UPDATED:
Overnight Justine Sacco issued an apology for her racist tweet.
She said:
“Words cannot express how sorry I am, and how necessary it is for me to apologize to the people of South Africa, who I have offended due to a needless and careless tweet. There is an AIDS crisis taking place in this country, that we read about in America, but do not live with or face on a continuous basis. Unfortunately, it is terribly easy to be cavalier about an epidemic that one has never witnessed firsthand.”
In the statement to South African newspaper The Star (and shared with ABC America) she also said “AIDS does not “discriminate by race, gender or sexual orientation,” and that she was “ashamed” of her comment.
****
You didn’t think we’d make it throught the year without one more WTF Internet story did you?
This one has scraped through just in time.
Yesterday, PR Executive for American Marketing firm IAC, Justine Sacco, tweeted what has been coined ‘the most racist tweet of the year’.
She then boarded a 12 hour flight to Africa and had no idea that her life was completely falling apart while she was in the air. By the time she landed, Sacco was the number one trend on twitter and google. Oh, and she had been fired.
Here’s how it all went down.
Before boarding a twelve hour flight from London’s Heathrow airport to South Africa’s Cape Town, Justine thought it would be a great idea to send out a Tweet to her 7,838 followers that read:
Yep. Just let that sink in.
Obviously, the tweet went immediately viral. Sacco was getting so much attention for her disgustingly racist joke that her company released a statement saying they were appalled.
She disappeared from her company’s website, so it was assumed she had been fired. Somebody registered the domain name justinesacco.com and redirected it to Aid for Africa. She became an internet sensation and she had no freaking idea. Flying blissfully above the earth, Sacco had no clue that everyone below her was waiting to see what would happen when she landed.
Google had a timer in the corner of their homepage counting down to when her plane would land. The hashtag #HasJustineLandedYet was trending on twitter:
So what actually happened when Justine landed?
Well, her dad was waiting for her at the airport. He had no idea what was going on, but soon figured it out when a random twitter user approached him and started asking him questions about his daughter. The twitter user – ‘Zac_R’ – said he had to see for himself “if it was real”. Sacco’s father apparently then said some racist stuff which made things worse:
Justine’s dad is like many South Africans who fled the county post ’94. He believed “the country would be a shithole” #HasJustineLandedYet
— Zac (@Zac_R) December 21, 2013
Not long after her plane touched down, Sacco deleted her Twitter and Facebook accounts. Her employer released a statement confirming that she had, in fact, been fired:
“The offensive comment does not reflect the views and values of IAC, “We take this issue very seriously, and we have parted ways with the employee in question. There is no excuse for the hateful statements that have been made and we condemn them unequivocally.”
Then she disappeared off the internet’s radar. One can only assume she is laying low. But, as a (now former) PR hotshot should know, no amount of laying low will delete something from your google footprint. Her appalingly racist tweet and the saga that followed will be the top internet search against her name forever.
She boarded that plane with her life intact. She disembarked a infamous internet sensation.
Maybe next time she’ll think twice about making racist jokes online.
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Top Comments
Man, did she Yumi the shark.
I laughed when I read the comments. Sounds as if she was squaffing too much champers in first class, got bored and started tweeting to kill time. Probably best not to express them on twitter though, especially in this age of faux moral outrage with any half witted comment.
It is a fact that approx 1 in 4 black people in Africa are HIV positive, so where is the moral outrage about this? No, the outrage is against some nitwit who was tactless with her tweets and her career and reputation is now in tatters. She also had a dig at the Brits and some German guy with BO, but it was the HIV comment that has provoked such ire. Seems to be you can say anything you like about a person and it is OK, but dare mention the colour of their skin then you become a racist - the greatest crime for a white person these days.
If you are to post "facts", at least get them right!