Introduction

This is “What Just Happened?,” the podcast that looks at the biggest brand crises of our time, what they meant for organisational strategy and behaviour, and their lasting impact on our approach to crisis communication.

I’m Kate Hartley. And I’m Tamara Littleton. And together, we’ll delve into what happened, why it mattered, and whether it could happen again.

Episode

Kate Hartley: So Tamara, before we get into the details of today’s episode, I wanted to ask you a couple of questions, if that’s okay.

Tamara Littleton: Okay, go for it.

KH: So my first question, and forgive me, I’m doing a bit of risk planning, but have you ever stolen a hat from a small child at a public event?

TL: I can categorically say I’ve never stolen a hat from a small child at a public event.

KH: Okay, great. That’s good, that’s good. Have you ever been caught on a kiss cam at a concert with someone you weren’t supposed to be with?

TL: Definitely not, to my knowledge. Oh, okay, and—

KH: Apologies for this next one. Have you ever got frisky with someone in a work meeting room and not realised the boardroom computer was filming you? Absolutely not. My final question: have you ever pretended to have invented a breakthrough medical test that doesn’t work?

TL: No, this is a relief. Good, I’ve passed the test.

KH: You’ve passed the test.

TL: So I’m guessing from those questions that today we are talking about CEOs who’ve gone rogue.

KH: We are, and we’re looking at that moment where the comms team just put their head in their hands and decided to completely rethink their life choices. What do you do when your CEO does something really, really daft and drags down the whole company name with them?

TL: I can’t wait to get into this. There are so many examples of leaders who’ve made some terrible decisions that have caught their organisation by surprise, and it can be really hard to deal with if you’re the team having to clear up the mess. And I know we’ve done a couple of podcasts recently on some very serious things CEOs or leaders have done, such as Luis Rubiales and the Spanish football team, or the Harrods scandal that we covered, but we’re looking more today at the slightly less serious crises, right?

KH: Yeah, we are. I think we’re bending our own rules a little bit on the definition of a crisis, and we’re looking at things where ultimately the brand was okay.

TL: But the people involved weren’t always okay. And probably the one we’re all thinking of from last year is the Coldplay Kiss Cam incident. Shall we start there?

KH: Yeah, let’s do that. So to summarise what happened, for anyone who doesn’t know, and I can’t imagine there’s anyone really that doesn’t, this is Andy Byron, the CEO of a tech company, Astronomer, who in July 2025 was caught on the kiss cam at a Coldplay concert in Boston, and he had his arms around the company’s chief people officer, Kristen Cabot. Now he ducked out of the shot, she covered her face, and then Chris Martin on stage said, “Oh, look at these two. They’re either having an affair or they’re just really shy,” and neither of them said anything initially. Presumably, they hoped it would all go away.

I think she had split from her husband just before that, and he was still married to somebody else. But of course, the internet went absolutely wild trying to find out who they were, and he was very quickly outed as the CEO of Astronomer. He resigned. A statement from Astronomer said they’d accepted his resignation, and they said, “Our leaders are expected to set the standard in both conduct and accountability, and recently, that standard was not met,” and she also resigned later.

TL: And that should have been the end of it, really, but the internet went wild, as the internet does. There were memes and spoofs and games that popped up all over the place. I think that the duck-and-hide move was even reproduced by Claudia Winkleman on Strictly Come Dancing in the UK, and I know it was a popular October Halloween costume as well.

And I remember Astronomer really leaned into it. They got Gwyneth Paltrow onto their socials thanking people for their newfound interest in data workflow automation. Gwyneth was obviously married to Chris Martin for many years, so I can see the connection there.

KH: Yeah, and they also put out a decent statement actually, saying, “Before this week, we were known as a pioneer in the data rock space.” They were kind of acknowledging what had happened. The statement went on to say, “While awareness of our company may have changed overnight, our product and our work for our customers have not,” and I think that was a nice way of saying this is a distraction from what they do.

And for me, they could have left it there. And I’m going to be a bit controversial here, I didn’t really like the Gwyneth Paltrow move. A lot of people said how clever it was, particularly in the PR industry, and I guess it kind of was. It did get some positive attention for Astronomer, and it sort of moved it away from the scandal, but it also kept the story alive.

And I think it’s really easy to forget that there were real people at the heart of this. And as ever with the internet, as you say, people kind of digging around. Things got pretty dark quite quickly, and people really went for Kristen Cabot. She suffered the kind of harassment that, sadly, we’ve come to expect now.

