“I made a bad decision and had a couple of High Noons and danced and acted inappropriately with my boss,” said Kristin Cabot, the woman at the center of what’s become known as #coldplaygate.
High Noon is a brand of alcoholic seltzer beverages with an alcohol content of 4.5% – around the same as a light beer.
Cabot made the confession during an interview with The New York Times, her first since the scandal went viral this summer. References to the embarrassing moment at a Coldplay concert popped up everywhere from memes to advertisements.
Cabot and her former boss, Andy Byron, were featured in an embrace on the “kiss cam” at Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Mass., during a Coldplay show. When they realized they were on the screen, they quickly scrambled away from each other and tried to cover their faces.
“Oh, look at these two,” Coldplay front man Chris Martin joked. “Either they’re having an affair or they’re just very shy.”
Another concert-goer caught the moment on video and posted it to social media. Internet sleuths identified the Cabot and Byron who were, respectively, a human resources executive and the CEO of tech firm Astronomer. Byron is married – not to Cabot, but to a woman named Megan Kerrigan. Cabot was going through a divorce.
People weren’t shy about sharing their opinions about Cabot and Byron’s behavior, regardless of whether they knew them. In her interview with The New York Times, Cabot said she was doxxed online, that at one point received hundreds of calls per day, that she received death threats and that someone just came up to her in public to call her “disgusting” and tell her off, right before Thanksgiving.
According to Cabot, she wasn’t in a sexual relationship with her boss. Byron and Kerrigan also seemed to be together as of this September, based on a report from Page Six. Still, both Cabot and Byron resigned from their positions at Astronomer after the video went viral. So viral that Martin’s ex-wife Gwyneth Paltrow of Oscar-winning and Goop-making fame, was pulled in to do a commercial for Astronomer.
“I took accountability and I gave up my career for that,” Cabot told the Times of her decision to step down. “That’s the price I chose to pay.”
While the viral moment has left the rapidly-changing online zeitgeist, Cabot still lives with its impact every day. Her children even avoid being seen in public with her.
“Any attempt to correct the record put her at risk of being shredded all over again,” said Lisa Miller of the Times. “Her mother, Sherry Hoffman, told me in a phone call that she was so worried about Cabot that she said a kind of prayer to herself: ‘Oh, please don’t go out there, they’re going to cream you.’”
Paul Keable, an expert with experience as the Chief Strategy Officer at Ashley Madison, joined Audacy’s “Something Offbeat” podcast earlier this year to discuss the scandal.
“In reality, the internet is in a sense, replicating the NASCAR world – and people just love a good crash,” Keable said. “And that’s what we’re seeing here. It just has so many different elements. Wildly successful, good-looking people, doing bad things and getting caught. It’s a bit of schadenfreude, and the world loves it.”
So, the more elite you become, the more important it is (for your image at least) to be careful around the High Noon cooler in public.