The Coldplay couple were a cold case — frozen so stiff, they were nearly relegated to the morgue of our collective consciousness. Soooo close to being a 2025 footnote and left alone to live their lives in private.
Naturally, Kristin Cabot, the woman involved, decided to put the spotlight back on herself.
Wha?
Cabot spoke to the New York Times and the Times of London in stories published Thursday, six long months after she and boss Andy Byron, the CEO of software firm Astronomer, were caught canoodling on a kiss cam at a Coldplay concert in Boston.
You’re remembering now, right? How their sudden breaking away from each other and ducking out of view sparked an unprecedented virality and international media feeding frenzy?
“Either they’re having an affair or they’re just very shy,” the band’s Chris Martin joked.
The infamous 16-second clip from hell led to the executives — both married but, Cabot said, separated from their spouses — leaving their jobs at the start-up, where she was the head of HR.
Then they disappeared, which fueled even more public speculation.
I have to ask: Why re-appear now? Why put yourself right back in the public eye?
“‘Silence is acceptance.’ And I thought, ‘Oh my god, that’s what’s going to be out there for the rest of her life,’” Cabot told The New York Times.
The NYT piece — headlined “The ritual shaming of a woman at the center of the woman at the Coldplay concert” — was meant to mount sympathy for Cabot, “just a mom from New Hampshire” who describes being hounded by strangers and receiving death threats.
The story frames her, and her alone, as the victim: cast from polite society because she is a woman, while her male partner in crime is still sitting pretty.
But that’s not the case. They both got their licks.
Interestingly, he has stayed mum. “Reached by phone, Byron declined to be interviewed for this article.”
Cabot, 53, meanwhile, reportedly hired the public relations guru who helped Monica Lewinsky reframe her identity from Oval Office strumpet to “patient zero” of online bullying.
Similarly, Cabot wants to dispel the notion that she slept her way to the top, saying, “I spent so much of my career pulling men’s hands off my ass.”
She also gave a blow-by-blow of how her and Byron’s office connection led to a blossoming romance. It was she who invited him to see Coldplay.
“I made a bad decision and had a couple of High Noons and danced and acted inappropriately with my boss. And it’s not nothing. And I took accountability and I gave up my career for that. That’s the price I chose to pay,” she said.
“I was like: ‘I got this. I can have a crush. I can handle it.’”
Cabot reserved particular scorn for other women, including Martin’s ex, Gwyneth Paltrow — who, in July, appeared in an Astronomer ad poking fun at the incident.
“I’ve been hired on a very temporary basis to speak on behalf of the 300-plus employees at Astronomer,” Paltrow said in a video viewed millions of times. “We’ve been thrilled so many people have a newfound interest in data workflow automation.”
“I was such a fan of her company [Goop] which seemed to be about uplifting women,” Cabot told the Times of London. “And then she did this. I thought, ‘How dare she after the beating she got for all the conscious uncoupling stuff.’ What a hypocrite.”
Yeah but it was pretty clever.
I have to admit, I felt sympathy for Cabot and Byron, 50, at the time. It’s a sad evolution of our social media-focused culture, where we fixate and destroy anonymous people’s lives for sport and clicks. Laugh now — but it may be you, random Joe Blow, who is up next on the viral shame game.
I doubt Cabot’s summer was pleasant by any stretch. And maybe she has a steep climb back to another human resources perch.
But I disagree about silence. It isn’t always acceptance.
Sometimes it’s dignified.
And the big winner of this mini press tour is High Noon.
[Notigroup Newsroom in collaboration with other media outlets, with information from the following sources]
