What Happened to Justine Sacco, The Woman Whose Life Was Ruined by an AIDS joke she made on Twitter?
The name Justine Sacco may not ring any bells in an internet culture where, it seems, everyone gets their 15 minutes of fame, but you’ll no doubt remember the circumstances that surrounded her in December 2013. Sacco was the top PR person for InterActiveCorp who — before boarding an 11-hour flight to South Africa — tweeted the following:
Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!
While on her half-day flight, that tweet was picked up by Sam Biddle at Valleywag, and by the time she’d landed the next day, it had gone viral. In fact, it had launched a hashtag, #HasJustineLandedYet, as the internet circled her landing like vultures. There was even someone at the airport waiting for her in South Africa to snap a photo and continue piling on the shame.
Some of the responses to her comment included: "How did @JustineSacco get a PR job?!", All I want for Christmas is to see @JustineSacco’s face when her plane lands and she checks her inbox/voicemail.", and “Oh man, @JustineSacco is going to have the most painful phone-turning-on moment ever when her plane lands. We are about to watch he get fired. In REAL time. Before she even KNOWS she’s getting fired.” The company that she worked for released a statement, all while Justine was still on her flight. "This is an outrageous, offensive comment. Employee in question currently unreachable on a flight," they wrote.
To say that her life was ruined, at least for a while, would be an understatement. She had embarrassed her South African family, longtime supporters of racial equality, and she was fired from her job and forced into seclusion, where she had “cried out her body weight” in the first 24 hours. Her life was destroyed over a stupid tweet.
The tweet was meant as a joke, and meant to be shared only with her small group of followers/friends and while I think we can all agree that a PR person should have been more careful about how she articulated herself on a public forum, was it really worth ruining her life over?
Fortunately, while it took a very long time, Sacco did eventually pick herself back up, but not before some setbacks. After spending some time working in Ethiopia, she took a job as the PR person for Hot or Not (an application used to rate photographs of people as being ‘hot’ (attractive) or ‘not’ (unattractive).