Kristin Cabot, who became an internet talking point last year after a Coldplay show when cameras caught her sharing a close moment with her boss, has now spoken to Oprah Winfrey about the incident.
Cabot, who later stepped down as Astronomer’s Chief People Officer, attended the British band’s concert at Gillette Stadium in Boston last July alongside Andy Byron, then CEO of the New York-based company.
During the performance, the two appeared together on the venue’s big screen while looking visibly intimate, prompting an immediate reaction from the crowd and, later, widespread online attention.
“Either they’re having an affair or they’re just really shy,” Coldplay frontman Chris Martin said at the time.
Now, months after the clip spread, Cabot appears in a teaser for an Oprah Winfrey podcast episode, where she argues that she and Byron hadn’t done anything wrong because both were separated from their partners at the time.
“I was walking into the concert and my daughter messaged me and said ‘oh it’s so great that you and Andrew [her husband] are both at Coldplay’. So she let me know that my estranged husband was also at the concert,” Cabot said.
She continued: “In my mind I thought well is this going to be weird if he sees me with Andy? Like that crossed my mind. If I run into him. But then I was like I’m in Gilette Stadium, there’s 55 thousand people here, I’m probably not going to run into him.
“But it doesn’t matter … that would’ve been better at the end of the day if I’d just run into him, but he knows how closely Andy and I work together. He knows we socially got lunches and got drinks. It was fine.”
Cabot added that she and Byron were very close professionally, and said her estranged husband understood the nature of her role and how frequently she worked alongside Byron, including in social settings.
Her comments follow an interview she gave to the New York Times in December, when she looked back on the fallout from the night.
“I made a bad decision and had a couple of High Noons and danced and acted inappropriately with my boss,” she said. “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.
“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 said she has seen Byron a handful of times since the concert, but that they’ve agreed to keep their communication to a minimum going forward.