Woman in Coldplay ‘Kiss Cam’ Controversy Says Her 2 Kids Feared They Were All ‘Going to Die’ amid the Harassment

Kristin Cabot says her life detonated the moment a “kiss cam” caught her at a Coldplay concert earlier this year — arms wrapped around her then-boss, Andy Byron — and the clip raced across the internet.

In her first public comments, Cabot said the attention didn’t just hit her. It hit her children, too: a 16-year-old son and a 14-year-old daughter who, she says, have struggled under the glare.

Cabot, 53, gave two new interviews this week to address what she described as a relentless stream of insults, rumors and false claims that have followed her since the concert.

“People would say things like I was a ‘gold-digger’ or I ‘slept my way to the top,’ which just couldn’t be further from reality,” Cabot told The Times in the U.K.

She said she wants people to understand that she was already separating from her spouse when she developed an emotional closeness with Byron — and that there was no sexual affair.

Cabot said Byron told her he was separating from his wife, Megan. (Byron has not commented publicly and has since been seen in public with his wife.)

According to Cabot, the only time they kissed was the night of the Coldplay show. What began as a lighthearted evening turned into, as she put it, “a bad decision.”

“I … had a couple of [alcoholic] High Noons and danced and acted inappropriately with my boss. And it’s not nothing. And I took accountability and I gave up my career for that,” she told The New York Times.

She also acknowledged that some may wonder why she’s speaking now.

“I’m sure a lot of people will say, ‘This is such a dead story, why bring it back up?’ ” she told The Times. “But it’s not over for me, and it’s not over for my kids. The harassment never ended.”

Cabot said the consequences were immediate and lasting. She lost her job as chief people officer at Astronomer, the tech company where Byron served as CEO before resigning.

But she said the fallout at home has been harder.

For a time, “I didn’t know what to do to support my kids correctly,” she told The New York Times.

She said that when she explained what had happened, her daughter “burst into tears, saying, ‘I guess that means you really are getting divorced then.’ ”

Cabot said she had been separating — on good terms — from her husband Andrew, her children’s stepfather, and later filed for divorce. She also said her children were close to Andrew and that she feared the concert moment would change their family dynamic.

“He’s an amazing guy and does not deserve that,” she told The Times in the U.K.

Cabot shares custody of her children with their father, her first husband, Kenneth Thornby, according to The Times.

After the concert incident in July, she said she traveled to Boston to speak with her children directly.

“They knew who Andy was, obviously,” she told The New York Times, “and I said, ‘He and I got very swept up in a moment and now it’s on social media.’ ”

She later moved temporarily to a rental property in New Hampshire, and the U.K. paper reported that she felt she had entered “too dark a place” for motherhood.

Cabot said the situation escalated quickly from a viral moment into something more frightening. She described receiving death threats, constant outreach from reporters, and an ongoing sense of being watched.

She told The New York Times that her daughter urged them to leave a local pool after they noticed someone taking their photo. Cabot also said she was confronted by women while driving to pick up her son from work.

One of the most alarming moments, she said, came when her children overheard a threatening message she’d received on her phone as she was showing it to her mother.

“They were already in really bad shape, and that’s when the wheels fell off the cart,” she told The New York Times. “Because my kids were afraid that I was going to die and they were going to die.”

Cabot said therapy and a change of environment have helped somewhat. Her children have managed to return to school, and she said she arranged for them to see therapists.

Still, she said the strain remains. According to The New York Times, her children “are reluctant to be seen with her.”

Cabot became emotional describing that reality to The Times: “They’re mad at me. And they can be mad at me for the rest of their lives — I have to take that.”

Even so, Cabot said she hopes her experience can be a warning about online cruelty.

“One of the main reasons I want to have this conversation is not to prolong any 15 minutes of pathetic fame,” she told The Times. “Every day I hear something about a kid or a young adult who committed suicide because of how horrific they were treated in the comment section. We have to be kinder to each other, not constantly tear one another down.”

She said she also wants her children to hear a message of resilience.

“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.”