- Kristin Cabot talked to Oprah about the Coldplay kiss cam incident.
- Cabot says people treated her more harshly than they did Andy Byron.
- News stories omitted the fact that she and her husband were separated.
When a kiss cam caught Kristin Cabot and her boss, Andy Byron, hugging at a Coldplay concert in July 2025, the moment went viral. Yahoo! Entertainment said the embrace “basically broke the internet with over 300 billion views worldwide.”
Clearly that’s an exaggeration. But much of the world saw the embrace and the embarrassment of the couple is not in question.
But the impact was not equally felt, Cabot said this week on the Oprah Podcast. Cabot took the brunt of it.
Paparazzi and others planted themselves outside her house, peeking through windows and generally trespassing — especially unnerving because her children were inside. People drove yelling and honking at odd hours.
She and her husband were actually separated at the time and she said Byron had told her his marriage was “troubled” at the time, as well. She said just before the concert, her daughter texted her that her husband was also at the concert with some of his friends.
When the kiss cam flashed their image on the Jumbotron, the backlash, she said, largely fell on her. And it didn’t help that most of the stories failed to mention that she was separated from her husband.
Women are treated differently than men in such situations, Cabot said, though both of them did step down from their jobs — he as CEO of Astronomer and she as director of human resources.
Here are three things she told Oprah during the interview:
On her appearance
Everything about her appearance was picked apart and the ripples soaked people who had nothing to do with it. “There were stories written about jewelry I was wearing and who bought it for me and how much it cost when one of my best friends is a jewelry designer and I’ve bought everything for myself that she made for me. ... My hairdresser somebody found and that turned into a whole thing where she was dragged for giving me crappy roots, crappy highlights and she got lit up for that.”
Different treatment
The man was treated entirely differently. “There was no one talking about Andy’s hair, shirt, watch” or asking if he became the boss “by sleeping his way to the top,” as far as she ever heard. Her own life, on the other hand, was dismantled, analyzed and judged. “How I looked to how I was dressed to how I behaved to, you know, sleeping my way to the top, to the gold digger, to the — all the words that we use — the husband stealer.” She showed special disdain for the notion that women “steal” men. “Like I would walk in and duct tape and zip tie a guy and unwittingly drag him out and steal him? Like the man has no role in this. ... I was the face of all of this.”
Funny things
She said that she, too, has seen funny things online and forwarded them, noting people don’t really stop and think about the real people behind the meme and the harm that can be done to them.