Kristin Cabot Fails to Understand Your Hostility
Kristin Cabot, of Jumbotron at the Coldplay concert infamy, has suffered unjustly because she’s a woman says a New York Time’s feature story. She made a mistake. Enough with the death threats.
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Can we all just stop vilifying the Other Woman, please?
Is the gist of a story in yesterday’s New York Times: The Ritual Shaming of the Woman at the Coldplay Concert. (Gift link)
I find “ritual shaming” to be a curious word choice. Like we’re all here holding rocks ready to stone the next lady adulterer in the news cycle. Zero thought behind it. It’s just what we do. Like not wearing white after Labor Day or serving turkey at Thanksgiving. Baaaad woman! (hurls rock) Begin the harvest!
What about rocks for men? ask some uppity spectators. Well, no we don’t do that. It’s not part of the ritual. Cheating is just a male prerogative and I’m sure your chubby thighs drove him to it.
ROCKS FOR EVERYONE! chant the upstarts.
No! We don’t stone adulterers. That’s barbaric. NO ROCKS. And while we’re at it, no snark or judgement either. No editorials, no memes, no schadenfreude. Real people with real feelings make mistakes. This entire scandal has been very hard on Andy Byron and Kristin Cabot. They lost their jobs. And worse, were ridiculed by the Phillies Phanatic mascot.
@phillies Couple caught cheating at Phillies game?! #phanatic #coldplay #sportstiktok ♬ original sound – Phillies
Haven’t they suffered ENOUGH?
Too much! is the gist of Lisa Miller’s NYT story. We’re all just reflexively and irrationally angry, bitter, and unkind. Nowhere in the article does it explore why the Jumbotron Coldplay cheaters struck a global nerve. Lisa Miller and Kristin Cabot fail to understand the hostility.
Cabot told me women had been her cruelest critics. All of the in-person bullying has been from women, as have most of the phone calls and messages. “What I’ve seen these last months makes it harder for me to believe that it’s all about the men holding us back,” she said. “I think we are holding ourselves back tremendously by cutting each other down.”
Gosh, why are women being so mean to you? Did you present your universal sisterhood card and get rejected, Kristin? Let me explain it.
The patriarchy leopards ate your face.
You don’t get to shit on women and then cry “sexism”! You were quite happy to suck the dick of the patriarchy. But then you got caught and the powerful guy you sided with threw you under the bus. Now you have regrets. You’re not a victim, you’re Vichy. So, yes, no one wants you at the barbecue.
Dick sucker of the patriarchy (DSOP)? What are you on about, Tracy?
Kristin Cabot copped to a workplace emotional affair with her married boss.
She asked him out on a date. Having a romance with your boss gives the appearance of favoritism and underscores ages old misogyny that women sleep their way to the top. That’s why we have HR rules about these things, which she should’ve known as director of HR. #DSOP
She was okay conspiring in the abuse of another woman.
There is no credible reporting that Andy Byron was separated or is divorcing. On the contrary, since Jumbo-gate, he’s reportedly reconciling. The Times story says he told her he was having marriage troubles, of the “my wife doesn’t understand me” variety and was separating. She could’ve checked his story out. Or refrained out of common sense. Instead she proceed with her “crush.” #DSOP
She was okay enforcing rules for others that she did not herself abide by.
And this in my opinion is where the global schadenfreude comes from. We’re all sick of oligarchs and rules for thee and not for me. She absolutely knew this was not acceptable workplace behavior and she made an exception for herself. Validation from a FW was more important than her kid’s financial stability, or being a professional. She wanted the spoils of entitlement, the same kind of spoils Byron enjoys. #DSOP.
As her boss’s mistress, or wannabe mistress, she was not on some journey of feminist self-actualization. On the contrary, she was sucking up to the CEO of her company and hoping for special favors. (Break company rules, be my date, leave your company vulnerable to lawsuits, don’t tell your wife.)
Are women judged harsher than men in workplace affairs?
Women are judged harsher than men in almost everything. Of course it’s sexist and wrong. But that doesn’t excuse Cabot’s behavior as a DSOP.
