Washington, DC [US], December 18 : Kristin Cabot, the executive at the centre of the viral Coldplay concert controversy popularly dubbed #ColdplayGate, has finally spoken for the first time about the incident that upended her professional and personal life.
According to PEOPLE, in an interview with The New York Times, Cabot addressed the July 2024 moment that saw her caught on the concert's kiss cam with her then-boss, Andy Byron, the CEO of data company Astronomer.
The clip, filmed at Coldplay's show at Gillette Stadium in Foxboro, Massachusetts, went viral in no time and also drew global attention after the band's frontman Chris Martin jokingly suggested the pair might be having an "affair".
Speaking about the concert night, Cabot shared that she made a "bad decision" after having "a couple of High Noons", saying she danced and behaved inappropriately with her boss. She went on to add that she took responsibility for her actions and accepted the consequences, which included losing her job and facing intense public scrutiny.
"I made a bad decision and had a couple of High Noons and danced and acted inappropriately with my boss," Cabot said. "And it's not nothing. I took accountability and I gave up my career for that. That's the price I chose to pay."
The video, which crossed 100 million views within days, showed Byron with his arms around Cabot before both attempted to duck out of the camera's view. What followed, Cabot said, was months of harassment, threats and public shaming. She told the newspaper that she was labelled a "slut", a "homewrecker" and a "gold digger", and that her phone rang hundreds of times a day as strangers tracked her down. Paparazzi waited outside her home, and she received death threats.
Cabot said the incident also had a severe impact on her children, who became afraid to be seen with her in public. She recalled a moment weeks later when a stranger recognised her at a petrol station and verbally abused her, an encounter she said marked the point when things "fell apart".
"They were afraid that I was going to die and they were going to die," Kristin said. "That's when the wheels fell off the cart."
Addressing speculation around her relationship with Byron, Cabot insisted that there was no affair and that the concert marked the first and only time they kissed.
"I was so embarrassed and so horrified," she said. "I'm the head of H.R. and he's the C.E.O. It's, like, so cliche and so bad. ... We both just sat there with our heads in our hands, like, 'What just happened?' "
Earlier, a source close to Cabot told PEOPLE magazine that there had been no affair and that the reaction to the incident was disproportionate, stressing that those involved are "real people and real families".
"Kristin and Andy [Byron] had an excellent working relationship, a great friendship. There was no affair," the source insisted. "It was inappropriate to be hugging your boss at a concert, and she accepts full responsibility for it. But the scandal, the downfall, the loss of the job all of that is unfair."
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