by Jon Ronson
—
It was December 20, 2013. For the previous two days she’d been tweeting little acerbic jokes to her 170 followers about her holiday travels. She was like a social media Sally Bowles, decadent and flighty and unaware that serious politics were looming. There was her joke about the German man on the plane from New York: “Weird German Dude: You’re in first class. It’s 2014. Get some deodorant.—Inner monolog as I inhale BO. Thank god for pharmaceuticals.” Then the layover at Heathrow: “Chili—cucumber sandwiches—bad teeth. Back in London!” Then the final leg: “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!”
She chuckled to herself, pressed send, and wandered around the airport for half an hour, sporadically checking Twitter.
“I got nothing,” she told me. “No replies.”
I imagined her feeling a bit deflated about this—that sad feeling when nobody congratulates you for being funny, that black silence when the Internet doesn’t talk back. She boarded the plane. It was an eleven-hour flight. She slept. When the plane landed, she turned on her phone. Straightaway there was a text from someone she hadn’t spoken to since high school: “I’m so sorry to see what’s happening.”
She looked at it, baffled.
“And then my phone started to explode,” she said.
—
We were having this conversation three weeks later at—her choice of location—the Cookshop restaurant in New York City. It was the very same restaurant where Michael had recounted to me the tale of Jonah’s destruction. It was becoming for me the Restaurant of Stories of Obliterated Lives. But it was only a half coincidence. It was close to the building where they both worked. Michael had been offered a job at The Daily Beast as a result of his great Jonah scoop, and Justine had an office upstairs, running the PR department for the magazine’s publisher, IAC—which also owned Vimeo and OkCupid and Match.com. The reason why she wanted to meet me here, and why she was wearing her expensive-looking work clothes, was that at six p.m. she was due in there to clean out her desk.
As she sat on the runway at Cape Town Airport, a second text popped up: “You need to call me immediately.” It was from her best friend, Hannah. “You’re the number one worldwide trend on Twitter right now.”
“In light of @JustineSacco disgusting racist tweet, I’m donating to @CARE today,” and “How did @JustineSacco get a PR job?! Her level of racist ignorance belongs on Fox News. #AIDS can affect anyone!” and “No words for that horribly disgusting, racist as fuck tweet from Justine Sacco. I am beyond horrified,” and “I’m an IAC employee and I don’t want @JustineSacco doing any communications on our behalf ever again. Ever,” and “Everyone go report this cunt @Justine Sacco,” and from IAC: “This is an outrageous, offensive comment. Employee in question currently unreachable on an intl flight,” and “Fascinated by the @JustineSacco train wreck. It’s global and she’s apparently *still on the plane,*” and “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,” and “Looks like @JustineSacco lands in about 9mins, this should be interesting,” and “We are about to watch this @JustineSacco bitch get fired. In REAL time. Before she even KNOWS she’s getting fired,” and then, after Hannah frantically deleted Justine’s Twitter account, “Sorry @JustineSacco—your tweet lives on forever,” and so on for a total of a hundred thousand tweets, according to calculations by the website BuzzFeed, until weeks later: “Man, remember Justine Sacco? #HasJustineLandedYet. God that was awesome. MILLIONS of people waiting for her to land.”
—
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 torture—like she was inside an iron maiden. Her friend had become her worst enemy.
—
Over the years, I’ve 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 Jonah—we took over as he tried to apologize). Justine Sacco felt like the first person I had ever interviewed who had been destroyed by us.
• • •
Google has an engine—Google AdWords—that 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.
—
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. “Yup,” he wrote, “@JustineSacco HAS in fact landed at Cape Town international. She’s decided to wear sunnies as a disguise.”
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 . . .
“I had a sex dream about an autistic kid last night.” (February 24, 2012)
—“16 TWEETS JUSTINE SACCO REGRETS,” BUZZFEED, DECEMBER 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. “As a publicist,” she e-mailed, “I don’t know that I would ever recommend to a client that they participate in your book. I’m very nervous about it. I am really terrified about opening myself up to future attacks. But I think it’s necessary. I want someone to just show how crazy my situation is.”
It was crazy because “only an insane person would think that white people don’t get AIDS.” That was about the first thing she said to me when she sat down. “To me, it was so insane a comment for an American to make I thought there was no way that anyone could possibly think it was a literal statement. I know there are hateful people out there who don’t like other people and are generally mean. But that’s not me.”
