Where Does Apple Martin Go to College?

Where does Apple Martin, the daughter of Goopstress Gwyneth Paltrow and Coldplay Brit Chris Martin, go to college? For a child whose parents are so firmly ensconced in the public eye, it’s not easy to find an answer.

The ultra-rich have, for the most part, better tools for ensuring their digital privacy than most tend to deploy. At the very least, a select few have made it very hard to figure out particular facts about themselves. You nearly have to be an NSA contractor, for example, to find the names of Jeff Bezos’s four kids. Martin, admirably uninterested (so far) in leveraging her famous parents into an influencer gig, seems to have gotten similar treatment. Both her Instagram and TikTok are private. There has also been minimal chatter about her on either platform from other users, or on Reddit, Twitter, or Tumblr. And her Google results are limited — filled mostly with SEO filler, celebrity net worth blogs, and gossip sites tracking her occasional appearances on Paltrow’s Instagram.

The simplest explanation for this is that the Paltrow-Martin decouplage has gone to some out-of-character lengths to safeguard their daughter’s privacy, presumably to keep gossip sites like this one from bothering a kid just trying to get through their Intro Psych textbook before the Kappa Gamma Alpha rush event. Understandable. But despite these challenges, we persist: Where does Gwyneth’s progeny hang her extra-long twin sheets?

It’s an interesting dichotomy, to use a word Apple is probably learning right now — for someone evidently trying to keep her daughter out of the papers, Paltrow keeps putting her out there with bizarre frequency. In September, she gave a sit-down interview with CBS Morning News, in which she brought up Apple’s departure for college, a transition she described as “almost as profound as giving birth.” The next month, she met with People magazine at the “Gwyneth Paltrow x Copper Fit Feel the Fit Press Day” in Santa Monica, where Apple’s college came up again. “It was horrible. It was truly horrifying,” she said of dropping her daughter off. “I was sick to my stomach, bursting into tears." Paltrow kept going: She was getting “more and more used to" the separation, thanks to a “parents weekend,” where she saw "how happy [Martin] is and settled." Then, the previous weekend, she said, Martin “came home for October break.”

Paltrow’s monthly blabbing about Apple’s departures and reunions plants the question in any tab reader’s mind: okay, where is she doing that? Paltrow was careful not to say, an omission the tabloids picked up on. “The Goop founder, 49, hasn't shared any further details about where Apple is going to school or what she'll be studying,” People reported in September. The magazine added in October: “The proud mom hasn't shared any details about where Apple is going to school or what she is studying.” The Daily Mail was predictably blunt: “Gwyneth did not name which school her teenager is attending.”

This week, Paltrow seemed to drop an unprompted hint, posting about Apple during a Thanksgiving outing in Manhattan. The requisite Page Six headline read: “Gwyneth Paltrow reunites with daughter in NYC after Apple starts college.” But again, there was no mention of which college. If you’ve picked up on the pattern and are inclined to conspiratorial thinking, you might wonder: did Paltrow post the New York pictures as a red herring, sending internet sleuths with too much free time on pointless rabbit holes of Googling “Apple Martin New School,” “Apple Martin Columbia,” and “Apple Martin NYU?” Possibly, and it may have worked; the latter shows up as a recommended Google search, as do “Apple Martin Colgate” and “Apple Martin Vanderbilt.”

All of those searches, notably, yield the same, weirdly brief results. But Vanderbilt has been a source of chatter since before Apple finished high school. Back in March, the forum dwellers at GreekRank were already chatting about Apple’s Panhellenic prospects at Vandy. It continued into the comments section of Celebitchy.com this summer, where gossips laid out some compelling, if entirely speculative, evidence.

In an August post about an out-of-control party Apple threw in the Hamptons, one commenter wrote: “Back in winter, one of Apple’s friends posted a congrats TikTok of Apple getting into Vanderbilt. It was later removed. Later, she was spotted wearing a Vanderbilt baseball cap.” Another chimed in: “I moved my son into Vanderbilt this weekend. He says that Apple Martin is a first year there. Will confirm with him.” A third said they spotted Apple during the same move-in weekend, along with an additional celeb superstar: Mark Cuban, whose daughter Alexis is a far-more-public freshman there. A fourth even claimed that the gossip was coming from the university itself. “On a college tour of Vanderbilt last week,” they wrote, “we were told that Apple was in the incoming freshman class.”

The school is not far from Paltrow’s Goop store in Nashville, where she also recently went on a “girls’ trip.” And we all know how Gwyneth feels about country music. So as much as Gwyn makes it seem like Apple goes to Fordham or Hunter, it’s believable that Apple is actually a Commodore-ista and she and mom frequently hop on separate PJs to NYC to go to Bergdorf’s for one day. It’s a good misdirect, but we know the truth is out there. And if you trust the denizens of gossip forums, which you largely should not, it may point towards Music City. If you have any info on Apple’s college whereabouts, or other minor celebrity mysteries, hit us at tips@gawker.com.