UMC suburban college student lied about background to become prestigious Rhodes Scholar

[Anonymous]

Can anyone do a cliff notes on the Cameron Driver lawsuit? Sounds like he had a medical emergency while in class? What are they alleging Penn did wrong?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Has anyone zillowed the value of mom's home? I doubt she lives in a shanty.

I saw 3 different estimates: $660,000, $685,000, and $690,000 (rounded off for ease of use).

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21174416-penn-answer
Begin reading at page 59 of this document. The narrative is quite interesting. It has to take some mental gymnastics to read the facts and find her worthy of defending.

The father is named Billy Terrell, an actor, accused, among other things, of pathological lying when he and the mom divorced. Hmm..

You do realize that the document you’re linking s not an objective report but the university’s attempt to defend itself. It not only is slanted but it whitewashes Penn’s role in all of this and acknowledges no wrongdoing on their part - as would be expected of an institution defending itself against serious allegations

My guess is that the truth in this matter lies somewhere between the positions that the 2 sides have staked out.

DP. Sure, it isn't objective. But the positions taken in it are detailed and supported by facts. When Penn refers to the lack of police records to support a statement Fierceton made about receiving threatening packages and letters, that is likely to be true. Therefore it is reasonable to conclude that the underlying facts described by Penn have supporting evidence.

It is always telling in a civil dispute when one side has a lot of detail and alleged facts, and the other does not. Fierceton's filing is filled with a bunch of very grand allegations, but comparatively little in the way of citable facts. That is the opposite of the Penn filing.

The problem is that Penn isn’t being accused of misrepresenting the facts. The lawsuit alleges retaliation for MF’s role in a separate lawsuit against Penn. This doesn’t really address that. In fact, it goes over the top in its efforts to continue to smear the plaintiff, thereby reinforcing her claim that they are acting with malice toward her. I still think that her case is going to win, but proving that she lied on her college application doesn’t counter her claim of retaliation.

They do address it. It’s in paragraph 51, p. 71 of answer. Here it is:

Having previously nominated Fierceton for the Rhodes, Penn had a duty to notify the Rhodes Trust of the issues that had surfaced relating to Fierceton’s background and application. While Fierceton contends that this report was in retaliation for her role as a witness in the Driver litigation, a wholly unrelated and ongoing wrongful death matter brought by the administrators of the estate of a deceased Penn student, Cameron Avant Driver. See Est. of Driver v. The Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania, et al., Case No. 1634 (Phila. C.C.P. 2020), that is untrue. No one at Penn in contact with the Rhodes Trust at the time was even aware that Fierceton had any potential connection to the Driver case.

So, they do address it explicitly and clearly.

The details about how Fierceton misrepresented herself to the university are highly relevant to the retaliation claim, because it shows good cause for their actions that has nothing to do with retaliatory purposes. And stating facts about the plaintiff that are relevant to the defense and supported by evidence in a defense to a lawsuit brought by plaintiff isn’t “smearing” under any definition.

These filings do not look good for Fierceton. Her case is weak from what we can see so far.

[Anonymous]

Yes, they simply deny it. No details.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Yes, they simply deny it. No details.

You can’t read? There is detail, the only relevant detail needed: They state that the officials involved did not know of her involvement. That is all the detail that is needed. There are not more details because you can’t show facts for something that didn’t happen.

I’m not sure what you want them to show. You can’t show something that doesn’t exist. If there was (say) some email somewhere from a Penn administrator saying that Fierceton was involved in the Driver lawsuit that had been sent to the administrators dealing with Rhodes, that would have come out in discovery and Penn would have addressed it in their answer. But there aren’t more details because they don’t exist.

Based on the filings, her case is exceptionally weak.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Can anyone do a cliff notes on the Cameron Driver lawsuit? Sounds like he had a medical emergency while in class? What are they alleging Penn did wrong?

The students had to form a chain of people in order to call 911 and then relay the information to whomever was performing life saving actions instructed by the 911 operator. The students’s emergency was in a basement classroom and that is considered an unsafe environment if you can’t call 911 from the classroom.

[Anonymous]

I think the case is sad. As brilliant as she is, I really think she would have landed at a top school had she been honest about her background. Most kids at those schools come from privileged backgrounds anyway, but even saying that she came from privilege but found out how the other side lived when, after a dispute with her mom, she ended up in foster care for a year, would have been powerful.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21174416-penn-answer
Begin reading at page 59 of this document. The narrative is quite interesting. It has to take some mental gymnastics to read the facts and find her worthy of defending.

