233: PR Distraction and the Power of Goop: How Gwyneth Paltrow Shifted the Focus Ahead of Her Ski Crash Trial

What did you have for lunch yesterday? Was it this?

I really like soup for lunch. I have bone broth for lunch a lot of the days.

Yum. Welcome to the Indestructible PR Podcast, where we use current events and tested media and PR strategies to help prevent or manage a crisis and build an indestructible reputation. Gwyneth Paltrow was one of the most popular actresses in Hollywood. Do you remember her in the cotton candy pink dress clutching her Oscar that she won for Shakespeare in Love? Well, recently the Academy Award winning actress and GOOP founder had to respond to some backlash over recent comments on a podcast. On this podcast, let's talk about why I think she did that podcast. In a now viral clip shared to TikTok last week, Gwyneth Paltrow could be seen opening up about her wellness routine. She was speaking to Dr. Will Cole. He holds a doctorate in natural medicine on his podcast the Art of Being well. If you haven't heard the clip, take a listen. What's your wellness routine look like now?

I eat dinner early in the evening. I do a nice intermittent fast. I usually eat something about 12 and in the morning I'll have some things that won't spike my blood sugar right? So I have coffee, but I really like soup for lunch. I have bone broth for lunch. A lot of the days try to do one hour of movement. So I'll either take a walk or I'll do Pilates, or I'll do my Tracey Anderson. And then I get in the sauna, I dry brush and I get in the sauna. So I do my infrared sauna for 30 minutes. And then for dinner I try to eat, you know, according to Paleo, so lots of vegetables. It's really important for me to support my detox.

