Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin split: Affair rumours plaguing ‘conscious uncoupling’ are ‘ridiculous’, actress says

After every high-profile split comes a deluge of affair rumours, spurious cheating reports and over-analysis on where it all went wrong.

Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin’s ‘conscious uncoupling’ was no different.

Some articles pointed to that Vanity Fair article that Paltrow fought so hard to have buried, making demands to editor Graydon Carter that he likened to that of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Un.

“Not to bore you with the details,” Carter wrote in the Editor’s letter for the March 2014 issue. “But the whole Vanity Fair – Gwyneth Paltrow brouhaha began innocently enough at a routine morning editorial meeting last spring.

“We were reviewing assignments and batting around story ideas, and at one point I idly mentioned that I would be interested in reading something on Gwyneth Paltrow.

“She asked that [friends and family] not speak to Vanity Fair about her, or about anything else ever again. Ever. Never.

“Kim Jong-Un couldn’t have issued a more blanket demand.”

He stopped short of saying what the article, dubbed the “epic takedown” of the actress with the most wholesome image in Hollywood, was actually about. In fact, he denied any such deconstruction of her character or marriage.

But that didn’t stop the press and public going wild over what could possibly have Paltrow so riled.

“And then things just went haywire,” Carter continued, as “magazines and websites tried both to anticipate what we had in our story and to best us.”

Naturally, much of this speculation, despite Carter’s denial, centred round the actress’ personal life.

Paltrow’s publicist, Stephen Huvane, was even forced to issue a blanket denial in February 2014 over claims that she had enjoyed an extra-marital affair with entertainment lawyer Kevin Yorn.

He told US website Defamer that the rumours were “completely false”, while a spokesperson for Yorn said the claims were “categorically untrue.”

And so, after they announced that 11-year marriage had come to an end, similar reports were dragged back to the surface.

But, the actress’ friends reportedly told The Mirror, Paltrow has remained un-fazed by the gossip. Any such claims, she allegedly said, are “ridiculous”.

“She doesn’t care what people think. She knows the truth,” a source close to Paltrow was quoted as saying.

And they may well be accurate. If there is any such tensions lying beneath the seemingly amicable surface of their break-up, they certainly don’t seem to be showing.

In what has been labelled by some media sources as “the most civilised break-up of all time”, the pair were apparently sunning themselves vacation on the island of Eleuthera in the Bahamas on an idyllic family vacation when they broke the news.

Actress Gwyneth Paltrow and Coldplay singer Chris Martin, pictured at a charity event in January (Getty Images)

Martin also allegedly gave Paltrow a break-up gift, too: a painting of a bird in flight by Mila Fürstová to mark a new freer stage in their lives.

“Going away together may seem unusual but that's Gwyneth and Chris,” a source apparently told the Mail.

“Foremost they want the kids to see they mean business about remaining a family, and another... They want to miss the fallout.”

The actress posted a joint statement from the couple (now an un-couple) on her website GOOP on Tuesday evening, announcing that she and the Coldplay frontman were separating after 10 years of marriage. It promptly crashed the site, due the sheer influx of people logging on to see it for themselves.

“It is with hearts full of sadness that we have decided to separate,” it read.

“We have been working hard for well over a year, some of it together, some of it separated, to see what might have been possible between us, and we have come to the conclusion that while we love each other very much we will remain separate.”

Martin and Paltrow, who married in 2003, have two children, Apple, 9, and Moses, 7.

“We are parents first and foremost, to two incredibly wonderful children and we ask for their and our space and privacy to be respected at this difficult time,” they added

Martin, 37, the Grammy-winning lead vocalist of Coldplay, and Paltrow, 41, who won an Oscar for her performance in “Shakespeare in Love”, were among Hollywood's highest profile couples.

The duo frequently accompanied each other to public events, such as this year's Golden Globes ceremony and the Help Haiti Home gala earlier this year, but they rarely posed together on red carpets.