Kristin Cabot has come to believe that her silence no longer serves her. It made sense in the beginning, after she appeared on the Jumbotron, aghast, in the arms of her boss at a Coldplay concert on July 16, 2025, a moment that caused an international furor. The original TikTok received 100 million views within days. Cabot retreated, trying to make things right with the people who mattered most: her two teenage kids; her employer, the tech company Astronomer; and her second husband, Andrew Cabot, from whom she was separated and negotiating a divorce settlement. In the initial phase, all she could think was: Oh my God, I hurt people. I hurt good people.
Her second thought was “hire a PR firm.”
I’m a good people. I hurt me. Someone get the message out. What’s it cost to get in People magazine and the New York Times these days?
Five months after the TikTok bomb became the defining disaster of her life, she described in her first interview since the concert what it feels like to be a punchline and a target. In online comments she has been called a slut, a homewrecker, a gold digger, a side piece — the usual tags for shaming women. Her appearance has been scrutinized, specific body parts evaluated and found insufficiently pretty. Some of the most famous people in the world — Whoopi Goldberg, Gwyneth Paltrow — and at least one furry green sports mascot, the Phillie Phanatic, have made her humiliation their material.
Where is the media sympathy for Megan Kerrigan, Andy Byron’s wife? Does her humiliation matter? She didn’t take any risks that exposed her to a freak Jumbotron. Is she not also a punchline?
She was doxxed, and for weeks received 500 or 600 calls a day. Paparazzi camped across the street from her house and cars slowly cruised her block, “like a parade,” she recalled. She received death threats: “Not 900. That showed up in People magazine. I got 50 or 60,” she told me.
Death threats are obscene. Public insults and menacing children are obscene. All of this is disproportionate. However, these actions should not be conflated with schadenfreude. Finding the humor in two cheaters cowering on a Jumbotron is not the same as wishing them dead.
DARVO therapy speak, anyone?
But Cabot, 53, wanted to tell her side, and her children, her mother and her closest friends stood behind her. “I kept thinking of a saying I’ve heard through the years,” Hoffman said. “‘Silence is acceptance.’ And I thought, ‘Oh my god, that’s what’s going to be out there for the rest of her life.’”
Kristin, I find your language quite mindfucky. “Silence is acceptance” paints you as a victim of abuse. That’s the language of oppressor/oppressed.
Well, yes, Tracy, she got a gazillion death threats.
Perhaps a more gracious exit strategy from public scorn would be to acknowledge your entitlement, apologize, and retreat. And employ the full boot of the law for all death threats and harassment.
Cabot hired a communications consultant to help her tell her story while minimizing further damage to herself and the people she loves — a high-wire act that felt, in her presence, at times anguishing and at times too pat.
Not telling your story is also a valid and dignified choice.
‘A bad decision’
She was not in a sexual relationship with her boss, she said. Before that night, they had never even kissed.
The Chump Lady in me is skeptical. You have that separate apartment in Boston and everything. Enh…
“I made a bad decision and had a couple of 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. 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.”
Weren’t you shitcanned and forced to resign? That’s not a choice you make. You took accountability by hiring a PR firm to write sympathetic pieces about how hard this has been on YOU. I’m sure it has been awful, but stop petting the patriarchy leopards.
Big feelings for a FW.
In the fast-growth, start-up culture, the company’s staff was expanding and Cabot and Byron spoke every day, sometimes three times a day.
In spring 2025, while grabbing a sandwich near Astronomer’s New York office, Cabot made reference to her marriage “in a tone,” as she remembers it, and Byron asked what was up. She was going through a separation, she said. It was stressful and she worried about her kids.
“I’m going through the same thing,” she recalled him saying. Reached by phone, Byron declined to be interviewed for this article.
“Going through the same thing” is rather vague. Traffic? Parenting struggles? Separation? If you want to fuck your boss don’t you think you should be a bit clearer on his relationship status? Apparently, it’s complicated with his $400K OnlyFans habit.
