The mother did not contact a Penn. A classmate outed her when they read about the Rhodes scholarship in the paper.
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Is it typical for ethical prosecutors to spend a lot of time with a defense attorney being convinced that a person claiming abuse is lying?
From the Newyorker, Marguilis was the mom’s defense attorney, parent from the school on the board.
Margulis told me, “I spent a lot of time meeting with the prosecutor and convincing him that the daughter had no credibility and made all of this up.”
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Two people contacted Penn initially. One was a parent, who identified himself. The other was anonymous and was later identified as a former classmate. Beyond that we don’t know anything.
My point is that being who those informants were does not preclude either or both of them acting on behalf of the mother for the simple reason that the mother’s attorney is the father of a former classmate. And that former classmate/attorney’s daughter is one of the classmates who has been described as turning against MF once the family dispute became public and people started choosing sides.
The whole reason that this is even in question is because Penn ran a kangaroo investigation in which they kept everything secret, including the identities of their “confidential witnesses”. We have no idea whom they interviewed. We don’t know who said what to whom. We don’t know who corroborated MF’s story and who didn’t. We don’t know what interviews were selectively included to support Penn’s narrative and which ones were excluded.
This is America. In a normal court proceeding, the accused is allowed to know who their accusers are and is allowed to confront them. Not in this case.
Not only did Penn conduct a secret investigation and withhold any contradictory evidence from this student, but in addition, they sidestepped their own normal procedures which are employed in cases where a student has violated the university’s code of conduct. By doing so, MF was denied the right of appeal because the appeals officer did not have jurisdiction over cases following this unusual alternate route.
So no ability to confront accusers or even know who they are. (Witnesses considered credible by the university’s investigation included MF’s accused abusers who had massive conflicts of interest.) No right of appeal. What country is this?
As @royalcroftmom said on April 4,
“Penn had sponsored her for the Rhodes; she was their candidate, and thus supported her application. This wasn’t some award totally separate from Penn.”
As partner to the application, Penn had their own interest in this case. And it’s not like the applicant is their employee. If anything, the roles are reversed. Students hire universities to provide them with a service. By undertaking this investigation the way they did, Penn took on large conflicts of interest. They should have recused themselves and farmed the investigation out to a neutral third party. They further complicated things by their secrecy and denial of the normal right of appeals.
Your statement that “a classmate outed her” assumes that she had something to be “outed” for. Penn had all of the information about her background from the time she applied. She has never denied that pedigree or any other part of her background. It was the Inquirer reporter who had erroneously described her as “having grown up poor” and who irresponsibly never corrected that error. MF herself never claimed to have grown up poor. They knew that she had attended a fancy prep school for rich kids. Oxbridge had verified her FGLI status and stands behind the legitimacy of that application to this day. She was legitimately low income at the time of her application to Penn undergrad, at the time of her application to Penn’s SPP grad school, and at the time of her Rhodes application. She had been driven into poverty by her abusive mother and her mother’s abusive boyfriend. Penn’s own Admission’s Office had initially classified her as first gen as is common practice in university’s all over the country for students who had aged out of the foster care system as she had, according ti the NYer article.
If anyone was outed by the e-mails from her Whitfield School associates. Rather than replying to the e-mailers with “We know all about that and she’s fine” as Oxbridge did when contacted about her application, Penn acted like a guilty party, like there was some wrongdoing to be covered up. I don’t know anything about their internal conversations, but their actions certainly look like those of someone who has panicked. Hastily conducted investigation conducted in secret. Communicating with Rhodes about her application without notifying the applicant/award recipient for almost a month subsequent failing to follow their own normal internal procedures. Imposing a financial penalty in violation of their own charter. Smearing their own student in public statements. All very sloppy. It certainly appears to be Penn who felt like they were the ones being “outed”.
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Again, Penn did nothing wrong in conducting its investigation. There was nothing sinister with it being conducted by its GC and in secret. That’s standard protocol. At the end of the day, both Rhodes and Penn arrived at the same conclusion independently yet all the criticism is directed at Penn. Seems like bias to me.
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The right to confrontation is for criminal cases brought by the state. The student has not had criminal charges filed against her by any state, and thus this does not apply. The identity of the whistleblowers is completely irrelevant to the question of whether student misrepresented herself in her applications.
