UPenn trying to ruin a woman’s life in retaliation (1 Viewer)

[GroveDiesel]

What a wild story.

Hard to sum this whole thing up, but basically this girl grew up in an abusive home, ended up in foster care until 18, went to UPenn, almost died after having a seizure because of UPenn’s negligence and inaccessible buildings, found out someone else DID die in that exact same building possibly due to the same reasons, got a Rhodes scholarship, and then was subject to harassment and a smear campaign orchestrated by UPenn and the Philadelphia Inquirer (editor happened to be married to a big wig at UPenn) to the point where they threatened to take away her undergrad and grad degrees and she was forced into giving up her Rhodes scholarship.

She is now suing them and I hope she wins millions and millions of dollars and lots of people lose their jobs.

 

[Kal El]

So they really have nothing better to do with their time than to try and silence one kid who brought up a salient point? I hope she owns the school when it’s all said and done.

 

[parasaurolophus]

Worth pointing out that this "article" seems to have only used a lawsuit filing as it's source. 

 

[Ramsay Hunt Experience]

So they really have nothing better to do with their time than to try and silence one kid who brought up a salient point? I hope she owns the school when it’s all said and done.

The article (and I assume the complaint) doesn’t really succeed in drawing a line to really make this seem retaliatory over the ADA stuff. What seems to have happened is that the biological mother read the puff piece in the Inquirer and complained/presented new evidence to both.  I have no idea if this woman is a fabulist, but it does seem weird that the Inquirer piece just drew some wrong conclusions as she was almost certainly shown the piece before publication. 

 

[Mister CIA]

I'd like to know more about Dr. Biological Mom.

 

[Kal El]

The article (and I assume the complaint) doesn’t really succeed in drawing a line to really make this seem retaliatory over the ADA stuff. What seems to have happened is that the biological mother read the puff piece in the Inquirer and complained/presented new evidence to both.  I have no idea if this woman is a fabulist, but it does seem weird that the Inquirer piece just drew some wrong conclusions as she was almost certainly shown the piece before publication. 

Maybe, though it does seem like a bit of an extreme response in that case as well. I’m sure they can prove if she was in foster care, and one kid on a scholarship isn’t going to bankrupt a school, and if medical issues happen, the first responders have to be able to do their job as quickly as possible.

 

[GroveDiesel]

The article (and I assume the complaint) doesn’t really succeed in drawing a line to really make this seem retaliatory over the ADA stuff. What seems to have happened is that the biological mother read the puff piece in the Inquirer and complained/presented new evidence to both.  I have no idea if this woman is a fabulist, but it does seem weird that the Inquirer piece just drew some wrong conclusions as she was almost certainly shown the piece before publication. 

The timing seems awfully suspicious and it seems awfully strange for a school to go to the extent that have gone to (leaking things to the Inquirer to dig into her, not following school policies while investigating her, seeming to give a lot of credence to her mother despite the medical/court records, etc). 

There’s really only 2 explanations for how hard the university is going after her and trying to ruin her future IMO:

1) They found concrete evidence that she somehow completely fabricated the abuse from her mother and see her as a serial liar and fraud that threatens the academic integrity of the university or

2) They are retaliating because of her role in the wrongful death suit against them

I mean, getting the newspaper to have one of their top investigative journalists spend an entire year digging into the woman, threatening to revoke her degrees, and reaching out to urge them to revoke her Rhodes scholarship are all really really big deals. You don’t do that stuff unless there is a really big reason behind it. 

Honestly, one of the actors in this is evil and nefarious. It’s either the woman spinning a web of lies throughout her life, or the university out to ruin a woman’s life because she rightly called out negligence that lead to someone’s death. There aren’t really any other possibilities.

 

[Ramsay Hunt Experience]

The timing seems awfully suspicious and it seems awfully strange for a school to go to the extent that have gone to (leaking things to the Inquirer to dig into her, not following school policies while investigating her, seeming to give a lot of credence to her mother despite the medical/court records, etc). 

