Kristin Cabot was unintentionally and unexpectedly exposed to the global social media pillory this summer. She was with her boss at a performance by the band Coldplay, he embraced her from behind and they were suddenly shown in huge size by the camera that searches the audience for couples in love, the kisscam. She put her hands in front of her face, he ducked down and Coldplay singer Chris Martin said: “Either those two are having an affair or they’re very shy.”
Before they even got home, a video of the moment was posted on TikTok, where it was viewed and shared millions of times. It became the meme of the year. In the hours and days that followed, Cabot, especially she, was inundated with comments, abuse and threats. She became a victim of the Internet’s peeping tom tribunal and a symbol of the spectacle economy associated with it. Every sensational story can be profitable, especially if it is picked up by traditional media. That happened twice in this case. American TV news comedians such as Jimmy Fallon and Stephen Colbert made entire songs out of it. There were parodies and even dignified reflections – “how the Coldplay kiss cam became a cultural moment”.
In The New York Times This Friday, Kristin Cabot tells us for the first time what it’s like to stand in the pillory, who starts yelling at you the loudest and how you try to get your life back on track.
Cabot (53) is guilty. That she is her boss, for whom she is increasingly ‘big feelings‘, decided to ask along to a pop concert, which she calls “a wrong decision”. She had had a few cocktails, High Noons, and “danced and acted inappropriately” with her boss. He was the CEO of a data and AI company, where she worked as head of human resources. “That is no small thing. And I took responsibility for that and gave up my job for it. That is the price I chose to pay.” She wanted to show her teenage children “that you can make mistakes and mess up things, but you don’t have to be overwhelmed and threatened with death for that.”
That’s what happened. The TikTok videos, the memes and the jokes about them had major consequences for Cabot. In the days after the concert, her address details were posted on the internet and “a parade of cars” passed by her house. TV show producers weren’t the only ones calling her. She received “500 or 600 calls a day.” She received death threats. Not 900 like tabloid People Magazine wrote, Cabot says, only 50 to 60. She had surveillance cameras installed around her house. The police increased surveillance in the area.
The perfect gentleman
Cabot was divorced from her husband long before the concert. He also made this known in a public statement (“he has been the perfect gentleman,” according to Cabot). She didn’t have an affair with her boss, the night of the concert was the first time they kissed, she says. Her boss was married. And yet she was portrayed as a slut, a marriage breaker and gold digger.
Moral outrage in a society that searches 24 hours a day for scandals with a sexual context to relieve boredom. Could that be the reason why Donald Trump, a president convicted of fraud, who uses the military against American citizens, who calls his political opponents and citizens of Somali descent “animals” and “trash,” is more troubled by his past relationships with the minor abuser Jeffrey Epstein than by other questionable behavior?
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The reporter from The New York Times notes that Cabot was pursued much more than her boss. That brings back memories of Monica Lewinsky, the intern who had sex with President Clinton in the White House. When he survived the political storm, he remained president and his popularity ratings only increased. Lewinsky hid in the shadows for years and watched as TV comedians continued to make sexually explicit jokes about the affair.
Gwyneth Paltrow
Cabot noticed that women in particular attacked her and called her with insults. “What I have seen in recent months makes it more difficult to believe that it is mainly men who keep us women down.” She tells about a woman who told her at a gas station that she was ‘disgusting’.
And then there’s Gwyneth Paltrow. Hollywood star, wellness entrepreneur, candle seller (best-known example: ‘This smells like my vagina’) and once the wife of Coldplay singer Chris Martin, until she announced on her company’s website that the two had “consciously uncoupled”. Paltrow was paid by the tech company where Cabot and her boss had resigned and which was trying to limit the damage to its reputation. She appeared in a commercial in which she played a “very temporarily hired” PR employee who answered the “many questions of the past few days.” Those questions appeared on screen: “OMG. What the current f…?” Or: “Can your social media team still handle it?” Paltrow gave an apparently dead serious answer: “Yes, there are still places for our Beyond Analytics event.” Everything with one big grin.
How could the woman she had admired for so long be so insensitive to the messy realities of private life, Cabot wondered? But then, at the very end of the interview, she sighs: “Don’t think I’m excusing men. I didn’t say that.”
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