They accused her of sleeping her way to the top, which was said quite often on social media, obviously rubbish. She was told she was unemployable. She had death threats, bullying, criticism about her appearance, paparazzi outside her house, and all her private details were put online. It was just horrendous.

TL: So bad. And so ultimately, not necessarily a crisis for the company, but a serious crisis for the two people involved, particularly, as ever, the woman. So let’s look at some other examples. The most extraordinary one is probably the story of Elizabeth Holmes, the CEO of Theranos, which was a company that defrauded investors by saying it could detect a wide range of medical conditions from a single drop of blood. And then that was found out to be complete nonsense.

KH: Yeah, and she had convinced everybody. She convinced investors, media, even high-profile board members, that she was onto something. And the company collapsed, and she went to prison for 11 years in 2022.

TL: I guess at that point, from a crisis point of view, that means the crisis is well and truly over. Nothing you can do will save it, and nor would you want to, quite frankly. But before we move on, I think it’s an interesting point that it’s worth mentioning the impact on the wider industry when there is a high-profile crisis like this.

Because the impact of Elizabeth Holmes’ fraudulent behaviour, even though it was one female founder going rogue, led to distrust of funding female founders in the biotech and diagnostic sectors, and maybe even other industries too. A real case of existing biases being vindicated by mainly male VCs.

KH: It’s awful, isn’t it? And we know that funding is hard to come by anyway for female founders, so yeah, absolutely awful. So let’s move on. There’s also another bizarre story of the CEO of a Polish paving firm, Drogbrook, who became known as the hat snatcher.

He snatched a cap from a child at the US Open. I don’t know why I’m laughing, it’s awful, but the cap had been signed by the tennis player Merschak for a young fan in the crowd, and the CEO of this firm nabbed it from him, and that went viral.

And of course, he had to apologise, although it was a little bit of a half-arsed apology, to be honest. He said, “It was never my intent to steal away a prized memento from a young fan.” Well then, why did you do it exactly? Don’t do it.

To be fair, he went on to say he thought the player was handing him the hat to give to his sons, who apparently were sat nearby, and he said later he’d given it back to the boy, because honestly, I mean, what else could he have done? But he and his firm suddenly had international media coverage for, obviously, all the wrong reasons.

TL: But it also got a bit weirder, didn’t it? Because there was online rage at the company, but there are two companies with similar names, and people got really angry at the wrong one.

KH: So the CEO from the other company woke up to a storm of social media messages from people calling him a thief, and he had no idea what was happening. People were even posting really negative reviews to the company. So the reviews went from four, four-and-a-half stars on Google to one-and-a-half overnight.

That can actually be really damaging. He had nothing to do with it at all.

TL: God, the internet loves a bit of chaos, and it just shows how easy it is to get caught up in a storm that has nothing to do with you, when you’re just an innocent bystander. And it also makes me think again, I feel like we say this a lot, who would have thought you’d be adding that to your risk register?

KH: I know, I know exactly. I mean, I’m pretty sure in our risk register we don’t have “who’s going to steal a hat from a small child at the US Open” or “will be mistaken for someone who has”.

TL: Exactly.

KH: So before we move on to talk about what you can do about all of this, if you are the comms person trying to manage this, can I quickly mention one of my favourite examples of a rogue CEO, if that’s the right word?

Go for it. So this is the example of the CEO of Guernsey Finance, who in November 2025 was filmed in what can best be called a compromising situation in a boardroom. They’d just had a staff training meeting, and the meeting room computer screen was still recording, which the CEO and his female colleague didn’t realise until the recording was circulated to attendees of the meeting.

You know, Teams just automatically sends you the recording in case you’d like to catch up on the meeting. And catch up they did. It was all over the media, partly because people compared it to the Coldplay Kiss Cam, and neither of those two people are still with the company.

So be very, very careful what you do. Even if you think the recording has stopped, it may not have done.

TL: I know we’re not in a video format yet, but basically I’ve got my hand over my mouth. It’s just like, oh my God, can you imagine? And this is something no one ever wants to happen.

And I’m also getting flashbacks. Do you remember during Covid there were quite a few mini crises caused by people going to the bathroom while on Zoom calls? I think there was a Labour councillor. People were just getting used to that new normal.

But anyway, let’s move on. So how best to handle a scandal like this if it does happen? In a previous podcast, when we looked into the Harrods abuse case, we talked about the importance of writing a leadership scandal into crisis policies so that they are just part of a process, rather than something pinned to an individual.

