Vince McMahon and Justine Sacco used to work together at WWE. No joke!

As previously reported by The Inquisitr, Vince McMahon just got back to the states after filming the WWE Tribute To The Troops in the Middle East.

Justine Sacco started a firestorm on Twitter when she made this Tweet before leaving for Africa from London:

“Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!”

Upon landing, Sacco, who was IAC’s senior director of corporate communications, first deleted the tweet and then her entire Twitter account. But the damage was already done and IAC fired her.

But the interesting part is that Justine Sacco joined IAC in September 2011 after working with Vince McMahon as a publicist at WWE. Why is this important? It just shows the type of work environment Sacco was used to working within. As a publicist for WWE, Sacco would have been used to a job where AJ Lee’s boy friend CM Punk could be called “f*ck face” as a friendly hello by a reporter.

You can’t argue with a straight face that WWE is politically correct (heck, McMahon even had the RAW announcers making fun of President Obama recently). To give you an idea how extreme things can be in the WWE, they faked Vince McMahon’s death by blowing up his limo and even convinced the world the story line was real for quite a while. WWE even scheduled tributes to McMahon from wrestlers and WWE stars mourning his death.

Never mind, along with the more normal clients like Urban Spoon and Match.com, Sacco also worked with College Humor. These type of bad jokes are a dime a dozen on such sites and fits in perfectly with Justine Sacco’s WWE career history. But, to be clear, I’m not saying the WWE is any way responsible for making Sacco the way she is or directly influenced the decisions she has made. But it seems likely that her track record of making offensive comments would have been more likely to be overlooked while at WWE as long as they didn’t affect background business operations.

And it’s not like Sacco doesn’t have a history of trying to offend while at IAC. She once tweeted to PETA: “I like animals, but when it’s this cold out I’ll skin one myself for the fur.” Other lovely gems include: “I had a sex dream about an autistic kid last night. #fml” and “I can’t be fired for things I say while intoxicated right?” So, really, it could argued the only reason she was fired now was because her comment became infamous via the media, not because of its insensitive content per se.

Do you think Justine Sacco’s history of bad jokes was influenced by working with Vince McMahon at WWE? Do you think the racist joke should have gotten her fired?

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