Coldplay kisscam: Kristin Cabot reveals what happened in days and months after scandal in first interview

Five months after a Coldplay concert turned her life upside down, Kristin Cabot says she finally feels ready to speak.

What began as a lighthearted night out in July became an international scandal when Cabot appeared on the stadium’s Jumbotron, wrapped in the arms of her boss, CEO Andy Byron.

As the camera scanned the audience, it landed on Byron, seen with his arms around Cabot, Astronomer’s Chief People Officer.

When the camera focused on the couple, they were both startled. Byron dashed out of the camera’s view, while Cabot turned away and shielded her face.

“Oh look at these two. Come on, you’re okay. Oh, what? Either they’re having an affair or they’re very shy,” Chris Martin commented as the crowd roared with laughter.

The clip went viral, clocking more than 100 million views within days. What followed, she said, was a tidal wave of ridicule and fear.

“I made a bad decision and had a couple of High Noons and danced and acted inappropriately with my boss,” she told The New York Times.

“And it’s not nothing. 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.”

The 53-year-old said she wanted to tell her story on her own terms after months of harassment.

She was called a slut and a homewrecker. Strangers showed up outside her house.

There were weeks, she said, when she received 500 or 600 phone calls a day and death threats that felt chillingly specific, with one person even pointing out where she did her shopping.

Even now, she says, she lives with it every day and her children still don’t like being seen with her in public.

Was she in a relationship with Andy Byron?

She insists she was never romantically involved with Byron beyond that one night and that both had previously told each other they were separated from their spouses.

When she met Byron during her interview she said they “clicked stylistically”.

As her marriage was ending, conversations with Byron turned more personal about both their marriages. “It sort of strengthened our connection,” she said.

That night at Gillette Stadium, she said “some inside part of my brain might have been jumping up and down and waving its arms, saying, ‘Don’t do this,’” when asked if she was concerned from a HR perspective.

She was keen to introduce Byron to her friends at the concert. “I was like: ‘I got this. I can have a crush. I can handle it.’”

The image of her and Byron appeared on the Jumbotron. “It was like someone flipped a switch,” she recalled. What had been “joy, joy, joy” turned instantly into fear.

“I was so embarrassed and so horrified,” she said. “I’m the head of HR and he’s the CEO. It’s, like, so cliche and so bad.”

“We both just sat there with our heads in our hands, like, ‘What just happened?’

“And the initial conversation was, ‘We have to tell the board.’”

She admitted then “panic attacks were starting”.

Coldplay kisscam video goes viral

They fled the venue soon after and emailed Astronomer’s board to self-report what had happened. Within hours, the TikTok version of the video was exploding online.

She says she drove through the night to tell her children before they saw it elsewhere. “They knew who Andy was, obviously” she said. “I told them, ‘He and I got swept up in a moment, and now it’s on social media.’ Her 14-year-old daughter then started to cry.

By the weekend, Byron had resigned. Cabot followed days later, unable to return to a company where she had become the punchline.

What did Kriston Cabot say about Gwyneth Paltrow

The humiliation deepened when actress and Goop founder Gwyneth Paltrow, Chris Martin’s ex-wife, appeared in an Astronomer ad days after the incident, joking about the viral video.

“I’ve been hired on a very temporary basis to speak on behalf of the 300 plus employees at Astronomer,” she said in the video which was released across multiple social media platforms.

She then went on to pretend to answer questions like “OMG: What the actual f?” She jokingly said: “Yes Astronomer is the best place to run a patchy airflow”.

“We’ve been thrilled so many people have a newfound interest in data workflow automation.”

For Cabot, it felt like betrayal because she was a fan of her company, which seemed to “empower, support and uplift women,” she said.

In a separate interview with The Times UK she went further on her criticism of Paltrow. “And then she did this. I thought ‘how dare she after the beating she got for all the conscious uncoupling stuff.’ What a hypocrite”.

She also told The Times that she threw out all her Goop products when she saw the video.