the Barstow School in Kansas City. Her senior year I drove her to school every day as her mom had a job that precluded that and there was only one car in the family. She lived a mile or so from me and it was completely convenient to do so.
Jessie had already alienated a lot of people at school. She was always willing to take up unpopular and divisive stands on things. If she could piss people off, she was happy. Her claim about childhood trauma and abuse simply does not ring true to me. I realize those kinds of things often go unseen, but having observed her from the time she was in 8th grade to her ignominious dismissal from Barstow at the very end of her senior year, I'd say she was always conning people, always being deceptive, always convinced she was so much smarter than everyone else that she could get away with it.
The final straw was her submission to the school literary magazine. It wasn't her work. The student editors didn't realize it, but when the magazine was printed and distributed to the student body, several people actually recognized it. Plagiarism, pure and simple. When I drove her home from school the day she'd been called in to the honor committee, she offered me some lame excuse about meeting a deadline. Well, I'm a published writer myself (trust me, you'll never have heard of me) and I know deadlines and they are not an excuse for plagiarism. She was told to clear out her locker and not return. She was not welcome to attend graduation. They'd mail her diploma to her.
The entire episode left a very bad taste in the mouths of everyone at Barstow.
Given that, when I first started seeing these stories about her, I wasn't at all surprised. It is precisely the kind of long con she'd work. What astonishes me is that she apparently got away with it for so long.
I myself am thoroughly Caucasian, so I realize I know very little about African American culture or identity. But I find it somewhat hard to believe that no one every took one look at her and said, "You're a fraud." And I'm not meaning to say she didn't "look" African American, but wouldn't a lot of her behaviors and speech been a giveaway?
I'm also curious as to at what point she started assuming a Black identity. Don't colleges keep track of that? How would she have gone from being a White student in Kansas to a Black one in Oregon or Wisconsin? And it would also be interesting to know exactly how she got hired at GWU. I'm sure she knew that if she'd tried to get hired by Howard University they'd have laughed her all the way back to Kansas.
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