“Everything just flashed before my eyes,” Kristin Cabot recalls of the moment Chris Martin ruined her life at a Coldplay concert in July.
The moment in question — an embrace with Andy Byron, her married boss — was caught on a “kisscam” filming the audience in Boston. “Either they’re having an affair or they’re just very shy,” Martin joked as the pair ducked and hid their faces.
A 16-second clip, filmed by another concertgoer and posted to TikTok, became one of the most viral videos of all time, receiving 150 million views within days. It rallied an online mob bent on destroying the lives of Cabot and Byron, who were widely assumed to have been caught cheating.
Cabot, 53, had never spoken publicly about her ordeal until now. In an interview with The Times, the mother of two says the embrace was the first time she and Byron had been physically affectionate. Both of them, she says, were amicably separated from their spouses.
“I could have been struck by lightning, I could have won the lottery, or this could have happened,” she says of the fact that the intimate moment was broadcast to a stadium of 50,000 people, before being watched and analysed by millions more on social media.
The attention might have been fair, Cabot reasoned to herself, had she been famous, or a high-profile figure. “But I’m not some celebrity, I’m just a mom from New Hampshire,” she says. “Even if I did have an affair, it’s not anybody’s business.
“It has been like a scarlet letter; people erased everything I’d accomplished in my life and achieved in my career. This can’t be the final word.”
The ‘big happy crush’
Cabot joined Astronomer, Byron’s start-up tech firm, as its human resources chief in November last year. She was headhunted by recruiters thanks to her decades of experience working at top advertising firms, where colleagues regarded her as “something of a rock star in people strategy”.
Cabot had heard good things about Byron. All of them, she says, turned out to be true. Byron was the sort of boss who “made sure women had a seat at the table, that I was just as loud a voice in the room as everyone else”, she says. “It was the first company in the male-dominated professions I’d worked in where I felt my gender was not an issue.”
They worked closely together, sharing the same vision for the company and how it could grow. Cabot recalls: “I definitely thought he was a good-looking guy and I had that thought of, ‘If I didn’t work here …’”
About a month before the concert, Cabot says, the pair revealed to each other that they had split from their partners: Cabot from her husband Andrew, the chief executive officer of a family-run distillery, Privateer Rum, and Byron from his wife, Megan, a school teacher.
“I don’t think my separation would have come as a surprise to him, but his definitely did for me,” Cabot says by Zoom from her apartment in Boston. “To have someone else going through it at the exact same time that you can talk to was an amazing support.”
Over time, her feelings for him developed into what she calls “a big happy crush”.
When she was given two free Coldplay tickets from her friends, she decided to offer the spare to Byron.
The night of the concert, Cabot’s 14-year-old daughter — one of two children she had with her first husband, Kenneth Thornby — texted her to let her know her estranged second husband, Andrew, would be there too. She would learn from a friend later in the evening that Andrew was there on a first date.
It eased her conscience, she says, that she was there with Byron.
From dancing in the dark to total shock
Cabot says she was “on top of the world” before the kisscam caught her with Byron. “We were sitting in the back of the stadium at the opposite end from the stage in the pitch black just feeling totally anonymous in an arena of 50-60,000 people,” she says. “We were just dancing, I’d had a few High Noons (vodka seltzers). Andy was standing behind me and we were dancing and I grabbed him.
“I didn’t hear the announcement that the jumbotron was coming, so suddenly I’m just seeing us on screen,” she says. Cabot’s instinct was to cover her face; Bryon’s was to duck and hide. “I’m not quite sure what to do,” Martin then said awkwardly, “did we rumble you?”
“My immediate reaction was, ‘Holy shit, Andrew’s here’,” says Cabot. “We were in the middle of an incredibly — and amazingly — amicable separation. I was worried I would embarrass him. He’s an amazing guy and does not deserve that.
“Then a beat later my mind turns to, ‘Oh God, Andy’s my effing boss’, this is a bad look. Boston’s not a big town. And while it wasn’t an Astronomer event or anything, there could have been investors or other staff there.”
Her longtime friend, Alaina, is the woman in the video who is seen laughing nervously.
Cabot and Byron rushed out of Gillette Stadium as they started to process what had happened, thinking about what they should do next. They agreed they needed to send a joint email to Astronomer’s board of directors in case the news got out.
They got a taxi back to where they had parked their cars. “It was pretty silent,” Cabot said of the journey. “All I could think about was ‘Andrew is going to kill me’ and ‘what do we do about our jobs?’”
Byron and Cabot drove back to hers, more than an hour away in Rye, New Hampshire. During the drive she received a text from an old friend who had been at the gig but did not know she and Andrew were separated. It read: “Duuuddde?”
Cabot and Byron then parted ways and later spoke on the phone around midnight for several hours, strategising the wording of their email to the board. At about 4am, her husband Andrew, who had not said anything up until this point, sent her a screenshot of the video online with the message: “I think you should know this is out there.”
It had been shared on TikTok by a concertgoer, Grace Springer, who quipped: “Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.” Internet sleuths began hunting for the identities of the couple.
Early the next morning, Cabot addressed members of the Astronomer board. “I apologised profusely to them for becoming a distraction,” she recalls. “They weren’t thrilled but they were nice about it. They just said, ‘This stuff happens’.”
The human resources department would be opening an investigation, they told her. “Obviously that was weird, as that would ordinarily be my job,” she laughs.
‘My daughter burst into tears’
Cabot wanted to tell her children — her daughter and 16-year-old son — before they heard it from anyone else. “My daughter burst into tears, saying, ‘I guess that means you really are getting divorced then’ ”, while her son tried to reassure her that it would “probably go away”.