KH: I think that’s so important, because it’s really, really hard to say to a company leader, “Do you know what we really need? We need to plan for you to have an affair or to be caught stealing from a child.” I mean, it’s a really difficult conversation to have.

But what you can do is say, “We have a process for when somebody makes a real error of judgement,” and that can take the sting out of it completely, I think.

TL: And the art of the apology is so important in these things, isn’t it? First of all, do you own it and apologise? Do you ask your leader to apologise? How do you do it and when?

And if you don’t address it straight away, the internet will fill the gaps, as we saw with the Astronomer example.

KH: Yeah. I mean, there were at least two fake apologies from Andy Byron going around on social media in the days after that kiss cam because he hadn’t said anything. So as you say, nature abhors a vacuum, and people do just fill in the gaps.

TL: So much to dig into with our guest. So we’ll be back after this short break.

Break

TL: We’re joined by Abby Mangold now. Abby is the co-founder of Mangold Consultancy, a media training and crisis communications agency. She was formerly at the BBC, where she produced and directed undercover investigations that exposed corporate behaviour.

So she definitely knows a thing or two about behaviours that get media attention, as well as how to recover from a reputational crisis. Abby, welcome to the podcast. I’m going to jump straight in, if that’s okay, because I want to ask: let’s start with the media attention that all these cases got. Why do we love a leadership scandal so much?

Abby Mangold: So I think this is relatively simple, right? Red tops and tabloids might be going out of print, but everyone loves a good gossip that’s true. Scandals tap into something really human, right?

And I was thinking about CEOs, and even if we don’t consciously mean to, I think we do put them on a pedestal. They’re meant to represent the values of an organisation, and when that cracks, it feels quite personal. I think people want more than just profitability from CEOs, right?

And it’s not even always the behaviour itself. I’m not diminishing the behaviour that we’ve been talking about, but it’s the gap between who someone claims they are and what they actually do.

KH: Oh yes, we talk about this all the time with businesses, don’t we, going against their own values?

AM: Yeah. It’s kind of like a betrayal of character. I sort of think of it as the veil coming down and you see behind the metaphorical stage.

KH: Yeah, and we love that, right? We love it.

AM: And when someone reaches the top, even in an industry, they do become a kind of celebrity. The fall from grace plays out really, really publicly, particularly on social media, where people are sort of invited to judge sincerity live, in real time.

And from a media perspective, I mean, these stories are just the gift that keeps on giving. They’re absolutely perfect. It’s brilliant for clicks, so why wouldn’t you try and find a new angle, a new meme, whatever it is that incredible people on the internet have created to keep the story going?

And I was also thinking there’s something about familiarity. It’s almost like these stories are modern morality tales. People want to understand the sins, how people got there, how they respond, and whether there were warning signs along the way.

So I think it’s the kind of story and narrative that we’ve all been brought up on, in the sense of good to bad, and is there redemption? It effectively turns company governance into a kind of spectator sport. It’s really, really compelling.

KH: I love that idea of redemption. And there must be a lot of leaders, I think, looking at some of the things we’ve talked about and saying, “Oh God, that could have been me,” or “that could have been one of my team.”

And it is something we need to prepare for, isn’t it, as organisations? If we’re consulting to or working within organisations, we need to prepare for the possibility that a leader might do something that brings down the reputation of the organisation. But it’s a really, really hard conversation to have.

If you’re one of the comms team, it’s really hard to say to your CEO, actually, I think what we should be prepared for is you getting caught on a kiss cam or you nicking a hat from a child. How do you prepare for that?

AM: So look, I stopped trying to predict human behaviour a long, long time ago, because you can’t. There have been things I’ve been told, particularly in the last 11 years, that no scenario plan could ever have predicted.

Some of these examples are light-hearted, some are more serious, but you’re absolutely right, it is such a difficult conversation to have. For me, the preparation piece is preparing for the impact of the behaviour rather than the behaviour itself.

So framing that conversation around protection rather than prediction. You’re not saying, “We think you’re going to do something like this.” You’re saying, “If anyone were to behave in an inappropriate way or make a serious error of judgement, this is how we would want to protect the organisation and the people.”

And I think that opens the door a bit. Although having said that, reflecting back on reputation or risk audits we do with clients, I can’t think of an example where someone has put forward, “What happens if the senior leader behaves in an inappropriate way?” I guess that’s where we come in, because we’re able to raise that without it coming from the internal team.

