The woman at the centre of the Coldplay kiss cam scandal breaks her silence

“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 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 2024, Cabot interviewed with Andy Byron, at the time Astronomer’s CEO, she found they “clicked, stylistically.” She started as Astronomer’s chief people officer in November.

In 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.

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. 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 HR 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, Massachusetts, Cabot learned, by text, that her soon-to-be former husband was attending the concert, too. “It threw me,” she conceded. But she and Byron “were not an item”.

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The seats were on a VIP 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 HR and he’s the CEO. It’s, like, so cliche 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 there to strategise. Who would write the email? What would it say? 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 4am, Cabot received a text. It was a screenshot of a TikTok.

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, she recalls, 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.” The company soon began an investigation.

On Saturday, Byron resigned. Cabot did not sleep. She spent the weekend pacing, 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 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 HR chief when she was a laughingstock. She negotiated her resignation, which was announced on July 24. (Astronomer declined to comment for this article.)

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.

She and Byron had been in touch all summer. They exchanged news about Astronomer and updates on their families. 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.

Cabot wants to rebut the assumption that she slept her way to the top. She has worked from the age of 13, having decided she never wanted to depend financially on a man or worry, as her mother did, about a heating bill.

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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.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.