Justine Sacco Says She “Really Suffered” After Tweeting AIDS Joke
In an upcoming book — So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed — the disgraced public relations executive gives her first interview since #HasJustineLandedYet.
“I had a great career and I loved my job and it was taken away from me and there was a lot of glory in that,” Sacco told Ronson, author of The Psychopath Test and The Men Who Stare at Goats.
The new book is being billed as an exploration of “famous shamees, shamers, and bystanders who have been affected.”
Sacco was a public relations executive at IAC until December 2013, when, en route to a family vacation in South Africa, she tweeted, “Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding! I’m white.”
It was a fairly quiet Friday afternoon, and Sacco’s tweet mutated into a full-blown news story; three hours later, BuzzFeed published a story on the internet fury, including the trending #HasJustineLandedYet. When she did land, Sacco deleted the tweet and her account. The next day, IAC announced it had “parted ways” with her.
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“I cried out my body weight in the first twenty-four hours,”
“It was incredibly traumatic. You don’t sleep. You wake up in the middle of the night forgetting where you are. All of a sudden you don’t know what you’re supposed to do. You’ve got no schedule. You’ve got no” — she paused — “purpose. I’m thirty years old. I had a great career. If I don’t have a plan, if I don’t start making steps to reclaim my identity and remind myself of who I am on a daily basis, then I might lose myself. I’m single. So it’s not like I can date, because we google everyone we might date. So that’s been taken away from me too. How am I going to meet people? What are they going to think of me?”
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“They’ve taken my name and my picture, and have created this Justine Sacco thats not me and have labeled this person a racist. I have this fear that if I were in a car accident tomorrow and lost my memory and came back and googled myself, that would be my new reality.”
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“It was a joke about a dire situation that does exist in post-apartheid South Africa that we don’t pay attention to. It was completely outrageous commentary on the disproportionate AIDS statistics. Unfortunately, I am not a character on South Park or a comedian, so I had no business commenting on the epidemic in such a politically incorrect manner on a public platform. To put it simply, I wasn’t trying to raise awareness of AIDS, or piss off the world, or ruin my life. Living in America puts us in a bit of a bubble when it comes to what is going on in the third world. I was making fun of that bubble.”
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http://www.buzzfeed.com/jtes/justine...s-j#.goXD4Orgp
