Penn had sponsored her for the Rhodes; she was their candidate, and thus supported her application. This wasnt some award totally separate from Penn.
Colleges investigate fraud when they credibly learn of its potential, not when every student applies
No. Absolutely no!
Your approach increases the incentive to lie on the application, because if the college canât figure it out then, the student is in the clear afterwards.
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Colleges rescind degrees all the time, upon finding fraud in the application, or plagiarism on a thesis, or similar misdeeds.
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I found the full story heartbreaking. Itâs absolutely evil how so many people in positions of power have contributed to her abuse. And somewhat heartening that at least those professors and teachers and administrators who were closest to her and have supported her despite having to go against their own institutions. That one of her Penn professors personally paid for her to still attend the PhD program at Oxford says so much.
Itâs amazing sheâs managed to continue to do so well despite all the odds against her. And itâs too bad that there has been no consequences for the mother (who is on the medical faculty of Washington University at St. Louis) or others who exasperated the issue. And the attempts to smear her are pathetic. At least the motherâs boyfriend who repeatedly sexually assaulted her (while her mother laughed it off) died a couple months ago so he can threaten her no more.
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You are making the assumption that what she says is true. There is evidence that she lies repeatedly, so I donât make that assumption.
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Iâve read both stories and found the New Yorker one much better. As @Bill_Marsh noted they presented additional facts and accounts from others that back up her story and demonstrated she was seeking guidance on how to complete the applications.
The motherâs story lacks credibility on so many levels.
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Well, the public prosecutor and the courts disagree with you, but everyone is entitled to an opinion.
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We all have to judge information imperfectly all the time. None of us was in the room when these events allegedly happened. The New Yorker didnât just quote her, it quoted dozens of other people, police reports, emails from school administrators, etc. Itâs disingenuous to reduce it to being just her word.
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A prosecutor and courts also initially gave Jeffrey Epstein a sweetheart deal, ignoring dozens of victims. Prosecutors and courts make bad calls all the time. Sometimes in good faith, sometimes in bad faith. That isnât really an impressive fact set one way or the other.
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I donât find her credible. And the NYer story was very one sided. In my opinion, she found some people, including the reporter, sympathetic to her. That proved nothing.
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Itâs interesting to me that this part of the story only came out now. Hard to judge if this is because âhe can threaten her no moreâ (there doesnât seem to be any evidence of contact in recent years) or because he can no longer sue for libel.
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That those allegations were new added to her lack of credibility to me.
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For those who âdonât find her credible,â Iâm curious what you think happened?
She showed up at school for yearâs with injuries. Her mother responded to allegations her boyfriend sexually touched her daughter by âlaughingâ and claiming she was âflatteringâ that he must have mistaken her daughter for her and that it was an innocent mistake. She ended up in the hospital for her injuries. Her mother doesnât even dispute she fell down the stairs while entangled with her, only the circumstances on why she did, and alleges she must have further harmed herself later to make herself appear worse. She ended up in Foster Care.
So far none of the things above were âher storyâ â they were all records and other peopleâs accounts.
So if we donât find her credible she had an amazing long con â years of self harm designed to resemble possible abuse and great performances of sheepishly offering excuses like an abuse victim would, years of writing fake entries in a diary entries about it, years of her mother inexplicably backing her stories of various accidents instead of addressing it as a self harm issue, and her brilliant ability to manipulate her mother into giving a reaction to the sexual abuse claim that defies rational explanation, etc.
But she said her hospital feeding tube tasted metallic when it was in fact plastic, so thereâs thatâŠ
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Objective observors had access to much more evidence than what was in either article, and found she lacked credibility. Neither of us have the entire file, so the rest is just speculation.
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I actually find her story about her mothers abuse credible based on the NYer article. Are we to believe she fooled the police, child services, teachers and the principal of her school?
Should she have checked the first gen box on her application, probably not, but who cares? Did Penn only admit her because she checked the box? Or because they liked her app?
What is the end game here for Penn? Just giver her degrees and move on.
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The NY article failed to mention the prosecutor withdrew all charges as based on false information and the judge expunged the record. Generally, IME, judges are more likely to get things right than reporters. YMMV.
On what basis can you conclude that some (undefined) people were âobjective observersâ but that the various social workers, police detective, teachers and school administrators interviewed or quoted from records were not?
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Actually it discussed that in great detail, so not sure why you say they failed to mention it. Also, on what factual basis do you know that judges âget things rightâ more than reporters?
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I deal with a lot of reporters and judges. IME, judges are more objective and less likely to pursue a personal agenda, but as I note, your mileage may vary. There are those who distrust anyone in the judicial system. Signing off.
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It didnât just come up now. The previous articles didnât mention it but itâs been there in the police record for years.
From the more recent article (I inserted the description of the names in parenthetical):
Brandt (a police detective) also asked Morrison (the mother) about the episode, which Mackenzie had reported the day before, when Mackenzie had woken up to Lovelace touching her breasts. Morrison said that Lovelace had made an innocent mistake. âShe thought it was funny that [Lovelace] mistook herââMorrisonââfor a 15 year old girl,â Brandt wrote. (In a separate interview, Lovelace, who had been the subject of complaints to the police by Morrison and two other women with whom heâd been romantically involved, denied ever touching Mackenzie.)"
Again, whether you believe Mackenzie or not, what mother would respond to allegations of sexual molestation to her daughter by laughing and turning it into a backhanded compliment of herself? But thatâs what a police detective, not Mackenzie, noted in the record at the time.
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