Justine had been about three hours into her flight—probably asleep in the air above Spain or Algeria—when retweets of her tweet began to overwhelm my Twitter feed. After an initial happy little “Oh, wow, someone is fucked,” I started to think her shamers must have been gripped by some kind of group madness or something. It seemed obvious that her tweet, whilst not a great joke, wasn’t racist, but a reflexive comment on white privilege—on our tendency to naively imagine ourselves immune from life’s horrors. Wasn’t it?
“It was a joke about a situation that exists,” Justine e-mailed. “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.”
—
As it happens, I once made a similar—albeit funnier—joke in a column for The Guardian. It was about a time when I flew into the United States and was sent for “secondary processing” (there was a mafioso hit man on the run at the time with a name that apparently sounded quite a lot like Jon Ronson). I was taken into a packed holding room and told to wait.
There are signs eve
rywhere saying: “The use of cell phones is strictly prohibited.”
I’m sure they won’t mind me checking my text messages, I think. I mean, after all, I am white.
My joke was funnier than Justine’s joke. It was better worded. Plus, as it didn’t invoke AIDS sufferers, it was less unpleasant. So mine was funnier, better worded, and less unpleasant. But it suddenly felt like that Russian roulette scene in The Deer Hunter when Christopher Walken puts the gun to his head and lets out a scream and pulls the trigger and the gun doesn’t go off. It was to a large extent Justine’s own fault that so many people thought she was a racist. Her reflexive sarcasm had been badly worded, her wider Twitter persona quite brittle. But I hadn’t needed to think about her tweet for more than a few seconds before I understood what she’d been trying to say. There must have been among her shamers a lot of people who chose to willfully misunderstand it for some reason.
“I can’t fully grasp the misconception that’s happening around the world,” Justine said. “They’ve taken my name and my picture, and have created this Justine Sacco that’s 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.”
I suddenly remembered how weirdly tarnished I felt when the spambot men created their fake Jon Ronson, getting my character traits all wrong, turning me into some horrific, garrulous foodie, and strangers believed it was me, and there was nothing I could do. That’s what was happening to Justine, although instead of a foodie she was a racist and instead of fifty people it was 1,220,000.
—
Journalists are supposed to be intrepid. We’re supposed to stand tall in the face of injustice and not fear crazy mobs. But neither Justine nor I saw much fearlessness in how her story was reported. Even articles about how “we could all be minutes away from having a Justine Sacco moment” were all couched in “I am NO WAY defending what she said,” she told me.
But as vile as the sentiment she expressed was, there are some potential extenuating circumstances here that don’t excuse her behavior but might mitigate her misdeed somewhat. Repugnant as her joke was, there is a difference between outright hate speech and even the most ill-advised attempt at humor.
—ANDREW WALLENSTEIN, “JUSTINE SACCO: SYMPATHY FOR THIS TWITTER DEVIL,” Variety, DECEMBER 22, 2013
Andrew Wallenstein was braver than most. But still: It read like the old media saying to social media, “Don’t hurt me.”
—
Justine released an apology statement. She cut short her South African family vacation “because of safety concerns. People were threatening to go on strike at the hotels I was booked into if I showed up. I was told no one could guarantee my safety.” Word spread around the Internet that she was heiress to a $4.8 billion fortune, as people assumed her father was the South African mining tycoon Desmond Sacco. I wrongly thought this was true about her right up until I alluded to her billions over lunch and she looked at me like I was crazy.
“I grew up on Long Island,” she said.
“Not in a Jay Gatsby–type estate?” I said.
“Not in a Jay Gatsby–type estate,” Justine said. “My mom was single my entire life. She was a flight attendant. My dad sold carpets.”
(She later e-mailed that while she “grew up with a single mom who was a flight attendant and worked two jobs, when I was twenty-one or twenty-two, she married well. My stepfather is pretty well off, and I think there was a picture of my mom’s car on my Instagram, which gave the impression that I’m from a wealthy family. So maybe that’s another reason why people assumed I was a spoiled brat. I don’t know. But thought it was worth bringing up to you.”)
Years ago I interviewed some white supremacists from an Aryan Nations compound in Idaho about their conviction that the Bilderberg Group—a secretive annual meeting of politicians and business leaders—was a Jewish conspiracy.
