Photo: GRETA RYBUS/The New York Times/Redux
At last, the moment we’ve been waiting for: One-half of the canoodling Coldplay couple speaks. In interviews with the Times and the New York Times published Thursday, Kristin Cabot recapped the moment that she was caught on a kiss cam embracing Andy Byron, her married boss and the former Astronomer CEO. The 53-year-old mother of two feels she “took accountability” for what she described as “a bad decision” she made that night in July.
Cabot explained that she’d joined Astronomer, Byron’s tech start-up, as head of human resources in November last year. After working closely together for months, she began to develop a “big happy crush.” “I definitely thought he was a good-looking guy and I had that thought of, If I didn’t work here …” she remembered. A month prior to the Coldplay concert, Cabot says they both shared with each other that they’d split from their respective partners. When a friend offered her free tickets to see Coldplay, she asked Byron to go with her. According to Cabot, the hug Chris Martin caught was the first time she and Byron had been physical, and that night was the first and only time they kissed. Later, she’d discover through her daughter that her estranged husband was also in the crowd that night. Both Cabot and Byron stepped down from their jobs in the aftermath.
“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. I took accountability, and I gave up my career for that. That’s the price I chose to pay.”
In the months since the incident, Cabot says she has received thousands of emails, texts, and letters to her home calling her a “homewrecker” and threatening that she’d meet a “violent end.” The betrayal hit another level when her former idol and Chris Martin’s ex Gwyneth Paltrow was hired to appear in a cheeky ad for Astronomer, spoofing the situation. Now that she’s retained a communications consultant and thrown away her Goop products, though, things are on the up and up — she’s found enough humor in her situation to buy a Victoria Beckham brand T-shirt that says, “Yes it’s me.”
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