After I saw that clip cringe, I immediately thought, I want to do a post on this. But I didn't. I was busy. However many people were taking me on that post and I thought, oh, I would love to do something on it. But the truth is, what was I going to do? I mean, it was obnoxious, absolutely, but it was a part of the GOOP brand. It was a part of Gwyneth Paltrow's brand. But it wasn't until last week I was getting ready to go into Boston University to teach my class. It was a bit of a scramble. I had to then after class run over to the TD Garden to go see Bruce Springsteen. It was a busy day. But in the middle of it I got a note on TikTok and I don't, I don't read a lot of the messages just because of time. I am not a full time tiktoker influencer. I work full time so I can only post when time allows. But someone had sent me a message indicating just alerted me to a news story about Gwyneth Paltrow. And I immediately thanked Elizabeth with an S for alerting me to that story because she knew that I would find the timing of it and peculiar, which was absolutely true. That podcast where she was discussing her daily routine. Now, in fairness to Gwyneth Paltrow, it was taken somewhat out of context. And in my work, that is the biggest obstacle that I need to overcome with clients, typically leadership boards, when I'm coming in, sometimes feeling like I'm on a high horse or thinking that I'm on a high horse, talking about the importance of good communications, the importance of hiring a good communicator, the importance of paying your communicators well and treating them fairly because communications are incredibly important. They make or break a reputation and there is a cost to a reputation. But the obstacle that I hear is this idea of context. They worry about information being taken out of context and they get buried by it. I've always respected it because they do have a point. But I always say, you know, in the hands of a good communicator, you don't need to worry about it. Now, in the hands of Gwyneth Paltrow here, she was somewhat taken out of context because in the podcast interview and most people did not sit and watch that entire interviewer listen to it. Paltrow said that she was speaking to Dr. Cole about chronic issues, these long term issues. She mentioned that she had long Covid and, and one of the symptoms was inflammation to the body. She was really speaking to. Her diet is specific to counter inflammation. And that wasn't really brought out in the context of the viral clip. But also, I don't think that Gwyneth Paltrow particularly cares. I believe that that interview was a well timed, strategically placed interview because of the story that was right around the bend. Now, Gwyneth Paltrow, she is no stranger to controversial statements. If you remember way back when when she and her former husband, Chris Martin, the frontman for Coldplay, broke up, they called it a conscious uncoupling. They got a lot of buzz for that. They're still known for that. And her wellness company, goop, named if you did not know GP and GOOP is her initials and the O is because someone, someone who worked In Tech said all successful companies have two O's. So she named it Goop. Here's a quiz right now for you listening to this podcast. Name two successful companies that have two O's in the name. I know you said Google. What's the other one? I don't know. I could Google it to find out, but I'm not going to. I'm going to let you sit and think on that one. But her wellness company, Goop, has been criticized for years for promoting unscientific health advice. She talks a lot about just crazy products. I consider them clickbait products. A lot of them are vaginal in scope, you know, and she does this, in my opinion, is because it's clickbait, it's clickworthy, it gets people talking about it. It's commentary. And she knows there's a lot of people who are going to complain about her online. She probably doesn't pay attention. She is targeting to a very specific group and that is another reason why she does face criticism. The group entitled Wealthy White Women. Gwyneth Paltrow is not about diversity. She is not about diversity in race or gender or economics. She is about a very specific set of highly affluent women. So she takes all this criticism and she probably dismisses it because her company is very successful targeting to those people. And that's why I think she did intentionally create this interview and the follow up interview where she had to speak out and defend that podcast. If that was a strategy in a Gwyneth Paltrow playbook, she would be doing this for years. But all of a sudden, why? Why now? Why does Today show and all these other big news outlets pick up the Gwyneth response on Instagram to this podcast and not Instagram? The grid Instagram stories, the ones that go away after 24 hours. She did that for the press hit. So now Gwyneth Paltrow has two press hits. You Google Gwyneth Paltrow and Diet maybe, or even Goop. You're going to get both of those stories. You're going to get the podcast interview itself, you're going to get the backlash stories about the podcast, and then you're going to get Gwyneth Paltrow's response to the backlash. Those are three news hits all filled with the same keywords. I believe that this was an attempt to distract from the story that was right around the bend. And that story is Gwyneth Paltrow appearing in a Park City courtroom the following week at the start of a trial for a 2016 skiing crash when she was in Utah and was accused of crashing into a skier on the beginner's slope. His name was Terry Sanderson, and he claimed to have several serious injuries from Paltrow running into him and then abandoning him. They were both on this beginner run at Deer Valley Resort. It was seven years ago when this happened. I remember when that story happened. I absolutely remember reading that story. And I do remember there was two sides to the story. She claimed he hit her, and he claimed otherwise. I think a lot of the evidence point that she hit him. But there was some guy, I believe, and I'm not reading this off of notes or anything, who had said to her husband, Brad Folchuk, and her son, they were skiing behind her when she was coming down the mountain, and they stopped at the guy after she had left, and then they scooted down after Gwyneth, that someone had said to him, like, oh, your buddy just knocked out Gwyneth Paltrow had said it to the friend of the Sanderson. So who knows? But he had filed a lawsuit in 2019, three years after this collision. So he said that he had a brain injury, broken ribs, and a lot of emotional damage. I don't even know why I'm laughing, but I do remember reading that story at the time, thinking the framing of it at the time. And who knows, maybe it was Peltro's team, that it seemed