There’s really only 2 explanations for how hard the university is going after her and trying to ruin her future IMO:

1) They found concrete evidence that she somehow completely fabricated the abuse from her mother and see her as a serial liar and fraud that threatens the academic integrity of the university or

2) They are retaliating because of her role in the wrongful death suit against them

I mean, getting the newspaper to have one of their top investigative journalists spend an entire year digging into the woman, threatening to revoke her degrees, and reaching out to urge them to revoke her Rhodes scholarship are all really really big deals. You don’t do that stuff unless there is a really big reason behind it. 

Honestly, one of the actors in this is evil and nefarious. It’s either the woman spinning a web of lies throughout her life, or the university out to ruin a woman’s life because she rightly called out negligence that lead to someone’s death. There aren’t really any other possibilities.

Again, the complaint does a very poor job of showing that the university leaked anything to the Inquirer. It seems far more likely from my reading, that the biological Mom contacted the Inquirer and the University.   
 

 

[Ramsay Hunt Experience]

OK, I'm going to try to list the points in the complaint/story that give rise to my skepticism:

• As near as I can see, Fierceton has not sued the university over the events related to her seizure.  What she did do, about a month after her seizure, was contact the administration and wish to talk about her seizure and the events around the student's death in 2018.
  
• About nine months later, Fierceton gets the Rhodes Scholarship and Ruderman writes a story on it.  The Penn administration is quoted in the story and they have nothing but praise for Fierceton.  This is not surprising, because the Univesity selects its Rhodes candidates.  This is also about three months after the family of the student that died in 2018 had filed their wrongful death suit.  It seems weird that the University would be openly supporting her Rhodes candidacy at this point if it were motivated to punish her for participating in investigating a wrongful death suit.
  
• After the story ran, Ruderman (the reporter) and Shephard (UPenn "News Officer") received an anonymous email complaint alleging Fierceton had fabricated her story.  This seems to belie the narrative of some type of "pillow talk conspiracy."  The allegation that Shephard leaked the information to her husband to get Ruderman to investigate information she already has absolutely no factual basis that I can discern.
  
• We have the two Penn faculty members who claim (in an unpublished submission to an academic journal) that Fierceton had not misrepresented her past and that she had attempted to correct misconceptions.  Maybe that's true.  It And maybe the complaint goes into greater detail into what Fierceton had actually represented and the efforts she made to correct any misconceptions, but this article doesn't cite to any of that.  Which is weird.  I note that the picture of Fierceton shows her wearing a "Foster Youth Voices Now" sweatshirt and her actual quote in the article published ("I would trade all of this to have been adopted and have a family and have had that experience and that never happened, and that’s really sad.") certainly seems to give the impression that she had more experience in foster care than she did.
  
• The discussion of the June 2019 Court Order is weird.  What that Court order found is that, as a matter of law, the proceeding where Fierceton was removed from her mother's custody did not establish that her mother had abused her.  It certainly didn't change what happened in 2014.  Yes, Fierceton was removed from her mother's custody and put into Foster Care (weirdly, she apparently did not pursue emancipation despite being 17 or so at the time).  But the 2019 Court Order rejected the findings of fact that led to that.  Because court orders cannot change the past, nobody can dispute what the initial court proceeding found, but what seems clear is that the factual basis behind Fierceton's abuse claims are in dispute, and have not, at this time, been resolved in her favor.
  

I can't know the true facts, here.  But even from what this story and the complaint gives us (and we don't have the other side), what I see is that Penn feels that Fierceton misrepresented her past in her Rhodes application and possibly in her admissions applications to Penn.  Maybe they are wrong.  But the facts presented just don't support a narrative that she is being punished as a whistle-blower and certainly don't fit the narrative of a "conspiracy" with the Inquirer (and at the risk of stating the obvious, there is not tort liability in a woman confiding in her husband anyway).  Looking at the blog as a whole, this guy's angle seems to be as a critic of proponents of criminal justice reform, and he appears to have a grudge against Ruderman/the Inquirer over their coverage of police corruption scandals.  And I think his biases against the reporters has led him to be pretty credulous about some of the allegations in the complaint.  

