Kristin Cabot is sharing her side of the story for the first time four months after her viral moment with Astronomer CEO Andy Byron at a Coldplay concert.
“I made a bad decision and had a couple of High Noons and danced and acted inappropriately with my boss,” Cabot — who says she was newly separated from husband Andrew Cabot at the time of the concert — told The New York Times on Thursday, December 18. “And it’s not nothing.”
Cabot reflected on how her life changed after the scandal. “I took accountability and I gave up my career for that. That’s the price I chose to pay,” she said. “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, the head of HR at Tech company Astronomer, and Byron, 50, the CEO who was also newly separated, made waves online for their stunned reaction when they were caught getting cozy on the kiss cam. Byron had his arms wrapped around Cabot until they realized the cameras were on them, prompting him to drop out of sight to hide and Cabot to turn and shield her face.
“Whoa, look at these two. All right, come on. You’re OK,” Coldplay frontman Chris Martin said at the time. “Either they’re having an affair or they’re just very shy. I’m not quite sure what to do. I hope we didn’t do something bad.”
When the moment got shared online, Byron and Cabot were both still legally married to other people. Andy’s wife, Megan Kerrigan Byron, made headlines for appearing to remove “Byron” from her Facebook profile while Kristin subsequently filed for divorce from husband Andrew.
Kristin clarified to The New York Times that she interviewed for a position at Astronomer in the summer of 2024. She spoke with Andy and they “clicked, stylistically.” Kristin started as Astronomer’s chief people officer in November 2024 and found herself developing a connection with Andy while going through a separation from her husband. Andy told Kristin that he related to what she was going through during a conversation they had in spring 2025.
“I’m going through the same thing,” she remembered him saying, per NYT.
According to Kristin, the first and only time she kissed Andy was at the infamous concert. She recalled how the immediate fallout affected her — personally and professionally.
“I was so embarrassed and so horrified,” she noted. “I’m the head of H.R. and he’s the C.E.O. It’s, like, so cliché and so bad. We both just sat there with our heads in our hands, like, ‘What just happened?’”
In the wake of the scandal, Andy — who NYT said declined to comment on the profile — resigned from his position as CEO of Astronomer.
“Astronomer is committed to the values and culture that have guided us since our founding. Our leaders are expected to set the standard in both conduct and accountability, and recently, that standard was not met,” a spokesperson for the company told Us Weekly in a July statement. “Andy Byron has tendered his resignation, and the Board of Directors has accepted. The Board will begin a search for our next Chief Executive as Cofounder and Chief Product Officer Pete DeJoy continues to serve as interim CEO.”
The statement continued, “Before this week, we were known as a pioneer in the DataOps space, helping data teams power everything from modern analytics to production AI. While awareness of our company may have changed overnight, our product and our work for our customers have not. We’re continuing to do what we do best: helping our customers with their toughest data and AI problems.”
Kristin, who stepped down from her position as Chief People Officer, recalled getting countless death threats in the months since the concert.
“They were already in really bad shape, and that’s when the wheels fell off the cart,” she shared about how her family was concerned for her safety. “Because my kids were afraid that I was going to die and they were going to die.”
She also recalled her 14-year-old daughter crying at the start of the scandal.
“They knew who Andy was, obviously,” she told NYT. “And I said, ‘He and I got very swept up in a moment and now it’s on social media.’”
As for her status with Andy, she told the newspaper that “their contact has been minimal” after initially staying in touch during the summer.
“Honestly, a lot of it was, like: ‘Hi. It’s 11 o’clock on a Tuesday. Any advice?’” she said of their conversations post-viral video. In September, they got together and decided “speaking with each other was going to make it too hard for everyone to move on and heal.”