It did not.
The video took on a life of its own; turned into fodder for late-night talk show hosts and gossip columnists. “‘Coldplaygate’ is a stark reminder that cameras are everywhere,” opined The New York Times. It was even brought up in an Oval Office press conference with President Trump.
Meanwhile, Byron and Cabot’s LinkedIn accounts were deluged with mocking references to Coldplay lyrics. “Lights did not guide Andy home,” one comment read. Fake Facebook accounts were set up in the name of their spouses.
It had all the right ingredients: suspected adultery, a tech CEO and his head of HR linked to one of New England’s wealthiest families (the Cabot dynasty is estimated to be worth billions).
Astronomer itself poured fuel on the already raging fire by hiring Martin’s ex-wife Gwyneth Paltrow to feature in a commercial promoting the business. Appalled, Cabot threw away everything she owned from Paltrow’s brand Goop. “I was such a fan of her company, which seemed to be about uplifting women,” she says. “And then she did this. I thought, ‘How dare she after the beating she got for all the conscious uncoupling stuff.’ What a hypocrite.”
Trauma and accusations
Cabot’s entire life had been distilled to a 16-second clip: a video she has never been able to bring herself to watch, though she has steeled herself on occasion to read the comments.
“I became a meme, I was the most maligned HR manager in HR history,” she said.
“I think as a woman, as women always do, I took the bulk of the abuse. People would say things like I was a ‘gold-digger’ or I ‘slept my way to the top’, which just couldn’t be further from reality. The amount I sacrificed to get where I did in my career, the amount of hands I’ve had to take off my ass over the years, comments I’ve had to swat away from men.
“I worked so hard to dispel that all my life and here I was being accused of it.”
After the video went viral, she retreated to an Airbnb in the New Hampshire mountains for a few days. She describes being in “too dark a place” to parent her children.
Byron resigned that same week. Astronomer’s investigation concluded there was no evidence of an affair between him and Cabot, though the board wrote that the company’s “leaders are expected to set the standard in both conduct and accountability, and recently, that standard was not met”.
Cabot stepped down shortly after. “There was a lot of noise around me not taking accountability, but what actually happened is the board said, ‘Please stay’,” she says. “And I said, ‘How, given my job is to be the one to show people how we are expected to behave, our standards, our values?’
“If it hadn’t turned into what it did online, I could have stood up and said, ‘It was a really bad decision and I regret it. I’m so sorry for the position I put you all in, but I’m committed to this place’ and stayed in my job.”
Cabot says nobody from Coldplay’s team ever reached out following the incident
ROBERT OKINE/GETTY IMAGES
Cabot and Byron kept in touch for a short while, exchanging “crisis management advice”. But they have not spoken since. Cabot says she was “saddened” that no one from Coldplay’s team ever reached out, or released a statement that might have helped turn down the heat on a scandal she believes Martin had helped manufacture. A spokesman for Coldplay declined to comment.
• The Coldplay kiss cam saga? There’s more!
Cabot filed for divorce from Andrew in August, formalising the end of a short and ill-fated marriage. The status of Byron’s marriage is not known, though he and his wife were pictured enjoying a picnic together on a beach in Maine in late September. They did not respond to a request for comment.
An ordeal that’s far from over
In the weeks and months after the concert, Cabot received thousands of emails, texts and even letters to her home, calling her a “homewrecker” and recommending ways she could meet a “violent end”. Her local radio station had shared her address and she started getting threatening messages from people warning her they knew where she got her coffee and filled up her car. Throughout her ordeal, she wondered if Byron was experiencing the same level of abuse she was.
“I’m sure a lot of people will say, ‘This is such a dead story, why bring it back up?’,” says Cabot. “But it’s not over for me, and it’s not over for my kids. The harassment never ended.”
To this day, mothers still gossip about her in the playground, strangers shout profanities at her on the street. Her children are still too embarrassed to let Cabot pick them up from school or attend sports games. “They’re mad at me,” she says tearfully. “And they can be mad at me for the rest of their lives — I have to take that.”
She lost friends and even family members who never reached out after the incident. She has been looking for another job, but has been told she is “unemployable”.
The impact of public shaming on its subjects has been studied at length. Statistics show that women are shamed more often and more intensely than men, especially when it comes to issues such as body image and workplace behaviour.
People can’t resist amplifying someone else’s worst moment. Psychologists say that is because it works to deflect from our own anxieties about success, failure and power.
Many lose their jobs and, like Cabot, struggle to find new ones. Others experience lasting mental health problems. Jon Ronson, author of the 2015 book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, analysed the fallout from a hack of Ashley Madison, a website for people looking for extramarital affairs. He linked it to four alleged suicides among those who had their identities exposed.
“When you reduce all human behaviour to the information that can be contained within one tweet, everything becomes very black and white,” he wrote. “Which is why on social media, everybody’s a magnificent hero or a sickening villain — there’s no room for people in between.”
Amid the fallout, Cabot hired a communications consultant, Dini von Mueffling, who is no stranger to rehabilitating the images of women monstered by the media, having represented both Monica Lewinsky and the late Virginia Giuffre.
Together they hope to create awareness around the real-life consequences of vigilante-like online mobs rallying to the cause of destroying someone’s life.
Lewinsky, who describes herself as “patient zero” in the modern epidemic of cyberbullying, has become a prominent advocate for internet protections.
“One of the main reasons I want to have this conversation is not to prolong any 15 minutes of pathetic fame,” Cabot says. “Every day I hear something about a kid or a young adult who committed suicide because of how horrific they were treated in the comment section.
“We have to be kinder to each other, not constantly tear one another down.”