The father is named Billy Terrell, an actor, accused, among other things, of pathological lying when he and the mom divorced. Hmm..

You do realize that the document you’re linking s not an objective report but the university’s attempt to defend itself. It not only is slanted but it whitewashes Penn’s role in all of this and acknowledges no wrongdoing on their part - as would be expected of an institution defending itself against serious allegations

My guess is that the truth in this matter lies somewhere between the positions that the 2 sides have staked out.

DP. Sure, it isn't objective. But the positions taken in it are detailed and supported by facts. When Penn refers to the lack of police records to support a statement Fierceton made about receiving threatening packages and letters, that is likely to be true. Therefore it is reasonable to conclude that the underlying facts described by Penn have supporting evidence.

It is always telling in a civil dispute when one side has a lot of detail and alleged facts, and the other does not. Fierceton's filing is filled with a bunch of very grand allegations, but comparatively little in the way of citable facts. That is the opposite of the Penn filing.

Lack of police records is not Relevant. It does not disprove her claim.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I think the case is sad. As brilliant as she is, I really think she would have landed at a top school had she been honest about her background. Most kids at those schools come from privileged backgrounds anyway, but even saying that she came from privilege but found out how the other side lived when, after a dispute with her mom, she ended up in foster care for a year, would have been powerful.

What exactly did she say other that she was in foster care and aged out of foster care and had no guardian? You have not read her essay so you can’t say she was being untruthful. Neither Penn nor Rhodes has show that she wrote anything untruthful.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Can anyone do a cliff notes on the Cameron Driver lawsuit? Sounds like he had a medical emergency while in class? What are they alleging Penn did wrong?

The students had to form a chain of people in order to call 911 and then relay the information to whomever was performing life saving actions instructed by the 911 operator. The students’s emergency was in a basement classroom and that is considered an unsafe environment if you can’t call 911 from the classroom.

Additionally, no phone in the room, no cell service, and the stairwells were too narrow to allow emts to get a stretcher to the student(s).

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21174416-penn-answer
Begin reading at page 59 of this document. The narrative is quite interesting. It has to take some mental gymnastics to read the facts and find her worthy of defending.

The father is named Billy Terrell, an actor, accused, among other things, of pathological lying when he and the mom divorced. Hmm..

You do realize that the document you’re linking s not an objective report but the university’s attempt to defend itself. It not only is slanted but it whitewashes Penn’s role in all of this and acknowledges no wrongdoing on their part - as would be expected of an institution defending itself against serious allegations

My guess is that the truth in this matter lies somewhere between the positions that the 2 sides have staked out.

DP. Sure, it isn't objective. But the positions taken in it are detailed and supported by facts. When Penn refers to the lack of police records to support a statement Fierceton made about receiving threatening packages and letters, that is likely to be true. Therefore it is reasonable to conclude that the underlying facts described by Penn have supporting evidence.

It is always telling in a civil dispute when one side has a lot of detail and alleged facts, and the other does not. Fierceton's filing is filled with a bunch of very grand allegations, but comparatively little in the way of citable facts. That is the opposite of the Penn filing.

Lack of police records is not Relevant. It does not disprove her claim.

Sigh, yes, it’s relevant. Honestly the weird Fierceton supporters in this thread are so obtuse.

Here is a primer for you: Fierceton filed suit against the university and certain administrators. She is alleging retaliation, claiming that Penn caused the loss of her Rhodes scholarship because they were unjustly retaliating against her for her involvement in the Driver suit, and seeking damages for that as well as for not granting her Master’s. To defend against the charge of retaliation, the university needs to show that it had good cause for its actions that were not retaliatory in nature. Therefore, the university needs to show that it had ample reason to distrust Fierceton, and to have gone down the path it did with respect to Rhodes. What the answer does is lay out all the facts that demonstrate that Fierceton was untruthful and misrepresented herself in her applications. The police records are relevant because it is a provable fact that shows that something Fierceton said was untrue. It’s just one fact in a constellation of facts that built up to a non-retaliatory justification of Penn’s actions.

The problem for Fierceton is that her credibility is at the very heart of this entire lawsuit. And her credibility does not look good now.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I think the case is sad. As brilliant as she is, I really think she would have landed at a top school had she been honest about her background. Most kids at those schools come from privileged backgrounds anyway, but even saying that she came from privilege but found out how the other side lived when, after a dispute with her mom, she ended up in foster care for a year, would have been powerful.

