🙂‍↔️ Schaden-Shame On Me

Album art for Coldplay’s 2014 Ghost Stories

“Shame never has a loud clang. The worst part of shame is how silent it is.”

—Victoria Chang, Dear Memory via Permission

So far in our Adulting is Easy! series, we’ve studied a simple 100+ item daily checklist, health insurance-induced bureaucracy rage, and codependent time (un)management.

I never get better at spelling the word schadenfreude, the German word for pleasure derived by someone from another person’s misfortune, even though I’ve written about it several times here on Doh. Today, I propose another new phrase and phase, as I strive to act like (become?) the forty-two year-old that I am, with my second made-up German word:¹

Fehl-schadenfreuden-reue (n): The sinking moral embarrassment felt upon realizing you took pleasure in someone’s apparent downfall, only to discover you had the facts wrong.

Fehl, means wrong or mistaken, and reue means remorse. AI helped me combine them into a sentiment that could address how I felt reading about the woman still embroiled in the Coldplay “Kiss Cam” scandal, Kristin Cabot.

It is her first interview since a viciously toxic life-as-she-knew-it-ruining debacle, sparked by a viral eight-second TikTok clip that racked up over 100 million views in the first few days. For the first time in five months, against Cabot’s earlier instincts, she explains her side in reporter Lisa Miller’s profile, “The Story of a Ritual Shaming,” spread across two full pages in Thursday’s paper:

The New York Times profile on December 18, “The Story of a Ritual Shaming,”

I should start by (ashamedly) admitting that when I first encountered the reel, while scrolling through YouTube with my husband in search of something light to watch after dinner, I laughed.

I laughed at the way the camera accidentally landed on them as Coldplay lead singer Chris Martin cooed, “Ooh, look at these two,” before realizing something was awry, then quickly correcting, “Uh-oh, what? Either these two are having an affair, or they’re just very shy.”

The reel automatically played on loop, so we watched it a few more times to better study each element. I laughed at the way their moment of bliss was interrupted, at how the man ducked down out of embarrassment while his paramour clasped her cheeks in red-faced humiliation. When I found out they were both married to other people—all I knew at the time—and that he was a tech CEO, and she the head of HR at the same company—well, then my schadenfreude really kicked in. This moment seemed like aptly dished-out just deserts (doughnut pun intended).

I didn’t give it another thought for a few weeks, until (ashamedly, again) I laughed, again, at Gwyneth Paltrow cashing in on the moment with a cheeky ad for that same tech company, Astronomer:

But then, when I read the NYT profile two days ago, my heart instantly sank. I scrolled on my phone, in horror, at all the ways I was wrong—we were all wrong.

Cabot summarized her misdeeds as follows:

“I made a bad decision and had a couple of High Noons and danced and acted inappropriately with my boss. And it’s not nothing. 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.”

Did you know that Cabot was separated from her husband at the time of the video? I didn’t. Did you know that, at least according to her, nothing romantic occurred before that night, that the inappropriate behavior started and ended at that moment of dancing and a kiss? I didn’t. Does it matter? Does she deserve this level of vitriol and punishment either way?

No.

Heaped on top of more public shaming than one well-meaning person should bear, it saddened me to read about Cabot’s reaction to the Paltrow video, someone she once looked up to:

“Cabot had long admired Paltrow, and goop, the company she built to ‘empower, support and uplift women.’ How could she, who together with her ex-husband Chris Martin, the Coldplay frontman, popularized the phrase ‘conscious uncoupling,’ be so insensitive to the messy realities of private lives? (Paltrow did not respond to requests for comment.)”

Miller’s article describes what Cabot has been through in the ensuing months, “after the TikTok bomb became the defining disaster of her life,” describing:

“. . . what it feels like to be a punchline and a target. In online comments she has been called a slut, a homewrecker, a gold digger, a side piece — the usual tags for shaming women. Her appearance has been scrutinized, specific body parts evaluated and found insufficiently pretty. Some of the most famous people in the world — Whoopi Goldberg, Gwyneth Paltrow — and at least one furry green sports mascot, the Phillie Phanatic, have made her humiliation their material. She was doxxed, and for weeks received 500 or 600 calls a day. Paparazzi camped across the street from her house and cars slowly cruised her block, ‘like a parade,’ she recalled. She received [50 or 60] death threats.”

The consequences have been beyond harsh, even worse than what’s described above. In addition to immediately voluntarily resigning from her job,

“While #coldplaygate, as it came to be called, cycled out of view, she lives with it every day. Her children are reluctant to be seen with her. Just before Thanksgiving, a woman recognized her while she was pumping gas at Cumberland Farms. She called Cabot ‘disgusting’ and said: ‘Adulterers are the lowest form of human. You don’t even deserve to breathe the same air that I breathe.’”

What, really, is her crime? Kissing a married man?

I remember doing that once, while dancing in similar reverie at a Las Vegas daytime pool club in my early twenties (I cannot imagine typing or living any aspect of that sentence now). He was a gorgeous, dark-haired, green-eyed man. I was too selfish to think about his life or wife; wasn’t that his job?

Until later that night one of my closest high school friends would barely speak to me. I asked her what was wrong, and the look of disappointment in her face said it all. She was recently married. “You are better than this,” she said. “What if that was my husband?”

She was right, and I vowed never to do that again—for her, and for myself, for my own integrity. I learned from my mistake; thankfully early, and thankfully in private. I never did it again. But I sure still seem to feel entitled to judge others who do.

Miller ended her profile on Cabot’s “fantasy of redemption,” saying:

Cabot wished for someone with visibility and power to interrupt the spinning, endless, ruthless cycle. She yearned for a rational voice to step in and say, “Wait a minute . . . can we start a conversation where there might be room for a different version of this story?”

But I would have ended the article differently. I would have closed on a quote earlier in the piece from one of Cabot’s closest friends. Taking a page from Jesus, the friend says:

“I hope all these people that are commenting have never made a mistake.”²

❤️

1. 🍌 In a post about Kevin Costner’s possible flop era, instead of pure schadenfreude, I proposed mitgefühlversagenfreude, my made-up word (with the help of ChatGPT) for empathy-failure-joy, or feeling empathy and even a little relief when hearing about someone else’s failure; not wishing any ill-will upon them, but grateful to know you’re not alone.

📚 For more books on these topics:

• Schadenfreude by Tiffany Watt Smith

• So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson

• Shame on You by Melissa Petro

• The Shame Machine by Cathy O’Neil

Am I missing any of your favorites?

2. 📖 🪵 From Luke 6:41-46:

“Why do you notice the splinter in your brother’s eye, but do not perceive the wooden beam in your own? How can you say to your brother, ‘Brother, let me remove that splinter in your eye,’ when you do not even notice the wooden beam in your own eye? You hypocrite! Remove the wooden beam from your eye first; then you will see clearly to remove the splinter in your brother’s eye.”

👉 If you enjoyed this post, you might also appreciate:

🍌 Is Kevin Costner in His Flop Era?

📕 All the Way to the Memoir, Part Two