Coldplay kiss cam woman Kristin Cabot rips Gwyneth Paltrow

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Ex-Astronomer HR exec Kristin Cabot has called Gwyneth Paltrow “a hypocrite” for making fun of her “kiss cam” scandal at a Coldplay concert earlier this year.

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Cabot, 53, became the laughing stock of the Internet this past summer when she was spotted canoodling with her married boss, former Astronomer CEO Andy Byron, on a “kiss cam” midway through Coldplay’s show outside of Boston.

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As faces in the sold-out crowd were shown on giant video boards inside Gillette Stadium, the band’s singer, Chris Martin, seemed taken with Byron and Cabot when the snuggling couple popped up on the screen.

“Ohhh look at these two!” Martin said playfully, as the pair embraced one another. But as soon as they were shown, the grey-haired Byron dove out of view quickly, while the blond Cabot shielded her face and turned away. “Alright, c’mon. You’re OK,” the frontman continued as they tried to hide themselves.

“Oh oh, what?” Martin said, when he realized they were desperately trying not to be shown. “Either they’re having an affair or they’re just very shy. I’m not quite sure … I hope we didn’t do something bad.”

After racking up hundreds of millions of views on TikTok and X, social media users became convinced the Byron and Cabot were cheating on their significant others, and it didn’t take long before several Internet sleuths identified the companions.

“I think somebody got caught cheating at a Coldplay concert,” one person wrote on X, while another added, “Having your affair go viral & public at a f***ing Coldplay concert is so f***ing funny to me.”

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Within days both Bryon and Cabot saw their LinkedIn profiles splashed all over the Internet and had resigned from the company.

Paltrow piled on by making light of their faux pas in a humorous video that was shared to the organization’s social media accounts and captioned, “Thank you for your interest in Astronomer.”

“I’ve been hired on a very temporary basis to speak on behalf of the 300-plus employees at Astronomer. Astronomer has gotten a lot of questions over the last few days, and they wanted me to answer the most common ones,” said Paltrow, who was married to Martin for more than 12 years.

When the first question appeared on the screen with a viewer asking, “OMG What the actual f,” Paltrow responded with a straight face. “Yes. Astronomer is the best place to run Apache Airflow, unifying the experience of running data ML and AI pipelines at scale.”

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She added, “We’ve been thrilled so many people have a newfound interest in data workflow automation.”

Paltrow’s tongue-in-cheek video racked up more than 37 million views and added to Cabot and Bryon’s humiliation. But months later, Cabot says she didn’t find the spot funny and accused the company of adding fuel to a “raging fire” that had engulfed her personal life.

“I was such a fan of her company (Goop) which seemed to be about uplifting women,” Cabot told The Times in the U.K., according to Variety. “And then she did this. I thought, ‘How dare she after the beating she got for all the conscious uncoupling stuff.’ What a hypocrite.”

Cabot told the outlet that she threw out all of her Goop products as a way to show her disgust with the Oscar-winning actress.

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At the time of the campaign, a source told PEOPLE that the spot “came together very quickly” after Astronomer reached out to Paltrow.

“Gwyneth has a really great sense of humour, and it felt funny enough for her to do,” the source said.

‘Play stupid games … win stupid prizes’

In an interview with the U.S. Sun, Grace Springer, the Coldplay fan who shared the viral video of Byron and Cabot to TikTok, had a six-word response after the fallout from their scandal: “Play stupid games … win stupid prizes.”

Springer, who captioned her clip “Trouble in paradise?” told the Sun she had no inkling the exchange would become such a massive viral sensation.

“I caught an interesting reaction to the kiss cam and decided to post it,” she said. 

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But in another recent interview with the New York Times, Cabot said that her life was upended by the endless mockery.

“I made a bad decision and had a couple of High Noons and danced and acted inappropriately with my boss,” she said.

The mistake resulted in her getting death threats and “500 or 600 calls a day.”

Cabot was going through a split (her then-husband was also at the same concert) and thought Byron was too. That night they went out to see Coldplay, the mother of two just wanted to blow off some steam.

“I wanted to put a cute outfit on and go out and dance and laugh and have a great night,” she said. “And that’s how it was tracking.”

When she saw herself on the screen she said she felt “so embarrassed and so horrified.”

“We both just sat there with our heads in our hands, like, ‘What just happened?’”

mdaniell@postmedia.com

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