The woman involved in the Coldplay kiss-cam scandal has finally spoken out.
Five months after the incident, Kristin Cabot sat down with The New York Times to discuss the repercussions of the viral clip that showed her and her boss, Andy Byron, canoodling at a Coldplay concert. The scandal led to her leaving her job, as well as public shame, harassment, and even death threats.
“I made a bad decision and had a couple of High Noons and danced and acted inappropriately with my boss," she told the publication. "And it’s not nothing. I took accountability, and I gave up my career for that. That’s the price I chose to pay."
On July 16, at Coldplay’s Foxborough, Massachusetts show, Cabot and Byron appeared on the kiss cam together, with his arms wrapped around her waist. As soon as the pair noticed they were on the big screen, they tried to hide, with Chris Martin joking that they might be having an “affair.”
Cabot told The Times that she was subsequently deemed a “slut,” “homewrecker,” and “gold digger.” She was hounded by paparazzi and received death threats. Her kids were hesitant to be publicly seen with her because “they were afraid that I was going to die and they were going to die.”
Cabot claims she and Byron, the former CEO at Astronomer, were not in a sexual relationship, and that the first time they kissed was at the Coldplay concert.
"I was so embarrassed and so horrified," she said of seeing herself on the kiss cam. "I’m the head of H.R. and he’s the C.E.O. It’s, like, so cliché and so bad. ... We both just sat there with our heads in our hands, like, 'What just happened?'"
Byron later resigned from Astronomer, and Cabot quit her position at the software company, though they later asked her to return. "I could not imagine how I could stand up as H.R. chief when I was a laughingstock," she said.
Cabot also told the UK outlet, The Times, that, at the time of the incident, both she and Byron were separated from their spouses. Cabot has since filed for divorce from her husband, though Byron has remained married to his wife.
At this point, Cabot hopes that the internet and the public will extend her some forgiveness, particularly because she has children. "I want my kids to know that you can make mistakes, and you can really screw up," she told The New York Times. "But you don’t have to be threatened to be killed for them."