For Cabot, the shared acknowledgment “sort of strengthened our connection,” she said, and a close working relationship grew even closer. At work, they shared confidences and made each other laugh, and for Cabot “big feelings” grew fast. She began to allow herself to imagine the romantic possibilities, though she knew she couldn’t keep reporting to Byron if the relationship progressed. She loved her job, and with two kids and a large, extended family of stepparents and siblings, she was incredibly busy. “I didn’t really get too carried away because he’s my boss,” she said.
Dude, you asked him out on a date. Where exactly do you think the line is?
Cabot’s separation from her husband was still new when she agreed to go with friends to see Coldplay. She liked the band well enough, but what really appealed was being out, with friends, on a summer Wednesday. “I hadn’t been out in ages,” she told me. She asked Byron to be her plus one.
Was any part of her concerned about this outing from an H.R. perspective? “Some inside part of my brain might have been jumping up and down and waving its arms, saying, ‘Don’t do this,’” Cabot replied. But, generally, “No.” She was “pumped” to introduce Byron to her friends. “I was like: ‘I got this. I can have a crush, I can handle it.’”
No, a crush is something you keep to yourself. A DATE WITH YOUR BOSS is an egregious violation of company policy and common sense. You’re the director of HR!
On the ride to Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Mass., Cabot learned, by text, that her soon-to-be ex-husband was attending the concert, too. “It threw me,” she conceded. But she and Byron “were not an item.”
Oh yeah, this is totally normal. You have romantic feelings for your boss. While coincidentally separated from your husband. Who brought a date to the same concert you brought your crush to. Relationship status #Fucktangle.
Byron was dancing behind Cabot when she took his hands and wrapped his arms around her.
At that moment, she had two thoughts. First: Andrew Cabot was somewhere in the dark stadium and she did not want to humiliate him. And: “Andy’s my boss.”
Hang on, in the PR piece that appeared in People Magazine in September, you claimed your husband was at the concert with a date. Why would your boss feeling up your boobs humiliate him? I think you and your comms person need to cross reference your stories.
If this is all copacetic, why hide? Why need a strategy? Why cower?
“I was so embarrassed and so horrified,” she said. “I’m the head of H.R. and he’s the C.E.O. It’s, like, so cliché and so bad.”
Please don’t feel bad, Kristin. You’re not a cliche. You’re entirely original. There’s nothing banal about a Jumbotron.
Cabot and Byron fled back to the bar. “We both just sat there with our heads in our hands, like, ‘What just happened?’” Even before leaving the stadium, they began to discuss how to manage their public transgression.
And the New York Times obliged.
The former coworker who was (allegedly) sleeping with our married CEO and who bullied me out of my last job made loud “feminist” noses, too. She was a very visible figure in a workplace initiative meant to support women. As a consequence, I made sure to stay away from that community, even if this made me look as if I was opposed to feminism (which couldn’t be further from the truth!). My only “crime” was that I had been the CEO’s ghostwriter long before she joined our company, and I was known to be good at it (he never talked to me in person, though). She wasn’t happy with that and attacked me in every way she could. As a consequence, I was forced to leave and change my entire career path just to get away from her. She wasn’t exactly a champion of women, I’d say.
I’m so sorry.
Every woman I know, including myself, has suffered severe career setbacks due to misogyny in the workplace. Some of us have been threatened or bullied out of entire careers. I’ve never seen anybody discuss it when talking about the wage gap.
I’m finally at a company that respects and rewards women for their work, but it’s unconscionable that it took 20 years to get here.
often it is (younger) women who do the most bullying when they are hungry and want to be on their way up …
And for some of them, this might be their main motivation for sleeping with a powerful married FW (even if he his much older and a complete bore and looks pretty average). They want free license to act like a total piece of sh*t at the workplace, especially towards other women.
I’m not a huge fan of the saying “If you are explaining, then you are losing” as I sometimes I have to do deal with people who “need to have shit explained to them in words of one syllable and slowly with it” …… but in this case I’ll make an exception. I would suggest that Kristin’s personal brand might be better served were she to stop talking and focus on becoming better acquainted with the consequences of her choices/actions.
