Let this be a lesson to all cheating lovebirds: cameras are everywhere.
This is especially true at concerts. It’s not the old days when fans went to see bands belt out hits and audience participation was limited to singing along or holding up a lighter during a ballad.
Everyone is now shooting music videos. Beware, you may end up in the footage.
Two executives discovered camera danger the hard way at a recent Coldplay concert.
I tried to avoid this story. But a week later, it remains inescapable. It’s everywhere. The Coldplay Kiss-Cam Scandal is to an entertainment columnist as Jeffrey Epstein conspiracy is to Donald Trump: it won’t go away.
Had you previously heard of Astronomer, a data company? Me neither. Did you know Andy Byron was the CEO? Me neither. Could you have picked Kristin Cabot, the head of HR, out of the checkout line at Pottery Barn? Me neither, though I’m guessing she was buying linens.
Now these two have more global recognition than the cast of “Stranger Things.”
Their marriages are shattered. Their reputations are in ruins. They are the stuff of online memes, late-night jokes, fake letters, parodies, AI tomfoolery and sombre meditations from exploitative corporate trainers who see the Coldplay Kiss-Cam Scandal as a teachable moment.
Training Module 1: Avoid romantic embraces that end up on the jumbotron.
In a clip shot by a concertgoer, Byron and Cabot are unaware they are on the giant circular screen or that everyone else can see them. He is standing behind her, his arms wrapped around her chest. Then they see themselves.
They react like two gazelles spotting a lion in the high grasses.
They push apart faster than two repulsed magnets. She covers her face and turns her back to the stage. He ducks down into an invisible foxhole as if only he can hear someone in the band shouting, “INCOMING!”
Their horrified reaction baffled Coldplay frontman Chris Martin.
“Ah, look at these two,” Martin said at first, not realizing he was looking at two concert infidels.
“Oh, what?” he narrates as they recoil. “Either they’re having an affair or they’re just very shy.”
It’s the first one, Chris. It’s always the first one. If only there was a way to freeze-frame the universe and think this through for a minute. Byron & Cabot — ironically, they sound like a law firm specializing in personal injury — would have realized the best thing to do was to do nothing.
Just keep grinning and canoodling. But their real-time shame-powered intrigue inside the stadium quickly spilled onto TikTok. It pushed online sleuths into dox mode: Who are these two?
Now Byron has resigned. His wife has changed her name and deleted her social media. I’m pretty sure Cabot’s performance review this year won’t get framed and hung on her wall.
Dear Kristin: HR stands for human resources, not horny relations.
My heart goes out to their poor spouses who learned of this cheating from the internet. Can you imagine clicking on a Most Read link in your feed and seeing your husband bear-hugging one of his execs you probably met at the office Christmas party?
Had they done nothing, Byron could have engineered an excuse on the 0.001 chance his wife ever saw the incriminating tape: “It’s not what it looks like. Kristin was choking on a popcorn shrimp. I draped my arms around her breasts to perform the Heimlich manoeuvre.”
These two weren’t even kissing on the Kiss-Cam. But some people are carrying on like they were in a luxury box going at it in the missionary position. Now two families are in turmoil and a start-up unicorn is searching for a new CEO.
And for what? Because Byron & Chabot didn’t have the good sense to grab a copy of Coldplay’s “Music of the Spheres” and explore each other’s spheres in a hotel room they checked into using fake names?
Yes, they are adults. Yes, they are responsible for their actions and indiscretions. But these online sleuths can be so annoying. Why don’t they use their detective superpowers to solve cold cases or figure out who is vandalizing the speed cams in Toronto so I can send that person a thank-you note?
Why gleefully torpedo strangers who are not in the public eye? I mean, it’s not as if George Clooney was caught French-kissing Meghan Markle at an Oasis concert while Prince Harry and Amal Clooney were doing charity work in Zimbabwe.
That would be news. This is just gross schadenfreude.
That’s the only reason I reluctantly wrote about it today — to call out the gross schadenfreude.
The pile-ons in modern society are more reckless than the stories they amplify.
All we know about Andy Byron and Kristin Cabot is their lives were destroyed by a viral video.