What exactly did she say other that she was in foster care and aged out of foster care and had no guardian? You have not read her essay so you can’t say she was being untruthful. Neither Penn nor Rhodes has show that she wrote anything untruthful.

Did you read the filing? There are a number of quotes from her essay that are not truthful: that her bones were broken, that she knew all the police from the time she was 6yo. Quoting from page 69:

"Fierceton also provided this false narrative to gain acceptance into two different Penn Summer Abroad programs and a related fellowship program. In her essays, Fierceton wrote about “bouncing around the foster care system throughout my life.” She described herself as being a “child of the system.”

While I understand that the document is Penn's assertion, I highly doubt their quotes from her essays are inaccurate.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21174416-penn-answer
Begin reading at page 59 of this document. The narrative is quite interesting. It has to take some mental gymnastics to read the facts and find her worthy of defending.

The father is named Billy Terrell, an actor, accused, among other things, of pathological lying when he and the mom divorced. Hmm..

You do realize that the document you’re linking s not an objective report but the university’s attempt to defend itself. It not only is slanted but it whitewashes Penn’s role in all of this and acknowledges no wrongdoing on their part - as would be expected of an institution defending itself against serious allegations

My guess is that the truth in this matter lies somewhere between the positions that the 2 sides have staked out.

DP. Sure, it isn't objective. But the positions taken in it are detailed and supported by facts. When Penn refers to the lack of police records to support a statement Fierceton made about receiving threatening packages and letters, that is likely to be true. Therefore it is reasonable to conclude that the underlying facts described by Penn have supporting evidence.

It is always telling in a civil dispute when one side has a lot of detail and alleged facts, and the other does not. Fierceton's filing is filled with a bunch of very grand allegations, but comparatively little in the way of citable facts. That is the opposite of the Penn filing.

Lack of police records is not Relevant. It does not disprove her claim.

Sigh, yes, it’s relevant. Honestly the weird Fierceton supporters in this thread are so obtuse.

Here is a primer for you: Fierceton filed suit against the university and certain administrators. She is alleging retaliation, claiming that Penn caused the loss of her Rhodes scholarship because they were unjustly retaliating against her for her involvement in the Driver suit, and seeking damages for that as well as for not granting her Master’s. To defend against the charge of retaliation, the university needs to show that it had good cause for its actions that were not retaliatory in nature. Therefore, the university needs to show that it had ample reason to distrust Fierceton, and to have gone down the path it did with respect to Rhodes. What the answer does is lay out all the facts that demonstrate that Fierceton was untruthful and misrepresented herself in her applications. The police records are relevant because it is a provable fact that shows that something Fierceton said was untrue. It’s just one fact in a constellation of facts that built up to a non-retaliatory justification of Penn’s actions.

The problem for Fierceton is that her credibility is at the very heart of this entire lawsuit. And her credibility does not look good now.

I don’t support Fierceton, I just point out obfuscation.

The rest is to;dr Blah , blah, blah

No police report is NOT proof that it did not happen and irrelevant. A police report that she falsely reported a threat is Perot, no police report is irrelevant.

They have NO PROOF, period.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I think the case is sad. As brilliant as she is, I really think she would have landed at a top school had she been honest about her background. Most kids at those schools come from privileged backgrounds anyway, but even saying that she came from privilege but found out how the other side lived when, after a dispute with her mom, she ended up in foster care for a year, would have been powerful.

What exactly did she say other that she was in foster care and aged out of foster care and had no guardian? You have not read her essay so you can’t say she was being untruthful. Neither Penn nor Rhodes has show that she wrote anything untruthful.

Did you read the filing? There are a number of quotes from her essay that are not truthful: that her bones were broken, that she knew all the police from the time she was 6yo. Quoting from page 69:

"Fierceton also provided this false narrative to gain acceptance into two different Penn Summer Abroad programs and a related fellowship program. In her essays, Fierceton wrote about “bouncing around the foster care system throughout my life.” She described herself as being a “child of the system.”

While I understand that the document is Penn's assertion, I highly doubt their quotes from her essays are inaccurate.

Neither of those statements are false. She was in duster care, she was a child of system and she was bounced around throughout her life.

Because the reader used their confirmed bias to read things that are not there does not make the statements false.

[Anonymous]

Someone here is weirdly obsessed with defending this woman. Maybe it's more than one poster, but the style and diction all seems to be coming from the same person. Get over it, ok? She got caught in a scam. In the scheme of things she's still just fine - she'll end up with at least one and probably 2 degree from an Ivy League school where she didn't have to pay a dime.