For Kristin Cabot, the fallout from a viral concert clip did not end when the cameras stopped rolling.
Months later, she says she made a firm decision to walk away from Andy Byron, her former boss, after what she describes as a breakdown in trust.
Speaking on The Oprah Podcast with Oprah Winfrey on March 17, Cabot said she ended all communication with Byron last fall.
“There was a big miss on honesty and integrity,” she said, adding, “He wasn’t the person he represented himself to be to me, and lying is a non-negotiable for me.”
The two first drew widespread attention during a Coldplay concert last summer, when they appeared together on the venue’s “kiss cam.” As they tried to avoid the camera, frontman Chris Martin made a light comment from the stage, suggesting they might be involved. The clip quickly spread online, bringing intense public scrutiny.
At the time, Cabot was head of human relations at Astronomer, where Byron served as CEO. Both later stepped away from their roles. They were also married to other people then, although Cabot has said she was already in the process of divorcing and believed Byron was in a similar situation.
When asked directly whether Byron may have misrepresented his personal circumstances, Cabot chose not to go into detail. She said she wanted to avoid putting another family under public pressure.
“I want to be careful,” she explained. “The world spoke for me, and I don’t want to do that to somebody else.” Still, she added, “A lot of what was represented to me was not true.”
Cabot maintained that, at the time of the concert, she believed Byron had separated from his wife. She also repeated earlier claims that the concert marked their first moment of physical intimacy.
In the weeks after the incident, she said they stayed in touch, mostly exchanging brief messages and advice as they dealt with the attention. Their conversations, she noted in a previous interview, were largely about managing the situation.
That contact eventually came to an end. Cabot said they met one last time in September and agreed that continuing to speak would make it harder for everyone involved to move on.
Reflecting on the aftermath, she described feeling exposed as the story unfolded, especially as Byron chose not to speak publicly.
“I was the one that was attacked for this while he remained silent,” she said. “That’s not a quality I would look for in a friend, a partner, or a boss.”
Today, she says, there is no relationship between them.
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