Kristin Cabot, the former Astronomer head of human resources who featured in July’s infamous “kiss cam” video at a Coldplay concert, has made some strides of late to repair her reputation — most recently by sitting down for an on-camera interview with Oprah Winfrey. The effort was, in our view, successful and offers much to ponder.

A brief reminder: On July 16, Cabot attended the concert with her boss, then-Astronomer CEO Andy Byron, and, while both married to other people, they were caught canoodling on the kiss cam. The video of that became one of the most viral things ever.

Cabot said she plans for the interview on “The Oprah Podcast,” posted March 17, to be her only on-camera sit-down. She did an interview with The New York Times for a December story by Lisa Miller (opening line: “Kristin Cabot has come to believe that her silence no longer serves her”). She’s scheduled to speak April 16 on “Taking Back the Narrative” at PRWeek’s Crisis Communications Conference in Washington, D.C.

Straight Facts

From a crisis comms point of view, Cabot’s two main wins in the Winfrey interview, which has more than 4 million views on YouTube, were setting some facts straight and likely gaining sympathy for what she’s been through (she received death threats and had people trespass onto her property when her teenage children were home, among other nightmares).

Doing this kind of reputation repair after a crisis isn’t easy, and Cabot provides an example of it well done. She was poised and came off as genuine and honest. This, in our opinion, can only help.

Much of the information in the Winfrey interview was also in the NYT article. The one new piece of knowledge is that, according to Cabot, Byron had led her to believe he was separated from his wife just as she had recently separated from her husband. This was something they bonded over, and they planned to tell Astronomer’s board about the burgeoning relationship (“I had a really big crush on him, Oprah”).

Cabot also said that she and Byron had not been having an affair, as we assume most people assumed (including ourselves); in fact, the concert was the first time they ever touched in a romantic way, she said. The theme here is that in a crisis people think they know the facts but often don’t. It’s the communicator’s job to set the facts straight.

‘Poor Decision’

Cabot admitted in the interview that she made a mistake in going to the concert with her boss. “I own the poor decision that I made,” she said. So that shows her taking responsibility.

She said that in the aftermath she was advised to stay silent because people didn’t want to hear from her then. She was also told the situation would blow over in a few days. That didn’t happen. She and Byron eventually resigned from Astronomer, a B2B tech company based in New York.

She stopped talking to him in the fall, she said. Winfrey asked why and, though Cabot stammered in her reply, it’s clear she feels betrayed in that Byron said he was separated when he (allegedly) wasn’t. She believes this caused a lot of her public flaying (she particularly decries that so much of it came from women).

‘Entire Trajectory’

“The entire trajectory of this would have changed if he would have just made a quick statement to say, ‘My wife and I were separated at the time of the concert,’ just like my husband did,” she said. Instead, she took the brunt of the outrage.

There have been criticisms of Cabot’s performance with Winfrey, including in the New York Post and The Sydney Morning Herald. The main beef is that Cabot used the interview to blame everyone but herself. We don’t see it that way, though in passing she did blame hatred of HR people, technology companies benefiting from all the clicks and views, and actress Gwyneth Paltrow, who did an Astronomer ad making fun of the situation.

The interview was risky but ended up being a net positive.

Photo Credit: Shutterstock/ra2 studio

Sign up for our free weekly newsletter on crisis communications. Each week we highlight a crisis story in the news or a survey or study with an eye toward the type of best practices and strategies you can put to work each day. Click here to subscribe.