 

[scorchy]

I can't know the true facts, here.  But even from what this story and the complaint gives us (and we don't have the other side), what  I see is that Penn feels that Fierceton misrepresented her past in her Rhodes application and possibly in her admissions applications to Penn.  Maybe they are wrong.  But the facts presented just don't support a narrative that she is being punished as a whistle-blower and certainly don't fit the narrative of a "conspiracy" with the Inquirer (and at the risk of stating the obvious, there is not tort liability in a woman confiding in her husband anyway).  Looking at the blog as a whole, this guy's angle seems to be as a critic of proponents of criminal justice reform, and he appears to have a grudge against Ruderman/the Inquirer over their coverage of police corruption scandals.  And I think his biases against the reporters has led him to be pretty credulous about some of the allegations in the complaint.  

Once again, your analysis is looking to be spot on.  I first heard about the story in this thread and then a much bigger and more vitriolic discussion popped on a messageboard that I'm ashamed to admit I frequent.  In early January, a much more nuanced article (compared to bigtrial.net) was published in the Chronicle of Higher Ed:

The Dredging (you need to register for full access)

Then Penn's response to the complaint:

Penn response (if interested, I would recommend starting on pg 88)

I know Penn's response is just one-side of the coin too, but there's some pretty damning stuff in there that really casts doubt on the student's narrative.  Beyond the veracity of the abuse allegations and other hardship claims, there's pretty much zero evidence that Penn's questioning of her story had anything to do with being a whistle-blower.

 

[Ramsay Hunt Experience]

Once again, your analysis is looking to be spot on.  I first heard about the story in this thread and then a much bigger and more vitriolic discussion popped on a messageboard that I'm ashamed to admit I frequent.  In early January, a much more nuanced article (compared to bigtrial.net) was published in the Chronicle of Higher Ed:

The Dredging (you need to register for full access)

Then Penn's response to the complaint:

Penn response (if interested, I would recommend starting on pg 88)

I know Penn's response is just one-side of the coin too, but there's some pretty damning stuff in there that really casts doubt on the student's narrative.  Beyond the veracity of the abuse allegations and other hardship claims, there's pretty much zero evidence that Penn's questioning of her story had anything to do with being a whistle-blower.

Thanks for this.  There's this deeply weird statement from Fierceton (which is apparently a last name she gave herself, LOL) and her lawyer that she "constructed not a narrative about herself for the purpose of deceiving others, but an identity for herself for the purpose of giving herself the strength and stability she needs to thrive despite the many, protracted traumas of her childhood."  And I don't know what to make of it.  She also argues that her statements were accurate (which might be true in a strictly lawyerly sense) and that she sought to clear up any misunderstandings (kind of true in one instance).  But this argument appears to give the game away that she was at least embellishing to some extent.

 

[scorchy]

Thanks for this.  

It's embarrassing how fascinated I am by the details.  It would make one hell of a made-for-TV movie.

 

[Caveman33]

It's embarrassing how fascinated I am by the details.  It would make one hell of a made-for-TV movie.

I enjoy these stories, too, but from a schadenfreude perspective.  There's no one for me to root for.  I find it funny that universities will reward the most woke applicants, who often end up being the biggest PITAs.  OK, you had a seizure in some hard to access part of the school.  It's unfortunate, but not malicious and should not be grounds for a successful lawsuit.  (A major weakness in our court system).  Now the lies and exaggerations of the cry bully have cost them their Rhodes Scholarship.  A happy ending.

 

[eoMMan]

Between this and the UPenn swimmer controversy, yikes. They are looking pretty bad.

Go Drexel.