It takes a particular kind of cunning to navigate the highest tiers of corporate America—not just ambition, but the capacity to mold the perception of your presence, to exude both authority and discretion, power and plausible deniability. That, more than anything else, is the currency of Human Resources at the executive level.
When the Coldplay kiss-cam scandal exploded online—two executives from the same company caught in a moment of intimacy that neither expected to become public—it didn’t take long for the world to pile its judgment onto the man. Of course they did. He is the CEO after all. He has to be the predator, the manipulator, the one with unchecked power.
But what if he isn’t?
What if this wasn’t a story about another CEO abusing his position, but rather a quieter, more complex imbalance of power? What if the scandal isn’t about a man misusing his authority, but about a woman weaponizing her access to it?
Kristin Cabot isn’t some entry-level assistant dazzled by proximity to influence. She is the Chief People Officer—the person tasked with maintaining the ethical spine of the company, the one who signs off on policies, investigates misconduct, and sets the tone for corporate behavior. She isn’t merely present in rooms of power; she is integral to designing the rules that govern them.
So why has she been framed as an accessory in this drama instead of its architect?
We are living through a cultural reckoning in which every tale of workplace misconduct triggers a kind of automatic alignment: CEO bad, subordinate innocent. But reality isn’t always that clean.
In this case, the woman involved is the head of HR—someone who, by every corporate metric, holds extraordinary institutional power. And yet public commentary is casting her as a passive co-conspirator at worst, or at best, a deer caught in headlights.
It’s time we admit something difficult: HR is not some neutral arm of compassion. At the executive level, it’s a weaponized branch of control, reputation management, and liability containment. HR chiefs don’t just oversee employee wellbeing—they defend the castle. And in this case, the chief gatekeeper got very cozy with the king.
What makes this affair so jarring isn’t just the intimacy, but the choreography of their panic. Caught on camera, they didn’t just blush or shrug—it was a scramble, a reflexive retreat, like fugitives spotting a drone overhead. That was more recognition than embarrassment. Recognition that they’d been seen, and worse, that they’d both built systems designed precisely to avoid this kind of visibility.
When we see an executive man in bed with an HR chief, we instinctively see a coercive imbalance. But let’s interrogate that. The HR chief is often the one CEO can’t act against without a paper trail ten feet high. A good Chief People Officer can make or unmake a CEO’s image. She knows where every complaint goes, which whispers become liabilities, and what behaviors get quietly buried under “performance-based restructuring.” She is not powerless. In many ways, she is the architect of silence.
The feminist lens, so necessary and valuable in exposing the structural oppression women face, is not above critique when it becomes reflex rather than rigor. It does us no favors to pretend that all women in power are perpetually powerless, or that their gender absolves them from the choices they make. A woman doesn’t need to be a man to exploit power. She only needs access, timing, and a story the public is too squeamish to question.
This wasn’t some clumsy office tryst between unbalanced players. This was two high-ranking executives, managing optics as much as desire, counting on plausible deniability to shield them from scrutiny. And it worked—at least until a Coldplay ballad made the whole stadium stare.
The aftermath played out predictably. Byron, the CEO, is being vilified across social media. His LinkedIn vanished. Articles questioned his character, speculated about board meetings, and dragged his family into the narrative. But Cabot? Her name barely trended. Her role in shaping company ethics was mentioned as a side note, not a core betrayal. Why? Because we have grown too comfortable with a storyline in which men fall from grace and women merely stumble into scandal.
There’s a deeper hypocrisy here. We claim to want equality, to level the field, to judge by standards, not sex. Yet when the person accused is a woman with HR power—the very position that, by design, investigates and punishes misconduct—we whisper instead of question, flinch instead of demand answers. We let silence pass as sensitivity.
Let’s be absolutely clear: had the roles been reversed—had the CEO been a woman and the HR chief a man—we would be dissecting every power imbalance. We would be quoting workplace codes of conduct, demanding resignations, calling it exploitation. The word “grooming” would be tossed around freely. But when a woman holds the clipboard and the keys, we look away.
Cabot knew the boundaries. She enforced them for others. She likely signed off on sexual misconduct training, harassment policy updates, and internal codes of ethics. She helped shape the cultural tone of the company. And then she disregarded all of it for a relationship that, by any HR definition, is a conflict of interest wrapped in a liability.
We must begin to accept a harder truth: women in power can—and sometimes do—act unethically. That doesn’t undermine feminism. It affirms it. Because true equality doesn’t just mean the right to lead. It means the right to be held accountable when you betray that leadership.
This story isn’t just about being cosy at a concert. It’s about what happens when the watchers of the system—the compliance officers, the HR chiefs, the professional protectors—decide to step outside the system themselves. Who then investigates the investigator? Who holds accountable the person who signs off on accountability?
We’ve been trained to think of HR as a force for good, a buffer between the powerful and the vulnerable. But the higher up HR climbs, the less it serves the worker and the more it protects the firm. When an HR chief engages in a secret affair with the CEO, it’s not a romantic tragedy—it’s a breach of trust. It tells every employee that policies are for the governed, not the governors. It sets a tone that compliance is conditional, and that those in charge play by different rules.
That’s not feminism. That’s feudalism.
To cast Cabot as a victim is to misread the entire ecosystem of corporate power. She is not some starstruck subordinate dazzled by a rich boss. She is the policy-maker, the enforcer, the whisperer in the boardroom. She has the toolkit to prevent this, and she chose not to. Her discretion wasn’t just personal, but political.
We should be careful, always, about leaping to conclusions. But we should be equally wary of narratives that refuse to scrutinize women who wield power under the guise of virtue. Gender should not be a shield for bad behavior. And positional power should never be excused as incidental when wielded by someone the public finds more sympathetic.
The woman in this scandal didn’t just cross a line. She built the line—and then tiptoed over it, assuming no one would notice. For years, HR departments have reminded us that perception is as important as conduct, that relationships in positions of asymmetrical power must be disclosed, monitored, and sometimes outright prohibited. That’s the mantra. That’s the policy. And when the person who wrote the policy breaks it, the damage is not just personal—it’s institutional.
This is a story of power and secrecy, of image and indulgence. But more than anything, it is a story of accountability deferred. Byron is being held to account. Cabot should be, too. Because the integrity of a company is only as strong as the ethics of its enforcers. And when the chief enforcer decides she’s above the rules, the message sent to every employee is chilling.
You don’t have to be the CEO to run the kingdom. Sometimes the power behind the throne wears heels and holds the handbook. And sometimes, she burns it.
Zealous Thierry 