Kristin Cabot breaks silence on Coldplay kiss-cam scandal: “I gave up my career for that”
Kristin Cabot, the HR executive at the centre of the Coldplay kiss-cam scandal, has broken her silence for the first time.
If anybody has forgotten, when Coldplay performed ‘Sparks’ at the Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts, this summer, the band turned their attention to the crowd and cast Cabot and Astronomer CEO Andy Byron onto the kiss-cam.
The pair looked terrified to be on the big screen, which led to people initially joking they were having an affair and the clip was eventually viewed hundreds of millions of times. Then, the situation turned nuclear when it emerged both were married.
However, it later surfaced that both Cabot and Byron had split up from their respective partners prior to the show. Nevertheless, they have both resigned from Astronomer.
Now, in an interview with the New York Times, 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.”
She continued, “I want my kids to know that you can make mistakes, and you can really screw up. But you don’t have to be threatened to be killed for them.”
Cabot also explained her reaction to being caught on the kiss-cam, which caused it to go viral, admitting, “I was so embarrassed and so horrified.” She added, “I’m the head of H.R. and he’s the C.E.O. It’s, like, so cliché and so bad.”
Additionally, her husband, Andrew Cabot, whom she had amicably separated before the concert, was also in attendance at the Coldplay show. She told The Times, “My immediate reaction was, ‘Holy shit, [her ex-husband] Andrew’s here.”
Cabot added, “We were in the middle of an incredibly — and amazingly — amicable separation. I was worried I would embarrass him. He’s an amazing guy and does not deserve that.”
She also opened up about the mental anguish it has caused her family, revealing that her children are now receiving therapy and “were afraid that I was going to die and they were going to die”.
Astronomer, the company that employed Byron and Cabot, poked fun at the scandal by ‘hiring’ Gwyneth Paltrow as their spokesperson in a marketing stunt, which the HR executive has now condemned as a “hypocrite”.
She told The Times, “I was such a fan of her company, which seemed to be about uplifting women. And then she did this. I thought, ‘How dare she after the beating she got for all the conscious uncoupling stuff.’ What a hypocrite.”
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