Kristin Cabot has come to believe that her silence no longer serves her. It made sense in the beginning, after she appeared on the Jumbotron, aghast, in the arms of her boss at a Coldplay concert on July 16, 2025, a moment that caused an international furor. The original TikTok received 100 million views within days. Cabot retreated, trying to make things right with the people who mattered most: her two teenage kids; her employer, the tech company Astronomer; and her second husband, Andrew Cabot, from whom she was separated and negotiating a divorce settlement. In the initial phase, all she could think was: Oh my God, I hurt people. I hurt good people.
Five months after the TikTok bomb became the defining disaster of her life, she described in her first interview since the concert what it feels like to be a punchline and a target. In online comments she has been called a slut, a homewrecker, a gold digger, a side piece — the usual tags for shaming women. Her appearance has been scrutinized, specific body parts evaluated and found insufficiently pretty. Some of the most famous people in the world — Whoopi Goldberg, Gwyneth Paltrow — and at least one furry green sports mascot, the Phillie Phanatic, have made her humiliation their material.
She was doxxed, and for weeks received 500 or 600 calls a day. Paparazzi camped across the street from her house and cars slowly cruised her block, “like a parade,” she recalled. She received death threats: “Not 900. That showed up in People magazine. I got 50 or 60,” she told me.
So while #coldplaygate, as it came to be called, cycled out of view, she lives with it every day. Her children are reluctant to be seen with her. Just before Thanksgiving, a woman recognized her while she was pumping gas at Cumberland Farms. She called Cabot “disgusting” and said: “Adulterers are the lowest form of human. You don’t even deserve to breathe the same air that I breathe.’” Here Cabot is paraphrasing.
I traveled to her home in New Hampshire on a snowy weekend this month, and we hashed over the events of July 16 for hours. For weeks Cabot had been debating, on her own and with family and friends, whether to talk about what happened. Any attempt to correct the record put her at risk of being shredded all over again. Her mother, Sherry Hoffman, told me in a phone call that she was so worried about Cabot that she said a kind of prayer to herself: “Oh, please don’t go out there, they’re going to cream you.”
But Cabot, 53, wanted to tell her side, and her children, her mother and her closest friends stood behind her. “I kept thinking of a saying I’ve heard through the years,” Hoffman said. “‘Silence is acceptance.’ And I thought, ‘Oh my god, that’s what’s going to be out there for the rest of her life.’”
Cabot hired a communications consultant to help her tell her story while minimizing further damage to herself and the people she loves — a high-wire act that felt, in her presence, at times anguishing and at times too pat.
The two of us started the day in the kitchen. Cabot, her hair twisted up in a bun, was nervous, referring to bullet points as she unspooled her tale. But by evening, she was tucked into the couch, her large Bernedoodle, Burt Reynolds, as much in her lap as he could manage to be. She was not in a sexual relationship with her boss, she said. Before that night, they had never even kissed.
“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 said. “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.”
Raised in Maine in a family of brothers, Cabot was always super competitive: She will “go through a brick wall to get something done,” she said. She came to human resources through advertising and sales and always presented herself as “hyper-professional,” said her friend Alyson Welch, who worked with her at the tech company neo4j.
When, in the summer of 2024, Cabot interviewed with Andy Byron, at the time Astronomer’s chief executive, she found they “clicked, stylistically.” She started as Astronomer’s chief people officer in November 2024. In the fast-growth, start-up culture, the company’s staff was expanding and Cabot and Byron spoke every day, sometimes three times a day.
In spring 2025, while grabbing a sandwich near Astronomer’s New York office, Cabot made reference to her marriage “in a tone,” as she remembers it, and Byron asked what was up. She was going through a separation, she said. It was stressful and she worried about her kids.
“I’m going through the same thing,” she recalled him saying. Reached by phone, Byron declined to be interviewed for this article.
For Cabot, the shared acknowledgment “sort of strengthened our connection,” she said, and a close working relationship grew even closer. At work, they shared confidences and made each other laugh, and for Cabot “big feelings” grew fast. She began to allow herself to imagine the romantic possibilities, though she knew she couldn’t keep reporting to Byron if the relationship progressed. She loved her job, and with two kids and a large, extended family of stepparents and siblings, she was incredibly busy. “I didn’t really get too carried away because he’s my boss,” she said.
Cabot’s separation from her husband was still new when she agreed to go with friends to see Coldplay. She liked the band well enough, but what really appealed was being out, with friends, on a summer Wednesday. “I hadn’t been out in ages,” she told me. She asked Byron to be her plus one.
Before the concert, Cabot and Byron met up with a small group of Cabot’s close friends at the Stockyard, an old-school steak joint. “I wanted to put a cute outfit on and go out and dance and laugh and have a great night,” she said. “And that’s how it was tracking.” The vibe of the evening was open and giddy, agreed two attendees who asked to be anonymous because of what they saw happen to their friend.
