Kristin Cabot has come to believe that her silence no longer serves her. It made sense in the beginning, after she appeared on the Jumbotron, aghast, in the arms of her boss at a Coldplay concert on July 16th, 2025, a moment that caused an international furore.
The original TikTok received 100 million views within days. Cabot retreated, trying to make things right with the people who mattered most: her two teenage kids; her employer, the tech company Astronomer; and her second husband, Andrew Cabot, from whom she was separated and negotiating a divorce settlement.
In the initial phase, all she could think was: “Oh, my God, I hurt people. I hurt good people.”
Five months after the TikTok bomb became the defining disaster of her life, she described in her first interview since the concert what it feels like to be a punchline and a target.
In online comments she has been called a slut, a homewrecker, a gold digger, a side piece — the usual tags for shaming women. Her appearance has been scrutinised, specific body parts evaluated and found insufficiently pretty. Some of the most famous people in the world have made her humiliation their material.
She was doxxed, and for weeks received 500 or 600 calls a day. Paparazzi camped across the street from her house and cars slowly cruised her block, “like a parade,” she recalled. She received death threats.
So while #coldplaygate, as it came to be called, cycled out of view, she lives with it every day. Her children are reluctant to be seen with her. Just before Thanksgiving, a woman recognised her while she was pumping gas. She called Cabot “disgusting” and said: “‘Adulterers are the lowest form of human. You don’t even deserve to breathe the same air that I breathe.’”
I travelled to her home in New Hampshire on a snowy weekend this month, and we hashed over the events of July 16th for hours. For weeks Cabot had been debating, on her own and with family and friends, whether to talk about what happened. Any attempt to correct the record put her at risk of being shredded all over again.
But Cabot, 53, came to want to tell the truth, and her children, her mother and her closest friends stood behind her.
Former Astronomer chief executive Andy Byron and the firm’s chief people officer, Kristin Cabot, caught on camera at a Coldplay concert.
Cabot hired a communications consultant to help her tell her story while minimising further damage to herself and the people she loves.
The two of us started the day in the kitchen. Cabot, her hair twisted up in a bun, was nervous, referring to bullet points as she unspooled her tale. She was not in a sexual relationship with her boss, she said. Before that night, they had never even kissed.
[ Most worrying aspect of Coldplay concert scandal has to be the ubiquity of online tripeOpens in new window ]
“I made a bad decision and had a couple of High Noons and danced and acted inappropriately with my boss,” she said. “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. I want my kids to know that you can make mistakes, and you can really screw up. But you don’t have to be threatened to be killed for them.”
Cabot came to human resources through advertising and sales and always presented herself as “hyper-professional,” said her friend Alyson Welch, who worked with her at the tech company neo4j.
When, in the summer of 2024, Cabot interviewed with Andy Byron, at the time Astronomer’s CEO, she found they “clicked, stylistically”. She started as Astronomer’s chief people officer in November 2024.
[ The Coldplay couple sit in the virtual dock, victims of online mob justiceOpens in new window ]
In spring 2025, while grabbing a sandwich near Astronomer’s New York office, Cabot made reference to her marriage “in a tone,” as she remembers it, and Byron asked what was up. She was going through a separation, she said. It was stressful, and she worried about her kids.
“I’m going through the same thing,” she recalled him saying. Reached by phone, Byron declined to be interviewed for this article.
Kristin Cabot’s separation from her husband was still new when she agreed to go with friends to see Coldplay. Photograph: Greta Rybus/The New York Times
For Cabot, the shared acknowledgment “sort of strengthened our connection,” she said, and a close working relationship grew even closer. At work, they shared confidences and made each other laugh, and for Cabot “big feelings” grew fast. She began to allow herself to imagine the romantic possibilities, though she knew she couldn’t keep reporting to Byron if the relationship progressed.
Cabot’s separation from her husband was still new when she agreed to go with friends to see Coldplay. She liked the band well enough, but what really appealed was being out, with friends, on a summer Wednesday. “I hadn’t been out in ages,” she told me. She asked Byron to be her plus one.
Before the concert, Cabot and Byron met up with a small group of Cabot’s close friends at the Stockyard, an old school steak joint. The vibe of the evening was open and giddy, agreed two attendees who asked to be anonymous because of what they saw happen to their friend.
Was any part of her concerned about this outing from an HR perspective?
