Among all the viral moments this year, one of the biggest ones of all just has to be the ‘Coldplay couple’.
When the seemingly innocent jumbotron at Coldplay’s Music of the Spheres concert in Boston back in July was doing a scan of the crowd, it ended up picking out Andy Byron and Kristin Cabot.
And with them acting rather suss in the moment, a global obsession was instantly sparked after a concertgoer shared the clip.
Social media sleuths tracked them down, Byron stood down as the CEO of Astronomer, Gwyneth Paltrow got involved (that’s still one of the weirdest bits to me) and now, Cabot has spoken out for the first time.
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Having spoken about her relationship with her then-boss, she also explained just what she was thinking in the moment she saw her face appearing on the jumbo screen.
Cabot told the New York Times she got ’50 or 60’ death threats, was doxed and was receiving hundreds of calls a day, with her children now ‘reluctant’ to be seen with her.
The 53-year-old, who had ‘amicably separated’ from her husband weeks before the concert, explained that she was not in ‘a sexual relationship’ with her boss and had never even kissed him before that now viral night.
“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."
Cabot had taken Byron as a ‘plus one’ to the concert with her friends, seated on a VIP balcony that felt ‘private’.
But when she saw the pair of them up on the jumbotron, she described it as feeling as though ‘someone flipped a switch’.
“I’ll never be able to explain it in any articulate or intelligent way,” she added.
Her first two thoughts were that her husband (again, who she had separated from) was also somewhere in the stadium watching the concert, and she didn’t want to humiliate him.
And: “Andy’s my boss.”
Cabot said she was ‘so embarrassed and so horrified’, adding: “I’m the head of H.R. and he’s the C.E.O. It’s, like, so cliché and so bad.
Explaining that the pair escaped to the bar after the viral moment, she elaborated: “We both just sat there with our heads in our hands, like, ‘What just happened?’”
They began to discuss how to manage things before leaving the stadium, as she added: “And the initial conversation was, 'We have to tell the board'.”
But of course, it quickly made its way onto TikTok and as things spiralled. Cabot rented a solo getaway weekend but did not sleep, as the story grew and grew, and then she was doxed.
Offered the chance to return to her role after Astronomer’s investigated, Cabot chose to resign.
Jess Battison