Was any part of her concerned about this outing from an H.R. perspective? “Some inside part of my brain might have been jumping up and down and waving its arms, saying, ‘Don’t do this,’” Cabot replied. But, generally, “No.” She was “pumped” to introduce Byron to her friends. “I was like: ‘I got this. I can have a crush. I can handle it.’” On the ride to Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Mass., Cabot learned, by text, that her soon-to-be ex-husband was attending the concert, too. “It threw me,” she conceded. But she and Byron “were not an item.”
The seats were on a V.I.P. balcony offering a sweeping view of the stage. Cabot remembers that the setting felt dark and private. She and Byron each had a couple of tequila cocktails, and as the concert went on they began to look like a couple. She made a point of saying that night was the first and only time they kissed. Byron was dancing behind Cabot when she took his hands and wrapped his arms around her.
When Cabot saw her own image, and his, on the Jumbotron, it was like “someone flipped a switch,” she said. “I’ll never be able to explain it in any articulate or intelligent way,” she said. What an instant before felt like “joy, joy, joy” turned to terror. Cabot’s hands flew to her face, and she whirled out of Byron’s arms. Byron ducked.
At that moment, she had two thoughts. First: Andrew Cabot was somewhere in the dark stadium and she did not want to humiliate him.
And: “Andy’s my boss.”
“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 cliché and so bad.” Cabot and Byron fled back to the bar. “We both just sat there with our heads in our hands, like, ‘What just happened?’” Even before leaving the stadium, they began to discuss how to manage their public transgression. “And the initial conversation was, ‘We have to tell the board.’”
Cabot has an apartment in the Boston area for when she has custody of her kids, and she and Byron went back there to strategize. Who would write the email? What would it say? Who would send it? “Panic attacks were starting,” Cabot said. In her mind’s eye, she saw the loss of her job and complications in her amicable parting with Andrew Cabot, whom her children adored.
And, then, about 4 in the morning, Cabot received a text. It was a screenshot of a TikTok.
“And I was like” — she paused and asked, “Can I swear?” I said she should speak as she normally speaks. She continued. “And I was like, Oh,” and she swore. “Like, not just Andrew and the board are going to know about this now.” At 6 a.m. Thursday, when Byron and Cabot pressed send on their email, the TikTok was already blowing up.
She drove to see her kids, who were staying with their father in Boston. She wanted to talk to them about what happened before they heard it elsewhere. “They knew who Andy was, obviously,” she told me, “and I said, ‘He and I got very swept up in a moment and now it’s on social media.’” Her daughter, who was 14, started to cry.
Then she drove back to her apartment for a conference call with the Astronomer board. In that conversation, they said: “Listen. We’re human beings. We all make mistakes. But you understand we have to step away and talk about this and figure it out,” she recalls. The company soon began an investigation.
Cabot decided to rent a getaway for the weekend, alone, as if a little self-care would make everything better. She doesn’t laugh much about #coldplaygate, but she laughs at the absurdity of this. Her kids had plans, so she put some organic wine and her dog in the car and headed to the mountains. “I was like, ‘This is just what I need after a tough week,’” she said.
On Saturday, Byron resigned. News outlets from New York to Australia covered the story. Cabot did not sleep. She spent the weekend pacing the rental house, crying and talking on the phone. It felt to her that every producer from every television news show was texting. At some point that weekend, Cabot was doxxed, and her phone flooded.
She had security cameras installed at her house, and the local police boosted their surveillance. After Astronomer concluded its investigation, the company asked Cabot to return to her role, she said. But she could not imagine how she could stand up as H.R. chief when she was a laughingstock. She negotiated her resignation, which was announced on July 24. (Astronomer declined to comment for this article.)
Cabot became unrecognizable to her family and friends. “There’s been such a darkness since then,” her mother told me. Many days, she did not leave her room. Cabot told me she felt safe indoors, but out in the world, anything could happen. She recounted a time when she and her daughter ventured to the town pool and a woman she knew only slightly started taking their picture. Tears came into her daughter’s eyes and she started to plead. “Please can we just go?” Cabot recalled her saying. Another time, while picking up her son at work, a group of women approached her car and, calling her “that girl,” declared they didn’t know how she could show her face. “I didn’t know what to do to support my kids correctly,” she said.
She found she could ignore most of the messages. But those that indicated a familiarity with her daily habits terrified her: “I know you shop at Market Basket and I’m coming for you.” At one point, she played one of these for her mother over speakerphone, unaware that her children were listening through the bedroom door. “They were already in really bad shape, and that’s when the wheels fell off the cart,” she said. “Because my kids were afraid that I was going to die and they were going to die.” Everyone in the family began to dread public spaces and social events.
