Half of Coldplay Kiss Cam Duo to Headline Conference

One of Coldplay's two most famous concertgoers is turning her viral nightmare into a paid case study. Kristin Cabot, the former HR executive whose Kiss Cam moment with her company's CEO at a Coldplay show exploded online, is headlining a crisis-communications conference in Washington, DC, where tickets run up to $875, reports TMZ. Cabot, previously chief people officer at data company Astronomer, will appear in a 30-minute session titled "Kristin Cabot: Taking Back the Narrative" at PRWeek's Crisis Comms Conference in April. She'll be joined onstage by Dini von Mueffling, who served as Cabot's public-relations strategist during the scandal.

Cabot's credentials come from hard experience: After the concert clip showed her cuddling with then-Astronomer CEO Andy Byron, Cabot resigned. While she has said she was separated from her spouse at the time, that detail wasn't widely known, and she was quickly cast online as a "homewrecker." Cabot later told the New York Times she blamed alcohol for her behavior and described being followed by paparazzi, fielding hundreds of calls a day, and receiving death threats. She has also said she and Byron aren't in a relationship.

The conference website frames her talk as a look at how she "experienced firsthand the extremity of public shaming that women have long experienced when in the negative spotlight of the media," adding that male counterparts "often seem to avoid" similar treatment. Cabot and von Mueffling are to walk attendees through the immediate and longer-term strategy Cabot used to "take control of her narrative and rewrite her story"—and, more broadly, how brands and individuals can pivot quickly when an unexpected viral moment becomes the crisis to manage.

Predictably, there are those poking fun at the news, and at the conference's steep ticket price, which some note costs more than the average Coldplay ticket, per the New York Post. "Who has the narrative and who gave it away in the first place?" one commenter wrote online. Another asked: "Will there be a Kiss Cam?" (Read Cabot's recent interview with the New York Times.)