The New Yorker Gives UPenn A Black Eye

Photo by Robbie Lawrence for The New Yorker

By Ralph Cipriano
for BigTrial.net

The New Yorker has just weighed in on the Mackenzie Fierceton case, and the result is a public relations disaster for UPenn.

The headline of the story published today and written by Rachel Aviv: "How An Ivy League School Turned Against A Student."

The subhead: "Mackenzie Fierceton was championed as a former foster youth who had overcome an abusive childhood and won a prestigious Rohdes Scholarship. Then the University of Pennsylvania accused her of lying."

On Dec. 21st, Big Trial was the first to break the story about an explosive lawsuit filed in Philadelphia Common Pleas Court that charged that top officials at the University of Pennsylvania conspired with journalists at The Philadelphia Inquirer to smear a Penn grad student who had just won a prestigious Rhodes scholarship.

The lawsuit, filed on behalf of Mackenzie Fierceton claimed that Penn officials targeted the grad student for retaliation after she became a key witness in a wrongful death lawsuit filed against the university.

The New Yorker story breaks new ground by publishing excerpts from Fierceton's diary that detail  allegations of abuse against her mother, a prominent doctor in St. Louis, as well as Fierceton's accusations of sexual abuse against the mother's boyfriend, a weightlifting champ from Missouri. 

In the The New Yorker story, the Inquirer gets a pass, but the magazine piles up on Penn. According to The New Yorker, as part of its crusade against Fierceton, a foster child living in poverty, Penn sunk so low as to threaten the student with a $4,000 fine.

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Penn Loses Round One In 'Pillow Talk' Conspiracy Case

By Ralph Cipriano
for BigTrial.net

A Philadelphia Common Pleas Court judge on Thursday denied the University of Pennsylvania's request to have Mackenzie Fierceton's lawsuit against the university transferred to Commerce Court.

If the judge had granted the university's request, the Fierceton case would have been transferred to a court where judges routinely and quietly settle business disputes out of the public eye, and often, without a jury trial. 

But now Penn is stuck where it doesn't want to be, in Common Pleas Court. That's where Fierceton's lawyer is demanding a major jury trial, when the university's brutal inquisition of an already physically abused student will be on prime display as the overriding issue in the case.

It doesn't look pretty for Penn. 

And if that wasn't bad enough, on Friday, the Chronicle of Higher Education, which just did a major takeout on the Fierceton case, headlined "The Dredging," published a lengthy, five-page letter to the editor from a couple of Penn's own professors who served as Fierceton's academic advisors.

In the letter, the two Penn professors blasted Penn's "shameful" treatment of the grad student "who has had, all agree, a deeply traumatic life so far."

In short, it was a bad week for Penn.

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In 'Pillow Talk' Conspiracy, Penn's Stonewall Cracks

Illustration: The Chronicle of Higher Education

By Ralph Cipriano
for BigTrial.net

On Dec. 21st, Big Trial broke a story about an explosive lawsuit charging that top officials at the University of Pennsylvania had allegedly conspired with journalists at The Philadelphia Inquirer to smear a Penn grad student who had just won a prestigious Rhodes scholarship.

The lawsuit, filed on behalf of grad student Mackenzie Fierceton claims that Penn officials targeted her for retaliation after she became a key witness in a wrongful death lawsuit filed against the university.

As part of the alleged conspiracy, the lawsuit claims, Penn officials conducted a "sham" investigation that forced the student to voluntarily give up her Rhodes scholarship, after Penn officials threatened to rescind the student's undergraduate degree and withhold her master's degree. On top of that, the lawsuit claims that Penn officials had threatened to send the student to jail for allegedly fraudulently representing herself in her application to become a Rhodes scholar.

In more than two weeks since that story was published, the public response of Penn and the Inquirer to the lawsuit has been crickets. None of the Penn officials nor the Inquirer journalists targeted in the lawsuit have responded to Big Trial's requests for comment. Neither has Inquirer CEO and Publisher Lisa Hughes. 

But stonewalling is harder to pull off in court. So last week Penn broke its official silence by filing an 80-page answer to the complaint that was mostly filed with denials. In its brief, Penn denied that it retaliated against Fierceton, or colluded with "co-conspirators" at the Inquirer to smear her.

Instead, Penn claimed that an internal investigation by the university, as well as the Rhodes Trust, had concluded that "Fierceton had not been truthful" about her background, and that's why the university had put her degrees on ice.

On Friday, the high-brow Chronicle of Higher Education weighed in on the fray with a long story about Penn's brutal inquisition of Fierceton entitled, "The Dredging." It's a story that will only serve to further fuel the battle that will be waged over Fierceton in Philadelphia Common Pleas Court.

Meanwhile, the Inquirer hasn't told its readers about the lawsuit that targets their top editor and a recently departed Pulitzer Prize winning reporter. How's that for transparency? Maybe if the Inquirer is brought into the lawsuit as a defendant, they'll finally have to say something. 

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Lawsuit: 'Pillow Talk' Conspiracy Between Penn's News Officer & Philly Inquirer's Top Editor Targeted Grad Student For Smear Job

By Ralph Cipriano
for BigTrial.net

An explosive lawsuit filed this afternoon in Philadelphia Common Pleas Court charges that top officials at the University of Pennsylvania conspired with journalists at The Philadelphia Inquirer to smear a Penn grad student who had just won a prestigious Rhodes scholarship.

The lawsuit, filed on behalf of Mackenzie Fierceton claims that Penn officials targeted the grad student for retaliation after she became a key witness in a wrongful death lawsuit filed against the university.

As part of the alleged conspiracy, the lawsuit claims, Penn officials conducted a "sham" investigation that forced the student to voluntarily give up her Rhodes scholarship, after Penn officials threatened to rescind the student's undergraduate degree and withhold her master's degree. On top of that, the lawsuit claims that Penn officials threatened to send the student to jail for allegedly fraudulently representing herself in her application to become a Rhodes scholar.

The lawsuits lists as defendants the university and its trustees, as well as three Penn officials: Beth Winkelstein, interim provost; Wendy White, senior vice president and general counsel; and Louisa Shepard, news officer for the Office of University Communications, none of whom could be reached for comment. 

The lawsuit, filed by attorney Dion Rassias of The Beasley Firm, claims that as part of the conspiracy to smear and retaliate against Fierceton, Louisa Shepard, Penn's news officer, leaked "false and baseless accusations" against Fierceton to her husband, Gabriel Escobar, editor and senior vice president of the Inquirer, as well as "presently unnamed co-conspirators at The Philadelphia Inquirer."

As a result of what the lawsuit describes as "orchestrated pillow talk" between Shepard and Escobar, the "conflict-laden editor" subsequently assigned Pulitzer-Prize winning reporter Wendy Ruderman to conduct a year-long investigation of Fierceton, the purpose of which was to "dig up any dirt possible." 

The lawsuit claims that during her investigation, Ruderman, who did not respond to a request for comment, interviewed "anonymous unreliable sources" that included Fierceton's biological mother, a doctor in St. Louis who lost custody of Fierceton in high school after Missouri state officials determined that the mother had physically abused her daughter, sending her to a hospital for nearly a month.

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