'Coldplay Kisscam' Woman Proves Internet Sleuthing Is Rarely About Justice

Speaking to The New York Times, Kristin Cabot, who was seen cosying up to her boss in a Coldplay concert earlier this year, finally broke her months-long silence on the kisscam scandal. 

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

“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.

“I want my kids to know that you can make mistakes, and you can really screw up. But you don’t have to be threatened to be killed for them.”

Calling the viral moment “cliché and so bad,” she added that her children now struggle to be seen with her, and that her employability has taken a huge hit. 

But why did this get so bad – these are not celebs, after all – and can we really call this a fair repercussion?

When #coldplaygate went viral, many internet sleuths applied a layer of faux-morality to their invasive deep dives. 

Netizens quickly “worked out” who the CEO and staff member were, that they were married, and that the other woman who was seen with both of them was also a member of the company and had been promoted soon before the scandal.

It is fair and just to insult and threaten people misbehaving, they appeared to reason.

Except – was it, and were they? 

I feel many have forgotten about that last member of the party, whose LinkedIn page was soon littered with potentially career-disrupting comments. Days later, the company said that the internet had gotten the wrong woman. 

That looks a lot like dogpiling on a likely innocent woman and accusing her of hush-hushing her way to the top with zero concrete evidence to me.

CEO Andy Bryon’s wife had to shut down her Facebook page due to the endless unsolicited comments about her marriage, too.

I said at the time of the scandal that the disruption was outsized and unfair, especially given we did not actually know for sure that all the people involved in the event were who we thought, or that they were definitely cheating. 

Now, Cabot has told The New York Times that she had been separated from her husband at the time of the pair’s reported one and only kiss. His presence at the game, she claimed, is why she didn’t want to be seen on-screen.

She said Byron had spoken to her about his separation from his wife, too (due to the public response to their viral moment, Byron and Cabot now rarely talk, she claimed). 

In other words, sleuths did not know for sure the nature of the now-famous duck away from the camera, the identity of all the people there, nor even that the pair were definitely cheating. 

But, it seems, even the whiff of scandal was “enough” to start an unchecked, unmoderated, unstoppable chain of events, which the New York Times reported left Cabot “unrecognisable” to loved ones. 

Cabot said that the scandal led to in-person harassment, doxxing, and threatening phone calls.

This is not to say that the behaviour of Cabot or Byron was ideal, and she doesn’t seem to think so, either. Nonetheless, it would be a shame for only the two at the centre of the viral moment to take lessons from this.

Researcher and Kellogg management and organisations professor Nour Kteily asked after his research into online pile-ons, “Are people evaluating the evidence? Are they actually looking at the full picture?

“Or are people choosing to socially punish without considering all of the evidence simply because they think it looks good to do so?”

Their study suggested that while the rewards for coming down hard on suspected bad actors with little evidence existed, people were more likely to wait for more information to come out when they felt their punishments were being observed.

But I don’t know anyone who has got in trouble, for instance, for apparently wrongly posting on the second Astronomer woman’s professional page.

The internet moves fast, even if people affected by pile-ons can’t, and posters largely stay anonymous.

As Ofcom moves to help prevent proven online misogyny, it might be worth imagining our comments, DMs, and posts about strangers shared on a giant Jumbotron before posting them, too.

Thumbnail credit: @instaagrace via TikTok