'I made a bad decision': Kristin Cabot addresses viral Coldplay concert controversy

Kristin Cabot, the executive at the centre of the viral Coldplay concert controversy nicknamed #ColdplayGate, has broken her silence on the moment that abruptly changed her professional and personal life.

The incident dates back to a July 2025 Coldplay show at Gillette Stadium in Foxboro, Massachusetts, where Cabot was caught on the venue’s kiss cam alongside her then-boss, Andy Byron, the CEO of a data company. What might have remained a fleeting concert shot exploded online after Coldplay frontman Chris Martin joked onstage that the pair could be having an “affair,” turning the clip into global internet fodder.

Cabot has now acknowledged that her behaviour that night crossed a line. She described it as a lapse in judgment after drinking at the concert and said she takes full responsibility. “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. I took accountability and I gave up my career for that. That’s the price I chose to pay.”

The video, which clocked more than 100 million views within days, showed Byron with his arms around Cabot before both appeared to realise they were on camera and tried to move away. According to Cabot, the viral moment unleashed months of public backlash. She said she was subjected to relentless online abuse, labelled a “slut,” a “homewrecker” and a “gold digger,” while strangers tracked her down and flooded her phone with calls. Paparazzi gathered outside her home, and she received death threats.

The fallout, she said, deeply affected her children, who became afraid to be seen with her in public. Cabot recalled an encounter weeks later when a stranger recognised her at a petrol station and verbally attacked her, a moment she described as the point when everything truly collapsed.

“They were afraid that I was going to die and they were going to die,” she said. “That’s when the wheels fell off the cart.”

Addressing speculation about her relationship with Byron, Cabot denied there was ever an affair and said the concert marked the first and only time they kissed. “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.” She added that in the aftermath, “we both just sat there with our heads in our hands, like, ‘What just happened?’”

While Cabot maintains that she made a mistake, she has pushed back against the scale of the backlash, stressing that the people involved are not characters in a viral clip but real individuals with families. Her account underscores how a few seconds on a stadium screen can snowball into a life-altering spectacle once the internet takes over.