Kristin Cabot, whose liaison with her boss at a Coldplay concert this summer went viral and cost both of them their jobs, has broken her silence in a New York Times profile, detailing how she’s living in the aftermath of public shaming. “I was so embarrassed and so horrified,” she said. “I’m the head of H.R. and he’s the C.E.O. It’s, like, so cliché and so bad.” But as she explained, the fallout was much worse after public shaming led to doxxing, which in turn led to 500 to 600 calls a day and what she estimated as 50 to 60 death threats.
Cabot, 53, maintained in the article that she was not in a relationship with her boss, former Astronomer CEO Andy Byron, before the concert, and that the first time they kissed was the one captured on Gillette Stadium’s jumbotron. “I made a bad decision and had a couple of High Noons and danced and acted inappropriately with my boss,” she 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. But you don’t have to be threatened to be killed for them.”
She also shared her side of the story, explaining that she started at Astronomer in November 2024 and bonded with Byron over their shared separations from their spouses. Feeling a spark, she invited him to a Coldplay concert with her friends. “I was like: ‘I got this. I can have a crush. I can handle it,” she told the Times. On the way there, she learned her husband, also an Andrew, would be in the audience. Nevertheless, she said, she went with the moment and pulled Byron’s arms around her for a kiss right as the camera hit her.
Aware that the camera was on them, when they instantly recoiled, Chris Martin commented, “Either they’re having an affair, or they’re just very shy.” Cabot told the Times that she and Byron ran to the bar in shame. “We both just sat there with our heads in our hands, like, ‘What just happened?’” she recalled, adding that their first impulse was to tell Astronomer’s board of directors what happened. After she received a TikTok at 4 a.m. showing her kiss, she drove to Boston the next day to see her husband and tell her kids what happened.
Byron resigned from the company a few days after the concert. After the Astronomer’s board investigated what happened, they offered Cabot the opportunity to keep her job, but she decided to resign instead, later in July. She tried to disappear by herself for self-healing, but the public shaming was fast and furious, and she began fearing for her and her children’s safety when people commented on her daily routines. She told the Times, though, that she wants to own her actions and hopes that people understand and respect her privacy.
Byron, Cabot’s ex-husband, and reps for Astronomer all declined to comment.
The harshest critics, she told the Times, were women. And she added that she was especially disappointed in Gwyneth Paltrow, who starred in a cheeky ad for Astronomer, since Paltrow had pioneered the phrase “conscious uncoupling” and had created a company supportive of women.
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Cabot’s and Byron’s jumbotron kiss became one of the year’s most prolific memes, with one person on social media commenting, “Shoutout to Coldplay for bringing the whole internet together for one day.”
After the incident, Martin made it a point to inform audiences that they could be caught on camera during what he dubbed “The Jumbotron Song.” “We’d like to say hello to some of you in the crowd,” he said in July at the Madison, Wisconsin gig after Cabot’s viral moment. “How we’re gonna do that is we’re gonna use our cameras and put some of you on the big screen. So please, if you haven’t done your makeup, do your makeup now.”
From Rolling Stone US
