The woman at the center of last year’s viral Coldplay “kiss cam” controversy has broken her silence in an exclusive interview with Oprah Winfrey, revealing that her estranged husband was also at the same concert and that both she and her boss were separated from their spouses at the time of the incident .
Kristin Cabot, the former Chief People Officer at tech startup Astronomer, sat down with Winfrey for “The Oprah Podcast” in her first and only on-camera interview about the July 2025 moment that became one of the most-watched videos of the year, amassing over a billion views globally .
The incident occurred when Cabot and then-Astronomer CEO Andy Byron were shown on the stadium’s big screen at Gillette Stadium in a close embrace during Coldplay’s performance. When the camera focused on them, they quickly covered their faces and ducked out of frame, prompting lead singer Chris Martin to joke to the crowd: “Either they’re having an affair, or they’re just very shy” .
In a shocking revelation, Cabot told Winfrey that her estranged husband, Andrew Cabot, was also attending the same concert that night with his own date .
“I was walking into the concert and my daughter messaged me and said, ‘Oh, it’s so great that you and Andrew are both at Coldplay,'” Cabot recalled. “So she let me know that my estranged husband was also at the concert” .
Cabot admitted that the thought crossed her mind that seeing Byron with her might be awkward if she ran into her husband. “In my mind I thought, well, is this going to be weird if he sees me with Andy? Like, if I run into him,” she said .
However, she quickly dismissed the concern given the massive crowd. “But then I was like, I’m in Gillette Stadium, there’s 55,000 people here. I’m probably not going to run into him” .
Looking back, she added wryly: “That would have been better at the end of the day if I’d just run into him” .
Cabot emphasized to Winfrey that she and her husband “had decided to separate and were living apart and planning for a divorce” four to six weeks before the concert . She explained that Byron also told her that he and his wife were living apart and planning to divorce, a situation he described as “many years in the making” .
Cabot insisted her husband would not have been alarmed by seeing her with Byron, given the nature of her work. “He knows how closely Andy and I worked together, he knows we socialized — like got lunches and got drinks. It was fine,” she said .
“He knows the nature of my work and the way the relationships — I’ve shared desks with the CEOs I’ve worked with,” she added. “It’s just a very close relationship, and so it didn’t matter” .
When the kiss cam panned to Cabot and Byron, she experienced “a moment of total horror” — not because of the public display, but because of who might be watching .
“My immediate thought was, ‘Oh my God, my husband’s in the building,'” she told Winfrey. “He was there with someone else and I knew that and that was great and fine. But he and I were in the midst of our separation, incredibly amicable. To this day, he’s been one of the biggest supporters of me through all of this. He’s an incredible man” .
“The last thing I wanted to do was embarrass him. And that was my first thought when I saw myself in that moment,” she said .
Cabot explained that her husband “comes from an incredibly private family in the Boston area, and I just knew in my head like the public embarrassment is not something that would have gone over well” .
The incident led to both Cabot and Byron resigning from their positions at Astronomer within weeks. Byron resigned first, followed by Cabot, who also filed for divorce from her husband in August 2025 .
Cabot described the intense public backlash, including being labeled with derogatory terms. “I was the most maligned HR manager in HR history,” she previously told The New York Times .
Winfrey is heard in the podcast clip asking Cabot for her response to being called “slut, homewrecker, gold digger and sidepiece… the usual tags for shaming women” .
Cabot said she received hundreds of calls daily and death threats at the height of the controversy .
Cabot also used her platform to criticize technology companies for profiting from viral humiliation. “When something goes this viral, technology companies are benefiting from this,” she said .
“The more pain someone like me is in, the more money they are going to make. And it fuels it and feeds it. I think there is an accountability there that needs to be looked at” .
She also addressed her disappointment with actress Gwyneth Paltrow, Chris Martin’s ex-wife, who appeared in a promotional ad for Astronomer shortly after the incident . Cabot called her a “hypocrite” given Paltrow’s own public journey with “conscious uncoupling” .
Cabot has since begun offering services as a speaker on crisis management and is scheduled to appear at a PRWeek conference next month, where she will discuss “taking control of the narrative” and strategies for handling media scandals . Tickets for the event are priced at approximately $750 to $875 .
Despite the ordeal, Cabot said she wants her children to know “that you can make mistakes — even big ones — and that you shouldn’t receive death threats because of it” .
Byron has not publicly commented on the incident, and reports indicate he and his wife are still together .