LFTT
“need to have shit explained to them in words of one syllable and slowly with it”
You gave me a good chuckle, good Sir.
This NYT piece was the first thing I saw on the interwebs this morning. I knew it would be grist for the CN mill. I’m just pleased I didn’t have to wait too long.
Poor Kristen, thinking she’s some modern-day Hester Prynne. There’s no excuse for death threats, but facing public disapprobation for pursuing and banging a married man and then getting busted on the Jumbotron at a concert isn’t persecution.
I’m doubtful about the death threats, because she has told so many other, easily-proven lies in this disaster of a PR push. She really will be on Dancing with the Stars soon.
Not persecution. Consequences.
Thank you so much, CL, for writing on the NYT article. I couldn’t believe it when I saw it. What most amazed me was that the writer (I won’t call her a journalist) had chosen to profile Cabot in the first place and then cast the story in (faux) feminist terms and write in so sympathetic a way about a woman who clearly is still excusing her behavior and casting herself as a victim. Me, too, it ain’t.
Cabot reminds me of a colleague (we were both professors) who moved in with a male colleague and his wife, slept with the husband while living in their house, and then complained, when the affair came out, that other women faculty had “deserted her,” as if it were our feminist duty to stand by her despite what she’d done simply because we were all women. Apparently she’d forgotten the wife was a woman, too.
… to help her tell her story while minimizing further damage to herself and
the people she lovesher career.It’s all lies from start to finish. How are we to know if she got death threats? Lying liar says she got death threats. Uh, okay? Lying liar says her boss was separated. No, it turns out he wasn’t. It’s all spin to make her look like the victim, and it’s sickening. She is the one who did this to her kids.
Apparently she didn’t read the employee handbook that she was responsible for updating yearly. The need to update said handbook yearly is due in part to behaviors like hers. A real confidence and loyalty builder for the the “little” people she was responsible to “direct”.
I was stuck with Human Resource Director duties after I agreed to support Cheaty McLiarface’s business start up. It was an anxiety inducing, thankless job in which I was left to deal with employee drama as well as outside legal issues. Looking back with my hard earned clarity I realize that Cheaty’s behaviors towards our employees (chronic flirtation, infatuation, favoritism) were a far greater threat to the survival of the company than any shenanigan an employee could have come up with.
It’s also gross how she’s like, “I know! I’m the HR VP, riiiiiight??” Tee-hee, giggle, giggle, like it’s no biggie. She sounds like a 12-year-old. Yes, you are the VP of HR, and you have ethical and professional obligations, you ninny.
I was hoping Chump Lady would jump on Cabot’s woe is me story. The media are giving Cabot room to spin her sob story because the actual victim in all of this is Byron’s wife and she apparently has too much class to talk to the media. Why do I suspect Cabot’s husband is a chump too but he didn’t want to appear “cuckolded” so he went along with his wife’s separation story? I think the pro photography is her trying to stick it to Byron “look what you’re missing out on by going back to your wife” photos. Ick. The woman is insufferable.
Like so many of these stories, the pain of the innocent faithful spouse–chump–is simply left out of the story. We are supposed to feel sorry for the terrible consequences the cheater mostly brought upon themselves (sans death threats, of course). Of course, it always about the cheater and only the cheater. That’s how the cheating started–i.e. gross entitlement and lack of concern for the innocent collateral.
And then she took her married boss back to her private work apartment that he’d presumably never been to before since they totally weren’t in a relationship before this, so they could “strategize”. #TotallyNormal
If I was trying to brainstorm how to *not* look like I’d just been caught in an affair with my married boss, “come back to my private apartment so we can think this over, just the two of us” would NOT be the first thing I did.
I also refuse to believe she innocently wound up at the same concert where her estranged husband happened to be with a date. If they were both big Coldplay fans, sure, but she says she isn’t. More like, was hoping to bump into her ex at the concert and one-up him with her tall, attractive, millionaire boss on her arm. How’d that work out for you, Kristin?