“How can you call it a Jewish conspiracy when practically no Jews go to it?” I asked them.
“They may not be actual Jews,” one replied, “but they are . . .” He paused. “. . . Jewish.”
So there it was: At Aryan Nations, you didn’t need to be an actual Jew to be Jew-ish. And the same was true on Twitter with the privileged racist Justine Sacco, who was neither especially privileged nor a racist. But it didn’t matter. It was enough that it sort of seemed like she was.
Her extended family in South Africa were ANC supporters. One of the first things Justine’s aunt told her when she arrived at the family home from Cape Town Airport was: “This is not what our family stands for. And now, by association, you’ve almost tarnished the family.”
At this, Justine started to cry. I sat looking at her for a moment. Then I tried to say something hopeful to improve the mood.
“Sometimes things need to reach a brutal nadir before people see sense,” I said. “So maybe you’re our brutal nadir.”
“Wow,” Justine said. She dried her eyes. “Of all the things I could have been in society’s collective consciousness, it never struck me that I’d end up a brutal nadir.”
A woman approached our table—a friend of Justine’s. She sat down next to her, fixed her with an empathetic look, and said something at such a low volume I couldn’t hear it.
“Oh, you think I’m going to be grateful for this?” Justine replied.
“Yes, you will,” the woman said. “Every step prepares you for the next, especially when you don’t think so. I know you can’t see that right now. That’s okay. I get it. But come on. Did you really have your dream job?”
Justine looked at her. “I think I did,” she said.
• • •
I got an e-mail from the Gawker journalist Sam Biddle—the man who may have started the onslaught against Justine. One of Justine’s 170 followers had sent him the tweet. He retweeted it to his 15,000 followers. And that’s how it may have begun.
“The fact that she was a PR chief made it delicious,” he e-mailed me. “It’s satisfying to be able to say ‘OK, let’s make a racist tweet by a senior IAC employee count this time.’ And it did. I’d do it again.”
Her destruction was justified, Sam Biddle was saying, because Justine was a racist, and because attacking her was punching up. They were cutting down a member of the media elite, continuing the civil rights tradition that started with Rosa Parks, the hitherto silenced underdogs shaming into submission the powerful racist. But I didn’t think any of those things were true. If punching Justine Sacco was ever punching up—and it didn’t seem so to me given that she was an unknown PR woman with 170 Twitter followers—the punching only intensified as she plummeted to the ground. Punching Jonah Lehrer wasn’t punching up either—not when he was begging for forgiveness in front of that giant-screen Twitter feed.
A life had been ruined. What was it for: just some social media drama? I think our natural disposition as humans is to plod along until we get old and stop. But with social media, we’ve created a stage for constant artificial high drama. Every day a new person emerges as a magnificent hero or a sickening villain. It’s all very sweeping, and not the way we actually are as people. What rush was overpowering us at times like this? What were we getting out of it?
I could tell Sam Biddle was finding it startling too—like when you shoot a gun and the power of it sends you recoiling violently backward. He said he was “surprised” to see how quickly Justine was destroyed: “I never wake up and hope I get to fire someone that day—and certainly never hope to ruin anyone’s life.” Still, his e-mail ended, he had a feeling she’d be “fine eventually, if not already. Everyone’s attention span is so short. They’ll be mad about something new today.”
• • •
When Justine left me that evening to clear out her desk, she got only as far as the lobby of her office building before she collapsed on the floor in tears. Later,
we talked again. I told her what Sam Biddle had said—about how she was “probably fine now.” I was sure he wasn’t being deliberately glib. He was just like everyone who participates in mass online destruction. Who would want to know? Whatever that pleasurable rush that overwhelms us is—group madness or something else—nobody wants to ruin it by facing the fact that it comes with a cost.
“Well, I’m not fine,” Justine said. “I’m really suffering. 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. Everybody else was very happy about that. 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 new people? What are they going to think of me?”
She asked me who else was going to be in my book about people who had been publicly shamed.
“Well, Jonah Lehrer so far,” I said.
“How’s he doing?” she asked me.
“Pretty badly, I think,” I said.
“Badly in what way?” She looked concerned—I think more for what this might prophesy about her own future than about Jonah’s.
