Kristin Cabot, the woman seen embracing her boss on a “kiss cam” at a Coldplay concert in July, is speaking out for the first time about the fallout from the moment and how it affected her family.
The embrace between Cabot, 53, and Andy Byron, the then-CEO of the company Astronomer, became a viral TikTok video that resulted in both of them resigning from their jobs. Cabot, who filed a petition for divorce from husband Andrew Cabot in August, told The New York Times that she and Byron had not kissed before that night at the concert at Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts.
“I made a bad decision and had a couple of High Noons and danced and acted inappropriately with my boss,” Cabot said. “And it’s not nothing. And 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,” she continued. “But you don’t have to be threatened to be killed for them.”
Cabot said she was going through a separation with her husband at the time of the viral moment. She told The New York Times that she also found out on the way to the show that her now former husband was also going to be attending the concert.
“It threw me,” she said.
She recalled how she felt when the spotlight found her and Byron during the show. She quickly covered her face and moved from Byron’s embrace while he tried to duck out of sight.
“Oh, look at these two. You’re all right. You’re OK. Oh, what? Either they’re having an affair or they’re just very shy,” Coldplay lead singer Chris Martin joked to the crowd during the show after seeing Cabot and Byron on the kiss cam.
“I was so embarrassed and so horrified,” Cabot said. “I’m the head of H.R. and he’s the C.E.O. It’s, like, so cliché and so bad.”
Astronomer, a data operations company, tried to make light of the situation by hiring Gwyneth Paltrow, the ex-wife of Coldplay’s Martin, as its “temporary spokesperson” in the wake of the video.
Cabot said the viral moment resulted in death threats, including one she played for her mother on speakerphone that was overheard by her children.
“They were already in really bad shape, and that’s when the wheels fell off the cart,” she said. “Because my kids were afraid that I was going to die and they were going to die.”
Once Cabot realized the TikTok video of the moment was going viral, she drove to talk to her children, who were staying with their father in Boston. Their 14-year-old daughter began crying as Cabot told them about her interaction with Byron.
“They knew who Andy was, obviously, and I said, ‘He and I got very swept up in a moment and now it’s on social media,’” Cabot said.
She said she has been shunned by many former friends and close colleagues, which she calls “worse than people yelling at me at the gas station.” She added that the scandal is something she lives with “every day,” including strangers approaching her and scolding her in public while she’s with her children.
“I didn’t know what to do to support my kids correctly,” she said.
