THE WOMAN AT the centre of the Coldplay clip that went viral over the summer has said she received up to 60 death threats afterwards.
The clip involved Andy Byron, a former CEO of a company called Astronomer, and Kristin Cabot, head of HR at the same company.
Astronomer launched a formal investigation after the kiss-cam style moment involving Byron and Cabot at a Coldplay concert went viral.
The video showed Byron with his arms around Cabot at the concert in Foxborough, Massachusetts.
They realise their interaction is being projected onto the stadium’s big screens and quickly try to exit the frame, with Cabot covering her face and Byron diving to the floor.
Coldplay frontman Chris Martin can be heard saying: “Either they’re having an affair or they’re just very shy.”
Byron and Cabot have since resigned from Astronomer.
In an article in The New York Times this week, Cabot decided to break her silence – neither Byron nor Astronomer replied to a request for comment.
Recalling the moment, Cabot said: “I made a bad decision and had a couple of High Noons and danced and acted inappropriately with my boss.
“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. But you don’t have to be threatened to be killed for them.”
Cabot said she was separated from her husband at the time and was negotiating a divorce settlement (she said her ex-husband has been a “gentleman” about the viral moment).
She told The New York Times that she confided in Byron that she was going through a separation and that he replied that he was “going through the same thing”.
Cabot said this “sort of strengthened our connection” and that for her, “big feelings” grew fast.
However, she added: “I didn’t really get too carried away because he’s my boss.”
Cabot was invited by friends to see Coldplay and decided to bring Byron as her plus one.
On the way to the concert, she said she was “thrown” by a text message informing her that her soon-to-be ex-husband would also be at the concert.
She said that night was the first and only time she and Byron kissed and added that when she saw herself on the jumbotron, it was like “someone flipped a switch” and that “joy, joy, joy” turned to terror.
Cabot said her first thought went to her ex-husband who was in the crowd, while her second went to Byron.
“I was so embarrassed and so horrified,” she said.
“I’m the head of HR and he’s the CEO. It’s, like, so cliché and so bad.”
Cabot said she and Byron decided that they would have to tell their company’s board.
However, in the middle of the night while they were penning that email to the company board, Cabot received a text message of a screenshot of the clip on TikTok.
Soon afterwards, her personal information was posted online and for weeks she received up to 600 calls a day and received around 60 death threats.
The paparazzi camped across the street from her house and the local police provided security.
She said people called her “disgusting” on the street and that she went through long periods where she didn’t leave her room.
She added that people in her life “turned their backs on me because of this, [and] that’s way worse than people yelling at me at the gas station”.
Cabot said she and Byron were in touch all summer but have since decided that “speaking with each other was going to make it too hard for everyone to move on and heal”.
Meanwhile, Cabot said she was infuriated by remarks online that she was “sleeping around” to get to her career position.
She added that women have been among her biggest critics.
“What I’ve seen these last months makes it harder for me to believe that it’s all about the men holding us back,” said Cabot.
“I think we are holding ourselves back tremendously by cutting each other down.”
However, she added: “I am not excusing the men. Please don’t hear me say that.”
She also said she was hurt by Gwyneth Paltrow, who was once married to Coldplay’s Chris Martin.
Paltrow starred in a video for Astronomer after the viral clip and joked in the video that she was hired on a “very temporary basis” to answer the questions people had had over the past few days.
Cabot said she had long admired Paltrow, as well as her company Goop, which Cabot described as a company built to “empower, support and uplift women”.
Paltrow did not respond to a request for comment by The New York Times.
