‘I made a bad decision’: Ex-HR chief breaks silence for first time on Coldplay kiss cam fallout

For Kristin Cabot, a night meant to be an escape turned into a moment that would permanently alter her life. Cabot, 53, a veteran human resources executive and mother of two, had gone to a Coldplay concert hoping for a brief reprieve from a stressful period.

Instead, footage of her dancing closely with her then-boss — Astronomer CEO Andy Byron — appeared on the stadium’s kiss cam, projected onto a jumbotron before tens of thousands of concertgoers. Within hours, the clip had escaped the arena and entered the unforgiving ecosystem of social media. 

What followed, Cabot says, was not just public scrutiny but professional erasure. 

Speaking publicly for the first time months after the incident, in interviews with The New York Times and The Times of London, Cabot described the viral moment as a “bad decision” that cost her decades of work and left her “unemployable.” 

“I made a bad decision… and acted inappropriately with my boss,” she told reporters, accepting responsibility for her actions. She attributed the lapse in judgment to a relaxed evening that included “a couple of High Noons,” a popular hard seltzer. Byron, she admitted, had been a “big happy crush.” 

The video’s spread was swift and merciless. What might once have been an awkward personal moment became a global spectacle, repackaged endlessly as memes and commentary. Cabot says the speed and scale of the reaction stunned her. 

“It has been like a scarlet letter,” she said. “People erased everything I’d accomplished in my life and achieved in my career.” 

From anonymity to infamy 

On the night of the concert, Cabot believed she was anonymous. She and Byron were seated toward the back of an arena holding between 50,000 and 60,000 people. The sudden appearance of their faces on the jumbotron caught her completely off guard. 

“We were sitting in the back of the stadium… just feeling totally anonymous,” she told The Times of London. “Suddenly I’m just seeing us on screen.” 

Her immediate fear, she recalled, was not public judgment but personal and professional consequences. She thought first of her then-husband — amid what she described as an amicable separation — and then of the implications at work. 

“Oh God, Andy’s my effing boss,” she said, noting that Boston’s corporate ecosystem is small enough that colleagues, investors, or industry peers could easily have been in the crowd. 

Career reduced to a meme 

In the months that followed, Cabot resigned from Astronomer. While she says she “took accountability” and accepted the consequences of her actions, she believes the punishment extended far beyond what the situation warranted. 

“I gave up my career for that,” she said. “That’s the price I chose to pay.” 

Yet the internet, she argues, demanded more. Cabot says she has been unable to find work since, despite decades of experience in senior HR leadership roles. 

“I’m not some celebrity,” she said. “I’m just a mom from New Hampshire.” 

The episode, she added, became a singular narrative that overshadowed everything else she had done professionally. “Instead of my career, I became a meme.” 

Gendered backlash 

Cabot believes the reaction to the video exposed a familiar imbalance in how women are judged in corporate scandals. While both she and Byron faced scrutiny, she says much of the abuse was directed disproportionately at her. 

“I think as a woman, as women always do, I took the bulk of the abuse,” she said. 

Online, she was accused of advancing her career through inappropriate relationships—claims she strongly denies. “I worked so hard to dispel that all my life,” she said. “And here I was being accused of it.” 

She and Byron exchanged brief messages after the incident, discussing crisis management, but have not spoken in months. 

About a month after the video went viral, Cabot filed for divorce, calling it the painful closing of an already difficult chapter. 

Today, Cabot says she lives with the knowledge that a few seconds of footage now define her public identity. While she does not dispute that her actions were wrong, she questions whether the level of public condemnation was justified.  “Even if I had an affair,” she said, “it shouldn’t have been anybody’s business.”