Late summer brought some relief. Cabot filed for divorce from Andrew Cabot, who released a statement confirming that they had been separated at the time of the concert and asking for privacy. (He did not respond to requests for comment. “He has been nothing but a gentleman,” Cabot said.) She found therapists for the children, who went back to school and were treated with kindness there. Cabot started leaving the house to play tennis; more recently her mood has lightened enough to buy a joking T-shirt from the Victoria Beckham shop. It says, “Yes It’s Me.”
She and Byron had been in touch all summer. They exchanged news about Astronomer and updates on their families. But for two workaholics now out of work, “Honestly, a lot of it was, like: ‘Hi. It’s 11 o’clock on a Tuesday. Any advice?’” In early September, they met and agreed that “speaking with each other was going to make it too hard for everyone to move on and heal,” Cabot told me. Since then, she said, their contact has been minimal.
One of her most self-destructive thoughts early on was that she deserved this comeuppance, that some hidden part of herself was rotten or bad. A conversation with a close friend helped Cabot gain some perspective. “You didn’t kill anybody,” the friend said, Cabot recalled. “I hope all these people that are commenting have never made a mistake.”
It’s a fair point. Marriages are complicated, so are separations, and who can identify the precise moment a romance begins or ends? If people at work are into each other, at what point should they disclose their relationship up the chain? Even if two consenting people are engaging in something illicit or secret or hurtful (which people do all the time), should they be dragged across the global stage as if they deserved to be savaged and tormented?
Cabot began to consider the question at the heart of it all: Why did the video take off with such furious force?
Brooke Duffy, an associate professor at Cornell University whose research focuses on internet culture, compared Cabot’s experience to the tradition of celebrity gossip. Cheating scandals and plastic surgery mistakes “ensnare us into dissecting women” in ways that become a proxy for larger debates, and anger, about haves and have-nots and about what a woman should be permitted to do, she said. What happened to Cabot also reminded Duffy of the much older “sport or game” of witch hunts. Byron was pursued by paparazzi and dragged through the comments as well, “but where did the criticism fall?” Duffy said. “It fell on her.”
Cabot wants to rebut the assumption that she slept her way to the top. She has worked from the age of 13, having decided that she never wanted to depend financially on a man or worry, as her mother did, about a heating bill. When she divorced her first husband, the father of her children, in 2018, and he became unemployed, “I supported my family entirely on my own, and I was able to keep my kids in incredibly fantastic schools and live in a comfy, warm house,” she said. “I have never been more proud of anything in my entire life.”
“I spent so much of my career pulling men’s hands off my ass,” she continued, so the notion that she earned her place in the C-suite because she was “sleeping around,” as she put it, infuriates her. As she begins to contemplate how she will return to work, she worries about how #coldplaygate will influence how anyone in a hiring position will view her. The reputational damage has been extreme. Former close colleagues, whom she trusted and boosted, have cut off contact entirely. When Cabot’s friend Alyson Welch suggests to mutual colleagues that they reach out to Cabot — “What a bummer for Kristin, she must be going through a lot,” she says — the response is always: “Yeah. You’re right. I will. That’s a great idea.” Welch gave a grim little laugh.
Cabot is devastated by these silences. “When people turn their backs on me because of this, that’s way worse than people yelling at me at the gas station,” she said.
Cabot told me women had been her cruelest critics. All of the in-person bullying has been from women, as have most of the phone calls and messages. “What I’ve seen these last months makes it harder for me to believe that it’s all about the men holding us back,” she said. “I think we are holding ourselves back tremendously by cutting each other down.”
When Gwyneth Paltrow agreed to appear in a July 25 Astronomer ad, snarkily sending up the video for clicks and laughs, Cabot recoiled. Cabot had long admired Paltrow, and Goop, the company she built to “empower, support and uplift women,” as Cabot put it. How could she, who together with her ex-husband Chris Martin, the Coldplay frontman, coined the phrase “conscious uncoupling,” be so insensitive to the messy realities of private lives? (Paltrow did not respond to requests for comment.)
We had come to the end of a long day, and Cabot looked tired. “I am not excusing the men,” she said. “Please don’t hear me say that.”
In the middle of the worst of it, when she was hiding in her bedroom, she had a fantasy of redemption. Cabot wished for someone with visibility and power to interrupt the spinning, endless, ruthless cycle. She yearned for a rational voice to step in and say, “Wait a minute,” as she told me. “Can we start a conversation where there might be room for a different version of this story? This has gotten really wild.”
Susan C. Beachy, Kitty Bennett and Alain Delaquérière contributed research.
Audio produced by Tally Abecassis.
Lisa Miller is a Times reporter who writes about the personal and cultural struggle to attain good health.
The post The Ritual Shaming of the Woman at the Coldplay Concert appeared first on New York Times.
