How could you not know about this?! A brief appearance on a Coldplay jumbotron turned into a life-altering internet spectacle, and now the woman at the centre of it is finally speaking out.
The incident unfolded during Coldplay’s July show at Gillette Stadium near Boston, part of the band’s regular crowd-camera segment where couples are shown on the big screens and encouraged to kiss. This time, the camera landed on Andy Byron, CEO of tech platform Astronomer, with his arms around Kristin Cabot, the company’s head of HR.
As soon as they realized they were on screen, Byron dropped out of frame while Cabot covered her head and turned away. Onstage, Chris Martin initially said, “Ohh, look at these two,” before adding, as their discomfort became clear, “Come on, you’re ok. Oh what? Either they’re having an affair or they’re just very shy.”
The clip exploded online. Within days, both Byron and Cabot stepped down from their roles at Astronomer. While accusations of an affair swirled, it later emerged that Cabot and her husband “were privately and amicably separated several weeks before the Coldplay concert.”
Now, Cabot has spoken publicly for the first time about the fallout in an interview with The Times.
“I could have been struck by lightning, I could have won the lottery, or this could have happened,” she said. “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.”
She described how normal the night felt before the moment went viral.
“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 told The Times. “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.”
She continued: “I didn’t hear the announcement that the jumbotron was coming, so suddenly I’m just seeing us on screen.
“My immediate reaction was, ‘Holy shit, Andrew’s (her estranged husband) here’. 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.”
In the aftermath, Cabot says the internet turned her into a target.
“Following the incident she said she became ‘a meme, I was the most maligned HR manager in HR history.’”
“I think as a woman, as women always do, I took the bulk of the abuse,” she said. “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.”
Cabot also said she was “saddened” that no one from Coldplay’s team reached out or issued a statement that might have helped de-escalate the situation, particularly given Martin’s on-stage comments.
At Coldplay’s first concert following the incident, Martin joked to the crowd: “We’d like to say hello to some of you in the crowd and put some of you on the big screen. How we’re going to do that is we’re going to use our cameras and put some of you on the big screen.
“Please, if you haven’t done your makeup, do your makeup now.”
According to Cabot, the harassment never stopped. She said she received thousands of emails, texts, and even letters sent to her home, branding her a “homewrecker” and suggesting ways she could meet a “violent end”.
“I’m sure a lot of people will say, ‘This is such a dead story, why bring it back up?’” she said. “But it’s not over for me, and it’s not over for my kids. The harassment never ended.”
She added: “One of the main reasons I want to have this conversation is not to prolong any 15 minutes of pathetic fame. 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.”
Elsewhere, Coldplay frontman Chris Martin has recently made headlines for a very different reason, surprising a couple on their wedding day by serenading them during their first dance.
Hard to feel remorse for either involved, isn’t it?
