returned to Nortons house for a few weeks. )., The year after the book appeared, in April 2014, Ms. Scott launched her own organization, Bystander Revolution, which was a website offering practical, crowdsourced advice about simple things individuals can do to defuse bullying and help shift the culture.. 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. 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. 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. Mackenzies parents had separated when she was six, and Mackenzie lived with her mother, Carrie Morrison, the director of breast imaging and mammography at The kind of philanthropy portrayed in The Testing of Luther Albright resembles the sort practiced by her mother, Holiday Tuttle. They rented a house in nearby Bellevue, Wash., where Amazon was founded in the garage in 1994. students, defines first generation broadly, including students who have a strained or limited relationship with a parent who has graduated from college. 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. 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. This writer that I admired so much also turned out to be such a gifted and devoted teacher, Ms. Scott said. 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. That power deserves civic scrutiny and attention.. She gave big. Still, it was a significant statement. He was informing friends, he told them at the time, because the news was about to come out in the tabloids. She has set about disbursing her enormous fortune with unprecedented speed and directness to frontline charities and nonprofits with a stated emphasis on advancing social justice and combating inequality, all while trying to keep herself out of the spotlight. Shortly before the pandemic hit, the chemistry teacher Dan Jewett took on a delicate, sometimes unpopular task. 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. Anea Moore, then a sophomore, had helped found the group the previous year. Mackenzie Fierceton didnt 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. Her own life has taken sharp turns that have shaped her choices, including her extraordinary leap into philanthropy, which in under three years has exceeded $12 billion in grants. 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. 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. 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