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Even if it is unusual, D.S.S. did show up. In addition to managing the case for almost a year after originally removing MF from her mother’s home, D.S.S. did not run away from the case and hide as they might have done if they had any regrets or second thoughts about there original finding. Almost 5 years later, the D.S.S. investigator was fully present, according to the NYer article.
So, while the judge found that there was insufficient evidence to sustain a criminal finding under the requirements of the legal standard for such, the finding of abuse by the objective unbiased professionals with expertise in child abuse also remain.
As I said earlier, professionals who have looked at this case very closely have widely divergent opinions on whether abuse happened or not.
Yet somehow you are very certain about what happened despite not having the full details. And also very certain that professionals that support your view are correct, and those that don’t are to be completely discounted.
I get that the DSS agent is very certain about what he or she thinks happened. I also get that the judge didn’t see it the same way. Nor did the assistant DA, who presumably made his decision independently of the judge.
To me those divergent opinions mean we don’t know for certain if abuse happened or not. And you repeating constantly that it did does not make it any more true.
The only thing we know for certain is that Mackenzie is prone to exaggeration when it comes to her applications for college and scholarships. I will leave it for others to decide if that character flaw only shows up in this one instance, or it is indicative of a larger problem.
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No new information is being imparted. Rather the same handful of users are just debating their opinion. For that reason, I am pausing the thread for a bit. If, when the thread reopens, the posts continue to be circular, I will be forced to shut for good.
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This topic was automatically opened after 16 hours.
Information new to this discussion is the fact that that both the Penn and Rhodes discussion were based on the same false premise that the student misrepresented herself as “having grown up poor.” She never made that claim. It was an error made by the reporter at the Philadelphia Inquirer. That was what the e-mailers correctly objected to and it could have been handled by a simple correction in its newspaper by the Inquirer. That would have satisfied the e-mailers because they weren’t objecting to what was submitted in the Rhodes application, which was something they never saw.
But Penn never clarified this error from the beginning. And they passed on the same mistaken claim to Rhodes. Since Rhodes was directed to that non-fact by Penn, the Rhodes investigation wasn’t independent but was using the report it received from Penn as it’s starting point and continued where it left off.
Hardly mentioned here is your “standard protocol” comment. As a point of fact, this is currently the subject of a grievance against the Penn administration by multiple Penn professors. What is standard protocol in the corporate world or elsewhere doesn’t apply here. A student is not an employee. Quite the opposite. Each university has its own established procedures which Penn failed to follow as detailed by 2 of the professors who are party to the grievance in a lengthy letter to the editor at Chronicle of Higher Education, linked earlier in this thread. In a black & white example of Penn’s irregularities in their procedures throughout this case is the imposition of a $4000 fine which was later withdrawn because it was in violation of their own charter.
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I’ve read Rhodes’ report. There was far more to it than that and I found it to be sufficiently thorough. Her application contained misrepresentations and embellishments (emphasis on the plural). That is undeniable. That’s how this all began. It’s not about abuse. She lost the scholarship not because of some Penn vendetta but because she misrepresented and embellished.
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If I recall correctly, your D was a finalist in that process or a similar one?
Yes. She applied to 4 of the big international scholarships. She was a finalist for 2, including the Rhodes, won the other and withdrew the 4th app. So we lived the process for some 8 months. I’m not sympathetic, particularly given the fact that no sob story was necessary to begin with. My DD’s undergrad fellowship program has finalists and winners to these scholarships every year. Not one of them needed a sob story to advance or win.
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Has MF released her Rhodes essays to the public?
The essay is just one part of the application. There are receptions, interviews…
There is only a single personal statement for which the applicant can get no assistance whatsoever. I only read my D’s PS after her interview. So it’s not like anyone could have vetted the details. Other than that, there is a resume, up to 8 LORs, and a school nomination. Finalists (8 per region) then have a full (and exhausting) weekend of activities that culminates in individual interviews and selection of 2/8 as Rhodes Scholar in each region.
The Rhodes investigation report calls out the imbellishments and misrepresentations that were in MF’s PS. It also finds some statements to have been accurate based on the investigation.
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Same here. This should begin and end with whether her Rhodes application was entirely truthful. It wasn’t, as she admitted in the New Yorker article. Whatever happened with her mother, if an applicant is dishonest, then that’s not fair to the other participants in the process.
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Can you give a link or a screenshot? Have read extensively about this case and the point you make here would be pivotal however I haven’t seen it mentioned anywhere at all