a little opportunistic, you know, to go after someone. But I don't know, who knows, maybe she did and she had said something very entitled and said a claim that she had said that she was famous or whatever, she would take care of it, and then she just skied away. At any rate, this court case came on the heels of all of these stories. So I absolutely believe that those two stories are linked. And Gwyneth Paltrow's team used distraction as a method to distract from the court case. Now, why? This is a little different from, you know, maybe 15, 20 years ago, even though the Internet was around. I think handlers are more strategic now when it comes to online reputation management. There's no way that they can bury this trial story. There's absolutely no way they can bury it. But this is how my brain works on this. And I happened to deliver a crisis communication plan yesterday. And I had mentioned this to the team, and I said, this is just. It's not even in the plan. But I was telling them, this is how I'm starting to process these crises now when they happen online. And it comes down to keywords if you were to Google and use the keyword Gwyneth Paltrow goop podcast, bone broth, you're going to get two stories. You're going to get a lot of bang for your buck there on those stories. So there's a lot of SEO search engine optimization behind those two stories. Now, the ski trial story is going to be big news for as long as this trial happens. Big unfortunate timing for Gwyneth Paltrow that this court case in Park City is on the heels of the Murdaugh trial. Now, even people who aren't into true crime were fascinated by the Murtaugh case because it dragged out for a while and because Alex Murdaugh had all these crazy things happening. You know, where he got someone to shoot him in the head and we had the Suns and the Netflix series came out, out. It was a story that was made for social media content and commentary. By the time the judgment was read live, I mean, all the stations were covering it. I mean, even national networks, they were cutting into their broadcast, into programming when the verdict was read. So this was a big, big case. I'm not going to say it's OJ level, but I mean, a lot of people were watching this, and people are still in that mindset of like, oh, a court case. So now that they see Gwyneth is in court court, now they're interested YouTube streaming it live. Ugh, that's not good. Now, one could argue it probably would have been streamed anyway, but maybe people would not have cared as much. They wouldn't have noticed it because this is somewhat of a busy week. I mean, it is March Madness. It's busy. But people are now spending the time watching this online. So that is unfortunate for Gwyneth Paltrow. But this takeaway on this story is, you know, how does it relate to you? You're not Gwyneth Paltrow. Right? Unless you're listening. Hi, Gwenny, you're. I doubt that, but this could happen to anyone. Anyone could be involved in these types of stories. Someone just tagged me on TikTok this morning about a woman who's trying to get out of a court case. And a wealthy woman, like a socialite in Los Angeles, she had run over two kids. And I remember this story, too, and they just tagged me on it. And this TikTok was about how she was using publicity to work her way around the legal system. Legalities and public relations do go hand in hand. So there is framing involved when legal issues are introduced into the crisis. You know, whatever it is so in this case, for Gwyneth Paltrow, I mean, she's going to go on, she's going to continue to go on. She's going to run goop, she's going to be fine. Everything's going to be fine. This ski crash story will go away in terms of SEO, because it's a brief trial. It's nothing like the Murdaugh trial. It's not like this is a murder conviction. I mean, this is just over $300,000. I think people are just going to lose interest in it. And eventually I do think it's just going to go away. It will definitely be a Wikipedia hit, unless Gwyneth Paltrow's team scrubs that from Wikipedia. But for the most part, the goop, the bone broth, the conscious uncoupling, all the criticism about goop, you're going to see those kind of ramp up after this case. And I believe it's to help people forget about this trial. It's to put the trial down, just tamp it down from an SEO point of view. Now, in every podcast, I include one indestructible PR tip. It's an easy to remember back pocket takeaway to help you build your indestructible reputation. And here it is. Anybody can use this SEO tactic. As a matter of fact, in a couple hours, I'm going to get on the phone with a client, one of my hourly consulting clients, and I know one of the questions they're asking me is this, how can I get rid of all of these stories, all of these bad stories? I think they want me to tell them that there is some company that you can pay, you know, X amount of dollars and they'll scrub it clean. They'll just wipe it clean. There are tactics. I mean, I know that there are probably the dark arts to it, that you could get some big firm to go in and do a lot of stuff on the back end. I mean, I'd be a fool not to think that that exists, but for the average person, it really doesn't. There are programs out there that will clean your identity off of websites, if you have your name on there, your address, your phone numbers, like that. Technology absolutely exists, but there isn't technology where you can wipe away a Washington Post story that has your name in it, or even a local news story. It's not going to wipe away a local news story. You can't do that. You can't do that. What you can do is you can tamp these things down. And how you do that is you create more content. Just like Gwyneth Paltrow did. You just create more content that has keywords in it, ideally backlinks you want to build. The more robust the post, the stronger it's going to be. The heavier it's going to be to push down those kind of one off stories that might be negative about you. But this is what I'm going to tell this client today. Instead of focusing on getting rid of these negative stories about you, which they'll never be able to do, why don't you create a new story? Your newer story is of more interest. Your newer story. You can create as much content as you want about that newer story and build off of that other story. Let's see the rehabilitation. Let's see what you've learned. It's my framework. Own it. Explain it. Promise it. Now you're in the promise stage. Make a promise to something. How have you changed? Make it a click worthy story. Make it a newsworthy story. Do the opposite of what G.W. paltrow did where she always talks about her brand. Be your own goop. That's my last line. That's all for this week on the podcast. Thanks for listening. Bye for now.