The HR executive busted canoodling with her married boss on the Coldplay concert kiss cam has finally spoken about her life-changing, career-ending scandal — blaming it on a “bad decision”.
Kristin Cabot, a 53-year-old mum of two, broke her silence in interviews published on Thursday — months after her 16-second public display of affection with her then-boss, Astronomer CEO Andy Byron, left her a “meme” and “unemployable”, The New York Post reports.
“I made a bad decision and had a couple of High Noons (alcholic seltzers) and danced and acted inappropriately with my boss,” she told the New York Times, while admitting he was her “big happy crush”.
“And it’s not nothing. And I took accountability and I gave up my career for that. That’s the price I chose to pay.”
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She insisted, too, that the backlash she received in the wake of the soap opera-worthy saga was unwarranted.
“I could have been struck by lightning, I could have won the lottery, or this could have happened,” Ms Cabot told the Times of London in a separate interview.
“But I’m not some celebrity, I’m just a mum from New Hampshire,” she added. “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.”
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Instead, she “became a meme,” she noted to the UK Times, one she reckons has made her “unemployable”.
“I was the most maligned HR manager in HR history,” she said.
The disgraced exec noted that both she and her then-boss were amicably separated from their respective spouses when they decided to attend the concert together with her friends.
Ms Cabot, who was only hired the prior to November, acknowledged developing a “big happy crush” on Byron after learning roughly a month before the gig that he was also in the midst of splitting from his wife.
“I wanted to put a cute outfit on and go out and dance and laugh and have a great night,” she told the NYT. “And that’s how it was tracking.
“Some inside part of my brain might have been jumping up and down and waving its arms, saying, ‘Don’t do this,’” she admitted, but ultimately she was swayed by how “pumped” she was to be there with him in front of friends.
The HR exec noted she was “on top of the world” in the moments before they were busted mid-embrace.
“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 UK Times.
“We were just dancing, I’d had a few High Noons. Andy was standing behind me and we were dancing and I grabbed him,” Ms Cabot continued.
“I didn’t hear the announcement that the jumbotron was coming, so suddenly I’m just seeing us on screen.”
Despite their on-screen antics, Ms Cabot admitted she knew ahead of time that her soon-to-be ex-husband was somewhere in the Coldplay crowd.
That news “threw” her — and was the first thought when she saw her canoodling flashed up on the big screen.
“My immediate reaction was, ‘Holy s**t, Andrew’s here,’” Ms Cabot said of her of ex.
“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.”
Elsewhere, Ms Cabot said the entire saga had up-ended her life and ruined her career, acknowledging the public shaming had resulted in her being told she is “unemployable.”
“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 arse over the years, comments I’ve had to swat away from men,” she continued.
“I worked so hard to dispel that all my life and here I was being accused of it.”
Despite staying in contact briefly to exchange “crisis-management advice,” Ms Cabot said she hasn’t spoken to her former boss in months.
Ms Cabot officially filed for divorce from her husband roughly a month after the caught-on-camera saga went viral.
This article originally appeared in The New York Post and was reproduced with permission.
