now.â
âIn light of @JustineSacco disgusting racist tweet, Iâm donating to @CARE today,â and âHow did @JustineSacco get a PR job?! Her level of racist ignorance belongs on Fox News. #AIDS can affect anyone!â and âNo words for that horribly disgusting, racist as fuck tweet from Justine Sacco. I am beyond horrified,â and âIâm an IAC employee and I donât want @JustineSacco doing any communications on our behalf ever again. Ever,â and âEveryone go report this cunt @Justine Sacco,â and from IAC: âThis is an outrageous, offensive comment. Employee in question currently unreachable on an intl flight,â and âFascinated by the @JustineSacco train wreck. Itâs global and sheâs apparently *still on the plane,*â and âAll I want for Christmas is to see @JustineSaccoâs face when her plane lands and she checks her inbox/voicemail,â and âOh man, @JustineSacco is going to have the most painful phone-turning-on moment ever when her plane lands,â and âLooks like @JustineSacco lands in about 9mins, this should be interesting,â and âWe are about to watch this @JustineSacco bitch get fired. In REAL time. Before she even KNOWS sheâs getting fired,â and then, after Hannah frantically deleted Justineâs Twitter account, âSorry @JustineSaccoâyour tweet lives on forever,â and so on for a total of a hundred thousand tweets, according to calculations by the website BuzzFeed, until weeks later: âMan, remember Justine Sacco? #HasJustineLandedYet. God that was awesome. MILLIONS of people waiting for her to land.â
â
I once asked a car-crash victim what it had felt like to be in a smashup. She said her eeriest memory was how one second the car was her friend, working for her, its contours designed to fit her body perfectly, everything smooth and sleek and luxurious, and then a blink of an eye later it had become a jagged weapon of tortureâlike she was inside an iron maiden. Her friend had become her worst enemy.
â
Over the years, Iâve sat across tables from a lot of people whose lives had been destroyed. Usually, the people who did the destroying were the government or the military or big business or, as with Jonah Lehrer, basically themselves (at least at first with Jonahâwe took over as he tried to apologize). Justine Sacco felt like the first person I had ever interviewed who had been destroyed by
us
.
â¢Â  â¢Â  â¢
G oogle has an engineâGoogle AdWordsâthat tells you how many times your name has been searched for during any given month. In October 2013, Justine was googled thirty times. In November 2013, she was googled thirty times. Between December 20 and the end of December, she was googled 1,220,000 times.
â
A man had been waiting for her at Cape Town Airport. He was a Twitter user, @Zac_R. He took her photograph and posted it online. âYup,â he wrote, â@JustineSacco HAS in fact landed at Cape Town international. Sheâs decided to wear sunnies as a disguise.â
Justine Sacco (in dark glasses) at Cape Town Airport. Photograph by @Zac_R, reproduced with his permission.
Three weeks had passed since Justine had pressed send on the tweet. The
New York Post
had been following her to the gym. Newspapers were ransacking her Twitter feed for more horrors.
And the award for classiest tweet of all time goes to . . .
âI had a sex dream about an autistic kid last night.â (February 24, 2012)
ââ 16 T WEETS J USTINE S ACCO R EGRETS ,âB UZZ F EED ,D ECEMBER 20 , 2013
This was the only time Justine would ever talk to a journalist about what happened to her, she told me. It was just too harrowing. And inadvisable. âAs a publicist,â she e-mailed, âI donât know that I would ever recommend to a client that they participate in your book. Iâm very
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