Another obvious lie — that her company asked her to please stay, but she willingly gave up her VP title. No, gurl. No.
Stop. Lying.
Yes. I used to work in HR and this may be the biggest of her whoppers.
She probably just knew Astronomer wouldn’t comment and contradict her.
The point at which she said that she admired Paltrow and Goop was when she lost me. *shivers*.
Also, I won’t link to them, but I find it morbidly funny that the consensus on the adultery subreddit is: (1) Cabot is lying, and (2) this is why you take your sidepiece to seedy motels and shitty restaurants, *not* actual romantic spots like balcony seats at concerts. 😆
Society doesn’t do enough to shame these people. It’s disgusting they started their own subreddit.
Nah.
When you engage in behaviour like this, you bring your own consequences upon yourself.
No matter what those are, the only person to blame is herself.
Suck it up and do better.
Nope…she gets no sympathy from me. You play, you pay. My FW married his AP in September ’25. He became the CFO of a company in 2022 and she is his subordinate…she is the company controller and answers directly to him. Now they are married and living in my former marital home. How this has been accepted at the company is beyond my understanding. Seems one or both should have lost their job over it. But as far as I know they both still work there.
The real villian in this entire story is Andy Byron. He is a piece of shit.
There is a great Ted Lasso scene where Rebecca, the owner of a British soccer team that she got in her divorce settlement, tells the American coach (Ted Lasso) she personally hired to wreck the team and then listed off all of the terrible things she did to him when her initial plan wasn’t working. Ted listens to her and tells her he forgives her because, “divorce is hard. It doesn’t matter if youre leaving or the one that got left. It makes folks do crazy things.”
I don’t think Kristin Cabot has her head on straight, even now. I’m positive she is getting some really bad advice by people she actually trusts. She is the one going through a divorce, and she has the kids. I know a lot of people that say the first thing you should do after a break up (including separation and divorce) is to go out and get laid. I know
others who say that you need to celebrate your freedom, ask out anyone you want
to ask because “now is the time.”
The real piece of shit in the story is Andy Byron. He lied to Cabot, led her to believe something that was not true, and then the piece of shit ran back home when the shit hit the fan, leaving her high and dry while she is still getting a divorce.
Yes, Kristin Cabot should have known better because she was the head of her company HR department. Going out with people in the company where you work is always discouraged and in some places actually forbidden. She made a mistake and she should have owned it outright without excuses or explanation.
But, in the end, Andy Byron should have said no to her invitation. My guess is that his termination involved a buy-out of some sort while hers involved “don’t let the door hit you on the way out.” We will never know – but that is how corporate America works.
The only relevant part of the Times story involved the death threats and the fact that her children heard at least one of them and feared for their lives. After that the story was a waste of paper, ink and time. The author of the New York Times story and the Times’ editors failed to note that Andy Byron should have said no to the invitation from her out of
an act of kindness and empathy for her personal situation. Divorce is hard, it makes people do crazy things. The real villian in this entire story is Andy Byron. He is a piece of shit.
Found the PR bot.
Of course, Andy Byron is a POS. But this blog wasn’t about him today, it’s about his affair partner piping up to play victim. Cabot’s not getting a hall pass here.
I’m not a PR bot and I lived in a city in Virginia where every single person I met lied and cheated and lied about being married or divorced or separated. I also dated quite a bit after my first divorce and the things we are all told to do can be beyond the pale. I can’t judge Kristin Cabot the same way everyone else seems to be because she didn’t lie to Andy Byron, he lied to her. She asked him out because he told her he was having marital problems (“Cabot now says she believed Byron was also splitting from his wife at the time.”) He should have said no. A decent man or woman with any sense of morals would have said no. He was clearly not having marital problems. The real problem is that the NYT article is incomplete and is in itself part of the problem of this entire saga.
I will agree on a couple of counts. One-death threats are a bridge too far.
And two-yes, we need to hold Mssr. Byron to the same level of accountability. That is a real thing. You don’t need to read a lot of Nathaniel Hawthorne to realize that women are held to a different standard (and that pillories come in all sizes!)
