Rachael Sacks, an attractive, wealthy girl, was at a grocery store and felt slighted by the cashier. She proceeded to write what some felt was a classist and offensive rant on Thought Catalog titled “I’m Not Going To Pretend That I’m Poor To Be Accepted By You.”
Here are 5 Fast Facts about Rachael, the controversy she sparked, and her follow-up Thought Catalog piece.
1. Rachael is Receiving Hateful & Derogatory Comments After Her Blog Post
@RAnSacks Read ur blog about being a chronic female masturbator. you didn't need to write that, people already knew you’re a fucking wanker
— Larry Chimp (@LarryChimp) October 18, 2013
This was a tweet Rachael received sent to her Twitter account @ransacks. According to the Daily Mail, she has received “endless online vitriol….”
Rachael seems to be taking things in stride and enjoying the attention rather than introspecting and realizing that there may be something she can learn from this experience.
Things have reached a fever pitch as an avowed Rachael hater posted the following extremely hateful (and racist) letter under a pseudonym, as reported by Americans Against the Tea Party:
WOW. So you’re not going to pretend you are poor to be accepted…but you will totally pretend to be a rich NYC girl to make yourself feel better about who you really are…You’ve ruined your rep and name before you were even able to make it into anything lol. It should be clear to you that you have f***ed yourself. This will be what you will be known for, for the rest of your life. You will be forever known as another dumb c**t that everyone made fun of on the internet. You’re up there with racist UCLA girl and that guy who got beat up on that bus by that old guy with the beard. And what’s even sadder is that you’re not even as famous or as novel as them. You’re just another loser who everyone hates and will never want to associate with; and nothing you do will be able to change that.
I’d say something about feeling bad for your little dwarf dad who has probably been hurt somehow by all of this, but I really don’t care lol.
Read the full letter here.
2. Rachael Was Disregarded & Vaguely Slighted, Leading Her to Call the Cashier ‘Bitter,’ ‘Petty’ & ‘Unhappy’ With Her Own Life
According to her Thought Catalog blog, Rachael was standing in line at the supermarket with a bag from Mulberry, near her apartment in the priciest neighborhood in Manhattan, the West Village.
The girl in front of her said to the cashier that she went to an in-state school to save money, the cashier said “that’s smart,” and both of them glared at Rachael. Rachael said that the glare implied the following:
… as if to say here’s daddy’s little princess wasting money, that little piece of shit.
Rachael says she tried to be chipper and ask the cashier how her day was, to which the cashier didn’t respond. Rachael says she left the store “feeling like a turd.”
She says in the post regarding the incident:
[Judgment based on wealth] just seems really petty and makes you look bitter and unhappy with your own life if you are casting nasty glares at college girls in Gristedes because you’re a cashier.
3. Rachael Has Submitted a New Piece to Thought Catalog; No Surprise After Front-Paging on the New York Post
Image Credit: Rachael’s Facebook
Her new Thought Catalog piece is called “I’m The ‘Rich’ Girl You Love To Hate And You’re All Idiots For It”
Rachael delivers the same hubris she’s come to fame for and refuses to apologize in the piece:
What I am is a scapegoat for the current issues in our economy and honestly, it doesn’t phase me.
Not quite, Rae-Rae.
I’ve been criticized by the media for taking this all in stride and not being more apologetic. What else am I supposed to do? Cry? Be a p*ssy and flip-flop on my own views? Beg for the public’s forgiveness? These are things I would never do. Who am I to turn my back on my own views? Who am I to attempt to talk about things that are taboo?
Just say sorry and that you learned to feel bad for poor people rather than yourself and your West Village apartment, the rent of which is probably higher than most people’s entire incomes ($30k on the low end!). Simple stuff.
Still, Rachael does seem on the cusp of enlightenment when she says:
All that I was attempting to do was express my views as I learn who I am and grow up. People found it to be off-putting and obnoxious, but I am learning. My writing will improve. I will learn from other experiences. I am just expressing myself, where I am in this life, and where I will be going.
Her most interesting point is the suggestion that the media is hypocritical:
By labeling me “rich,” the media is doing exactly what I said people shouldn’t do.
She misses the salient part of why she is being labelled rich which is not at all a critique of her personality, but rather the fact that she has led an extremely privileged life and hence, her indictment of a poor cashier for being unresponsive lacks self-awareness.
Girl, you rich and hot. Do you realize how zero attention most people get all the time always? And then they have to go to an awful, difficult, and underpaid job. Get over yourself.
4. Rachael’s Father Is a Fertility Doctor & Her Family Lives in a $700,000 Home in Maryland
Rachael Sacks with her father via The Daily Mail.
Dr. Sacks, Rachael’s dad, is perhaps a bit more appreciative of those with “difficult” lives, as he graduated from a state school, Louisiana State University. He completed his residency at Georgetown U and eventually joined his practice in 1992.
He is board certified in Obstetrics and Gynecology in addition to Reproductive Endocrinology and Infertility, according the Google cache of the Columbia Fertility Associates website. His profile there has been deleted, ostensibly because of Rachael’s notoriety.
5. Rachael’s Social Media Accounts Show Some Racist and Classist Thinking
Some fob in my class just said "how you say". Lololol @TheOneRitz
— Rachael Sacks (@RAnSacks) July 17, 2013
Fob in my class' accent is so thick she says "Shakespeare" and someone asks "what is that?" because she couldn't understand her. Lol
— Rachael Sacks (@RAnSacks) July 22, 2013
FOB means “fresh off the boat,” a term Rachael repeatedly uses on her Twitter. Again, there’s no reason to crucify her, but just to make the point that she simply doesn’t understand how good she’s had it, and how hard life can be for others, struggling to make it in America — let alone other countries.
While her notorious first post includes some reasonable quotes, like …
Thinking that other people are beneath you just because of the financial circumstances they were born into is just gross.
… there are some problematic aspects to her thinking, including equating wealth with perfection. She says, “I grew up… in a decently rich area where people who work for the government go to raise their perfect kids.”
She also says obtusely, “I am sorry that I was born into great financial circumstances and my father likes to provide for me. I am sorry I don’t have to go to a state school to save my parents money.” Rachael can only be sarcastically sorry, rather than sincerely appreciative of her privilege and the hardship of others.
Rachael does deserve credit for her frank and earnest inquiry and thoughts regarding female sexuality and masturbation in “Confession: I’m a Chronic Female Masturbator.”
Pleased to report that Rachael has eaten poor-people food