“Some inside part of my brain might have been jumping up and down and waving its arms, saying, ‘Don’t do this’,” Cabot replied. But, generally, “No.” She was “pumped” to introduce Byron to her friends. “I was like: ‘I got this. I can have a crush. I can handle it’.” On the ride to Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts, Cabot learned, by text, that her soon-to-be former husband was attending the concert, too. “It threw me,” she conceded. But she and Byron “were not an item.”
I’m the head of HR and he’s the CEO. It’s, like, so cliche and so bad
— Kristen Cabot
The seats were on a VIP balcony offering a sweeping view of the stage. Cabot remembers that the setting felt dark and private. She and Byron each had a couple of tequila cocktails, and as the concert went on they began to look like a couple. She made a point of saying that night was the first and only time they kissed. Byron was dancing behind Cabot when she took his hands and wrapped his arms around her.
When Cabot saw her own image, and his, on the Jumbotron, it was like “someone flipped a switch,” she said. “I’ll never be able to explain it in any articulate or intelligent way,” she said. What an instant before felt like “joy, joy, joy” turned to terror. Cabot’s hands flew to her face, and she whirled out of Byron’s arms. Byron ducked.
At that moment, she had two thoughts. First: Andrew Cabot was somewhere in the dark stadium and she did not want to humiliate him.
And: “Andy’s my boss.”
“I was so embarrassed and so horrified,” she said. “I’m the head of HR and he’s the CEO. It’s, like, so cliche and so bad.”
Cabot and Byron fled back to the bar. “We both just sat there with our heads in our hands, like, ‘What just happened?’” Even before leaving the stadium, they began to discuss how to manage their public transgression. “And the initial conversation was, ‘We have to tell the board’.”
Cabot has an apartment in the Boston area for when she has custody of her kids, and she and Byron went there to strategise. Who would write the email? What would it say? In her mind’s eye, she saw the loss of her job and complications in her amicable parting with Andrew Cabot, whom her children adored.
And, then, about 4am, Cabot received a text. It was a screenshot of a TikTok.
She drove to see her kids, who were staying with their father in Boston. She wanted to talk to them about what happened before they heard it elsewhere. “They knew who Andy was, obviously,” she told me, “and I said, ‘He and I got very swept up in a moment, and now it’s on social media’.” Her daughter, who was 14, started to cry.
Then she drove back to her apartment for a conference call with the Astronomer board. In that conversation, she recalls, they said: “Listen. We’re human beings. We all make mistakes. But you understand we have to step away and talk about this and figure it out.” The company soon began an investigation.
Kristin Cabot said of the threatening messages she received, “My kids were afraid that I was going to die and they were going to die.” Photograph: Greta Rybus/The New York Times
On Saturday, Byron resigned. Cabot did not sleep. She spent the weekend pacing, crying and talking on the phone. It felt to her that every producer from every television news show was texting. At some point that weekend, Cabot was doxxed, and her phone flooded.
She had security cameras installed at her house, and local police boosted their surveillance. After Astronomer concluded its investigation, the company asked Cabot to return to her role, she said. But she could not imagine how she could stand up as HR chief when she was a laughingstock. She negotiated her resignation, which was announced on July 24th. (Astronomer declined to comment for this article.)
Late summer brought some relief. Cabot filed for divorce from Andrew Cabot, who released a statement confirming that they had been separated at the time of the concert and asking for privacy. (He did not respond to requests for comment. “He has been nothing but a gentleman,” Cabot said.) She found therapists for the children, who went back to school and were treated with kindness there.
She and Byron had been in touch all summer. They exchanged news about Astronomer and updates on their families. In early September, they met and agreed that “speaking with each other was going to make it too hard for everyone to move on and heal,” Cabot told me. Since then, she said, their contact has been minimal.
Cabot wants to rebut the assumption that she slept her way to the top. She has worked from the age of 13, having decided she never wanted to depend financially on a man or worry, as her mother did, about a heating bill.
In the middle of the worst of it, when she was hiding in her bedroom, she had a fantasy of redemption. Cabot wished for someone with visibility and power to interrupt the spinning, endless, ruthless cycle. She yearned for a rational voice to step in and say, “Wait a minute,” as she told me. “Can we start a conversation where there might be room for a different version of this story? This has gotten really wild.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
