This summer, seemingly the entire internet was talking about Kristin Cabot. She’s finally talking back.
When a Coldplay concert “kiss cam” caught Cabot, Astronomer’s former head of people, and Andy Byron, the company’s former CEO, embracing, the footage quickly went viral. In the weeks that followed, both Cabot and Byron left their jobs.
Now, Cabot, who was in the process of separating from her now-ex husband at the time of the infamous concert, has given her first public interviews to The New York Times and the Times of London.
From the crisis management to anger at Gwyneth Paltrow to lasting career fallout, here are the biggest takeaways from Cabot’s conversations.
It was their first kiss
Cabot told both outlets that she and Byron had never kissed before the concert. She said they’d gotten along well since she joined Astronomer in November of 2024, and that she’d told him about her ongoing separation from Andrew Cabot shortly before the concert in July. That’s when she said she learned that he, too, was going through a similar situation. (Andrew Cabot has publicly acknowledged that the couple was separated at the time and the two have since filed for divorce; the status of Byron’s marriage is unclear, according to the Times of London).
By the time of the concert, Cabot told the Times of London that she had developed “a big happy crush,” but she told The New York Times that she kept her feelings in check because he was her boss. At the concert, she said she had a few High Noons — the vodka seltzers well-known to college partiers — and the two started to act more like a couple. It was, she said, the only time they kissed.
Crisis management
Immediately after the big screen caught Cabot and Byron embracing — and quickly untangling, ducking, and turning away — Cabot said she first thought of accidentally humiliating her still-husband, who was also at the concert.
“Then a beat later my mind turns to, ‘Oh God, Andy’s my effing boss’, this is a bad look,'” Cabot told the Times of London.
The two employees quickly went into crisis management mode, driving to her home about an hour away and deciding they needed to tell the board before anything got out, Cabot told both outlets. She said that “panic attacks were starting,” according to the New York Times. She and Byron continued strategizing on the phone for several hours after he left, she told the Times of London.
Cabot has since hired a communications consultant and told The New York Times she and Byron haven’t spoken much since September.
Her then-husband sent her the TikTok
Around 4 am, Andrew Cabot sent her a screenshot of the video on TikTok, Cabot told the London outlet. She said he was cordial throughout the whole ordeal.
The next morning, she said she apologized to the board, whom she said was kind, even as they opened an investigation. Eventually, the board asked Cabot to stay in her role, she told both outlets. Ultimately, she decided to leave.
Retreating to an Airbnb
The weekend after the video went viral, Cabot said she retreated to an Airbnb in the New Hampshire mountains. She told the Times of London that she was in “too dark a place” to fulfill her responsibilities as a parent.
Threats kept rolling in
Cabot told the New York Times that she got between 500 and 600 calls each day in the weeks after the concert, and 50 or 60 death threats. She said her children hesitated to go out with her in public, as people — largely women — would heckle her. She told the outlet that local police increased surveillance of her home and that she installed security cameras.
Former colleagues have cut her off altogether, she said.
Anger at Paltrow and Coldplay frontman Chris Martin
In July, Paltrow, the founder and CEO of Goop, appeared in an Astronomer ad that poked fun at the kiss cam video. Cabot told the Times of London that Paltrow, who popularized the phrase “conscious uncoupling” when she split from Coldplay frontman Chris Martin, was acting like a “hypocrite.” She decided to throw out all of her Goop products.
Cabot also told the outlet that she believed Martin played a role in creating the scandal and was disappointed that nobody from Coldplay had ever contacted her or released a statement.
‘Scarlet letter’
Cabot said she has long prided herself on her career and her financial independence, and told the Times of London that the whole scandal has made her virtually “unemployable.”
“It has been like a scarlet letter; people erased everything I’d accomplished in my life and achieved in my career,” she said.
