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. We would never have believed any of it if we werent living it, she wrote, adding that Mackenzie had directed her masterpiece perfectly. One of Morrisons sisters also wrote White an e-mail, saying that Mackenzie deliberately tried to frame Carrie and planted evidence around the house, including her own blood.. I know that good part is still there somewhere, she wrote. The D.S.S. Her foster parents had had a baby, and Mackenzie felt increasingly peripheral to their lives. Im telling my story because I think its a microcosm of how institutions of power can manipulate truth, she told me. Or even to write everything down in here. Dr. Morrison was arrested at the time but the case was dropped by prosecutors who said they could never prove Mackenzies claims. The week before, she had started work at an investment firm, with her future husband, Mr. Bezos. God, I dont know, she wrote. 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. 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. While Ms. Scott may be seeking to stay in the background, her funds are reshaping the nonprofit sector in the United States and beyond. Brandt stood beside Mackenzies bed and asked who had hurt her. Public records also show that Lost Horse has an office of its own in a brand-new eco-friendly building in Seattle. Mackenzie Morrison was born Mackenzie Terrell but took her mothers name after her father, Billy Terrell, who worked in soap operas, left. She gave with few strings attached. 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. Gutmann more than doubled the number of Penn students from low-income and first-generation families, her faculty biography explains. 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. 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. They dated for three months before getting engaged and were married three months after that. Brandt read Mackenzies diary and interviewed her principal, her soccer coach, and her teachers. Her sudden spate of giving has now reached 1,257 groups, from little-known charities to mainstream organizations like Habitat for Humanity, which last month received $436 million, her largest known gift. Morrison has a record of 20 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 has become arguably the most consequential philanthropist in the world right now one who is very much operating on her own terms. Amy Hillier, a faculty member at the social-work school, took a sabbatical from Penn because she was so disillusioned by Mackenzies treatment. Fendell did not accept the explanation, and she later told Mackenzie that she was legally obligated to notify Missouris Department of Social Services. I envy her because shes so important.. The pediatrician felt awful for not pushing the issue, Brandt wrote. Mr. Tuttle worked as a financial adviser while his wife stayed home with the kids. Bill Gates is among its alumni, and Jeff Bezos and MacKenzie Scott are among the parents. 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. 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. The kind of philanthropy portrayed in The Testing of Luther Albright resembles the sort practiced by her mother, Holiday Tuttle. Ms. Scott made cold calls and assembled an informal group of advisers. Trailing behind their car was Mackenzie's father Matthew, who drove up and saw the wrecked car after being hit multiple times and rolling before coming to a stop on it's side. I cannot avoid the sense that Mackenzie is being faulted for not having suffered enough, one of her professors said. Some were groups that her mother might have gone to a luncheon for in Palm Beach, or her grandmother in El Paso. Her mother began working at a womens boutique on fashionable Worth Avenue a short walk away. Kitty Bennett contributed research. 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. She was five feet ten with long curly blond hairthe picture of Americana, as one friend described her. That summer, Mackenzie decided to apply for a Rhodes Scholarship, to get a Ph.D. at the University of Oxford. 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. and not another? Ms. Scott and Mr. Bezos began to make their own forays into the charitable world. When she visited friends and former teachers, she tried to take up as little space as possible. There was also a nascent sense in the book of philanthropy as a good. I remember there was some blood with my lip, yeah, Mackenzie said. Annie Korzen and Then the University of Pennsylvania accused her of lying. The car was a Chevy Blazer, a gift from Mr. Bezos father. And we all have enormous energy to devote to helping and protecting those we love.. 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. Mackenzes mother, Dr Carrie Morrison, a radiologist Norton said, I told Mackenzie, You dont have to spend any time with us if you dont want to, but you need to be safe.. A few months after their divorce was finalized in 2019, a new shell company was quietly set up in Delaware called Lost Horse. According to Mackenzie, Logan, who had been pregnant when her husband died, asked her to meet. She had pledged to give until the safe is empty but her remaining Amazon shares were worth more than at the time of the divorce, the result of a soaring market that fueled further debate over billionaires and income inequality. 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. Ms. Scott graduated from Hotchkiss, where tuition rivaled the cost of college, after three years instead of four. A few days later, Mackenzie received an e-mail asking her to meet with Winkelstein, the deputy provost, to address questions that had arisen from an anonymous source. Sensing her mothers involvement, Mackenzie asked a university staff member to attend the meeting as her informal adviser. Her opaque methodology is the subject of regular hushed conversations in the nonprofit field. Mackenzie said that her college counsellor had told her that, as an independent student estranged from her family, this information was not required. Sherry McLain, a nurse assigned to her, told me, She had two black eyes, and her hair was full of blood. He could not afford it, she wrote, pretending he had a job that made money and also pretending he could spend it., Ms. Morrison, who died in 2019, called Ms. Scott an extraordinary writer, almost full-blown, and indeed the novella is strikingly assured, as well as a little bloody, macabre and almost Gothic in places. To revisit this article, select My Account, thenView saved stories, To revisit this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories. Michael Raffaele, one of the attorneys, said that Morrison presented herself as a model parent who didnt understand why Mackenzie wouldnt accept her love and come home. Or the propaganda campaign that they can put behind her story?. Princeton classmates recalled her as passionate about books and deeply engaged in her studies. Such a shame this angry teenage girl just destroyed her mothers career, another wrote. Mackenzie Fierceton didnt I personally believe the education level (or/and financial status) of the biological parents would be irrelevant, the associate director responded. She had bruises all over her body in different stages of healingan obvious sign of child abuse.. Penn seemed to embrace Mackenzies story as evidence of its commitment to promoting social and economic mobility. It says that your hair is caked with dried blood. That didnt happen, did it?. Over the past year, Ms. Scott has announced grants totaling $6.6 billion. Before leaving, the caseworker, who was white, explained that she didnt really need anything else from us and she was sorry to bother us, but was glad everything worked out, Mackenzie wrote. There were only seventy-one students in Mackenzies grade, and soon everyone seemed to have an opinion about her life. At the end of the interview, she offered to connect Mackenzie with support. I just wanted some sort of closeness with an adult, she said. That morning, Brandt and an investigator with the Department of Social Services (D.S.S.) That same year, in September, Mr. Bezos and Ms. Scott pledged $2 billion to open Montessori-inspired preschools and support homeless families. Ms. Scott has published two novels, Traps and The Testing of Luther Albright.. 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. 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. 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 something unusual happened. After you talked to the school. (Her fine was withdrawn, because the universitys charter says that financial restitution cannot be imposed in cases involving academic integrity.) When White learned that Mackenzie had been telling professors that she felt the university was threatening her, she added a new requirement. By the early 1990s, her parents had left behind their two houses in California and transplanted themselves to Florida, settling in an apartment building in Palm Beach where at the time units rented for around $800 a month, or roughly $1,500 today. 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. Karen Weise contributed reporting. 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. WebHer father is Mike Morrison. My mom, Mackenzie responded. Thats what I tasted, yeah, Mackenzie responded. 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. Another hallmark of Ms. Scotts personality on display in her writing life was her dedication to intense research. 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