KH: And you can do that without it feeling so personal, can’t you?

AM: Right, exactly. From a practical point of view, it looks like scenario planning with the comms team, potentially with the legal team as well. Always get them in nice and early.

I think it’s about agreeing decision-making authority. It’s looking at the organisation’s governance and structures, and really talking through how you would respond if scrutiny suddenly landed on a senior leader.

TL: Let’s go there then. Let’s say something has happened, you’ve done all the preparation, but the CEO has ended up in a situation where the brand or organisation is all over the media. What’s your advice on how the organisation should handle that?

AM: The first thing is to establish the truth. We live in a world of deep fakes, manipulated footage and misinformation, so being really sure that what you’re dealing with is real is crucial.

We know speed matters, but not panic. You want to be out there, because a vacuum creates space for speculation, but you don’t want to go into panic mode. Being a reliable source of truth is incredibly important.

The other thing is delineating between the behaviour of the individual and the behaviour of the organisation. The senior leader needs to own the behaviour, admit it’s unacceptable, acknowledge those impacted, and set out what happens next. The business also needs to be decisive.

I was thinking about where I haven’t seen that done well. If we think about the BBC and the challenges they’ve faced in recent years, there were many times when it felt the right decision would have been to remove the Director General. That decision often wasn’t taken soon enough, despite the fact that in many cases the DG ultimately resigned or was fired.

It’s that period between the issue and the departure where so much reputational damage is done. And finally, you’ve got to be real for a period of time. The scrutiny will feel relentless, it will get personal, but it will pass.

I often say to clients, tin hats on, you’re in the trenches. Stick to your strategy and it will pass. Speed matters, but don’t panic, and if you’ve prepared in advance, stick to the plan.

KH: It’s interesting what you said about not taking that decision quickly enough. If that was built into a process, it would be easier, wouldn’t it?

If it’s already been scenario-planned and mapped out, then the organisation knows what to do and so does the individual. There are no surprises.

Do you think there can be a way back for a CEO after a scandal, particularly one that’s relatively light-hearted, like an inappropriate relationship?

AM: It totally depends on what’s happened. Sometimes there is a way back, but it’s slow and it requires humility. In other cases, no comeback is the right outcome.

There will always be people for whom no apology is ever enough. CEOs are stewards of culture, and public roles come with heightened scrutiny. In situations where behaviour wasn’t malicious, there can be a way back, but it needs to be handled carefully.

Apology is critical, but it’s not just words. Behaviour matters. Leaders need to demonstrate learning and understanding through their actions. There can be redemption, but not everyone will agree with it.

TL: That redemption story is a positive outcome, but there must be people where the fallout never ends. I remember reading John Ronson’s book about public shaming on social media.

There must be people who are only ever known for the scandal. And particularly women seem to face disproportionate hate. Do you have any insight on that?

AM: I was thinking about that and doing some research, and frankly it was depressing. Studies from UNESCO, the University of Sheffield and the UK government show systematic harassment of women in public roles.

The Rockefeller Foundation looked at 100 news stories about 20 CEOs and found female CEOs were blamed in 80% of cases, compared to 31% for male CEOs. It’s stark.

For communications professionals, crisis handling goes way beyond a statement. Monitoring online abuse, offering long-term support and intervening when abuse escalates is critical.

Silence can feel like abandonment. Employers need to recognise the psychological impact. For women in particular, coming back from that level of criticism is incredibly difficult and requires resilience.

KH: You touched on apologies, which you talk about a lot in media training. What does a good apology actually look like?

AM: Clients often ask about “I” versus “we”. In these situations, “I” is incredibly important. Research analysing 224 corporate apologies found that “I apologise” reduced market penalties by around 86%.

“I” signals accountability. “We” dilutes responsibility. Repetition is also key. People need to hear things multiple times for them to land.

I analysed Nick Varney’s interview after the Alton Towers crash. In 15 minutes, he apologised or expressed regret around ten times and repeated key safety messages consistently. That repetition matters.

Try saying an apology out loud. If it doesn’t feel sincere when spoken, it won’t land publicly. And think about employees too. They need enough information to feel comfortable acknowledging what happened and believing the organisation responded appropriately.

A good apology isn’t just about words. It’s about responsibility, behaviour, and giving people confidence that the right thing was done.

Outro

You’ve been listening to “What Just Happened?” with Kate Hartley and Tamara Littleton. If you enjoyed the podcast, please subscribe, rate, and review.