That being said, for somebody that spent money on hiring a group of people to help her make excuses for bad behavior (and DARVO the general public in so doing)…wow did she do a poor job. I spent part of my Monday arguing with somebody with psychosis and a polysubstance habit about why I was not permitting them to go off premises unsupervised. They had better excuses than Cabot’s whole PR firm.
There is no real accountability anywhere in there. None. “Resign or be fired” is not accountability. “I made a mistake” sounds like accountability but it is not.
As my grandmother would say, “everything before ‘but’ is bullshit.”
It’s all just (expensive) fuckwit logic.
“I made a mistake BUT we need to take a step back from that because other women are being mean to me and Schmoopie isn’t getting nearly the same firestorm.” Of course they are being mean to you. We do not need to step back. You elected to very publicly demonstrate your affair with your boss (please somebody tell me that you can’t slip the AV people an Andrew Jackson to NOT put you on Kiss Cam).
The court of public opinion is not a jury of your peers.
Is there internalized misogyny in play? Absolutely. Is there some kernel of truth to “women are held to a different standard and slandered more readily for these behaviors”? Absolutely.
Did Kristin Cabot cheat on her husband with her boss, get caught, and face the music? Absolutely. And is her damage control for all of this employing the precise same logical fallacies that got her into this mess to begin with? Absolutely.
There is clear overlap between her logic and the truth. All that being said, I very much doubt she is getting taken down by her own gender because “it’s just what you do.”
She seems to be blaming everybody and everything but herself, up to and including her lack of social life and a couple of low APV hard seltzers. I know we have some AA/NA types floating around the ChumpNation…do I need to explicitly say “alcohol disinhibits-it does not create”?
Fuckwit. Logic.
Yes, she lost her job. And we will be getting a post from our fearless leader any week now about her new shitty podcast where she is suddenly a radical feminist and this is all some conspiracy about her because she was a woman in power. And if she’s lucky well get a parody of her in the next Benoit Blanc whodunnit before she correctly fades into obscurity.
She is not the victim. Her former employees are and her children are.
I have had crushes on co-workers, too. Fun as those are they are never a good idea. 0/10 would never do again. I did make the mistake of dating a coworker once, and hoo boy was THAT a mistake! That was before I was in anything resembling power though. Those two idiots put an entire company in jeopardy because they (demonstrably) could not keep their hands to themselves. Hundreds of people were hurt by that “mistake.” About the only person NOT hurt are Cabot’s STBX’s lawyer, whose job just got A LOT easier (Tracy, can we get him on the podcast?)
It’ll be Christmas in a few days, so a message to anybody feeling froggy about their relationship over the holidays:
I know I have already talked enough today(and have waxed on everything else before). The part that disgusts me the most here is that it was people in positions of power within that company. Perhaps I was simply educated on leadership differently-I was told that I set the standard for conduct and professionalism. There are people that worked under them that now think that what they did was ok and this has reinforced the thinking error that it was OK until they got caught. Damage has been done more than any little defensive puff piece in “The Times” will ever acknowledge.
The real moral of the story here: Cheating is not victimless. You are going to feel entitled to whatever you feel entitled to and I cannot stop you from that (though by all means take a hard look at those entitlements sometime.) You need to understand that it doesn’t just hurt the Chump-it hurts everybody in their sphere. That includes their kids, their co-workers, their everything. It hurts everybody in yours, too. In this case, there are a lot of people that have lost credibility and job security because the people that they trust to run their place of employment literally couldn’t keep their hands to themselves. Lives are being threatened and people are feeling unsafe. It is already hard enough to put food on the table when the masters of your financial destiny are blaming convenience store alcohol on their personal problems. If your visceral reaction to that is “everybody needs to chill out,” you might be right, but the problem starts with YOU. “It’s/I’ll just…” logic is dishonesty, pure and simple. Your entitlement ends where the rest of our safety begins.
EDIT: in the immortal words of one of my favorite influences, “Oh, and I almost forgot to tell ya…”
Have a Fuckwit Free Friday!