The PR executive who was summarily dismissed after her racist Tweet sparked a revolt on social media has apologised - as her own father called her a ‘f****** idiot’.
Justine Sacco said that she was ‘ashamed’ over her actions and said she had been ‘cavalier’ in making her tasteless joke about the AIDS crisis in Africa
But her father, who has not been publicly named, was more forthright and said that what she did was ‘unforgivable’.
He also apparently backed the campaign to name and shame his daughter as, in an ironic twist, it emerged he moved his family from Cape Town to the US in 1994 to escape racism at the end of Apartheid.
Sacco is now thought to be holed up with her family in South Africa and will be spending Christmas coming to terms with her sudden ascent to the Internet's public enemy no.1.
Losing her job as a communications director could also mean losing her US work visa -potentially forcing her to leave America.
Sacco was fired by IAC, a major US media company which owns Match.com and Vimeo, after she sent the Tweet as she was about to board a 12-hour flight from London to Cape Town.
It read: ‘Going to Africa. Hope I don't get AIDS. Just Kidding. I'm White!'
The post was retweeted over 3,000 times and was picked up by media outlets around the world, however Sacco remained completely unaware of it all because she was in the air.
The blonde publicist was pictured arriving in Cape Town looking shocked and talking on her phone.
Moments later the offending Tweet and Sacco's Twitter account disappeared - and IAC announced it had fired her.
Now she has apologised in a statement released to The Star, a South African newspaper.
It read: ‘My greatest concern was this statement reach South Africa first.
‘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.
‘For being insensitive to this crisis -- which does not discriminate by race, gender or sexual orientation, but which terrifies us all uniformly -- and to the millions of people living with the virus, I am ashamed.
Justine Sacco has no idea her offensive tweet made the news because she is on a flight to Africa
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