Why HR exec Kristin Cabot, in Coldplay concert cheating scandal, hasn't been fired and whether she can sue the company
Chief People Officer Kristin Cabot is on leave, but hasn't been publicly given the boot over liability concerns, legal experts said — and it's not so easy to dump employees just because of 'ugly' headlines.
Cabot's fate at the New York-based data science company is still murky — though employment lawyers also threw cold water on any possible sexual harassment case or similar claims.
'In a real-world big company, you can't just fire someone because the headlines are ugly,' said attorney Nicole Brenecki.
'There are likely contracts, internal investigations, and legal issues involved.
'If HR greenlit what happened with Coldplay, and there is a supporting paper trail, heads will likely roll. It just might take a few more days before the axe drops.'
Cabot, who took the job in November 2024 became one half of a viral public scandal when she and Byron were called out by Coldplay frontman Chris Martin on the jumbotron at the show at Gillette Stadium outside Boston.
Astronomer later publicly confirmed an investigation into the incident is underway.
Both Byron and Cabot appear to be married to other people, according to social media posts — adding a layer to the scandal.
An email to Astronomer seeking comment on Cabot's job status was not returned Monday, though the new interim CEO weighed in on the scandal online.
Pete DeJoy, the company's co-founder, said in a LinkedIn post the immense attention 'has been unusual and surreal for Astronomer workers.
'While I would never have wished for it to happen like this, Astronomer is now a household name,' DeJoy said.
'The events of the past few days have received a level of media attention that few companies – let alone startups in our small corner of the data and AI world – ever encounter,' he added.
Another employment attorney, William Cafaro, suggested that booting Cabot would be easy, but he suspects the company and her might be wrangling over an exit deal.
'Like if you were to look for a picture of 'cause' [for firing] in the dictionary, it would show a picture of the head of HR having a public affair with the CEO of the company,' he told The Post.
He added that it's 'difficult to conceive' how she could continue in her current role.
Attorney Douglas Wigdor theorized there could be more details about the relationship that the public isn't privy to. He said that could be a factor in why Cabot has not publicly left the company.
Additionally, the results of the internal probe could determine what the company ultimately does with Cabot, Wigdor added.
'Maybe there's more to the story from her,' the founding partner of Wigdor LLP said.
'That's definitely possible about how it came to be that they're at this concert and they're embracing. It's a short video so it's hard to know what exactly is going on.'
Legal experts also doubted she could bring forward a claim of sexual harassment, even though Byron was her superior.
'Unless she was pressured into the relationship because of a power imbalance, there's not much of a case,' Brenecki said.
'If it was consensual… a sexual harassment suit would be a stretch. In fact, a jury might laugh it out of court. Being embarrassed on a jumbotron isn't the same as being harassed at work.'
Wigdor echoed that sentiment – though he again cautioned it was based on limited information.
'She'd have to demonstrate their relationship was unwanted and I think based off what I've seen would be difficult,' he said.
Originally published as Why HR exec Kristin Cabot, in Coldplay concert cheating scandal, hasn't been fired and whether she can sue the company
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ABC News
5 hours ago
- ABC News
Is it OK to shame the Coldplay kiss cam couple?
Sam Hawley: If you hadn't realised by now that cameras are everywhere, so-called Coldplay-gate is a great reminder. And the Kisscam vision of a canoodling couple at the concert, who are apparently having an affair, is proof again how quickly word can travel on social media. Saying it went viral is an understatement. Today, political scientists from Loyola University in Chicago, Jennifer Forstall, on public shaming and when it can sometimes be a good thing. I'm Sam Hawley on Gadigal land in Sydney. This is ABC News Daily. Jennifer, we better start with a little recap from the Coldplay concert last week in Boston. I think at this point we all feel like we were there. Jennifer Forestal: Right, yeah. Social media will do that. Sam Hawley: Yes, exactly. It's got a fair bit of attention. So it was during this concert that Chris Martin, Coldplay's frontman, announced that he would be singing to a select few people in the crowd using cameras to say hello to members of the audience. Just tell me what happened after that. Jennifer Forestal: Right. So as I understand it, the Kisscam, as it's often called, is sort of going through the crowd, catching couples. Chris Martin, Coldplay lead singer: We'd like to say hello to some of you in the crowd. How we're going to do that is we're going to use our cameras and put some of you on the big screen. Jennifer Forestal: And it happened upon a couple that was embracing and then very quickly realized the camera was on them and turned away, you know, ducked under the cover. Chris Martin, Coldplay lead singer: All right, come on, you're OK? Uh-oh, what? Either they're having an affair or they're just very shy. Jennifer Forestal: And it turned out that he was absolutely right. Sam Hawley: Yeah, what a moment. OK, then the identities, of course, of this couple in the vision is confirmed as Andy Byron, who's a married chief executive of a tech company called Astronomer and Kristen Cabot, the company's chief people officer, who, by the way, is not his wife. And things haven't been going so well for them since then, have they? Jennifer Forestal: That's right. I think Andy Byron was put on leave. I think maybe actually they both were put on leave pending investigation by the company. And then we've quickly found out that Andy Byron submitted his resignation, which was accepted. News report: Astronomer said in a statement that Andy Byron had tended his resignation and the board of directors have accepted that resignation. This clip went viral. Jennifer Forestal: I think the jury is still out on what's happening with Kristen Cabot. I believe she's still employed with the company right now, but we'll see what happens there as well. Sam Hawley: Yeah, and of course, this vision, it has been beamed around the world. The original footage was taken by a TikTok user known as Instaagrace. And that vision that she posted has been viewed 124 million times. It's pretty extraordinary. Jennifer Forestal: It really is. I think it speaks to just the kind of virality that we can see on these technologies these days. Part of it is just kind of the, it's salacious. The way that we all kind of like to watch disasters unfold in front of us. I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that there's a kind of turn against sort of CEOs and wealthy elites more generally. So it feels kind of nice to see them sort of, see their life get ruined in front of our eyes. But at the end of the day, really, I think it's just another example of the sort of strife and effect, right? That if they hadn't done anything, if they would have just stayed sort of embracing and sort of waved at the camera, we wouldn't have thought twice about it. But it's the fact that they sort of reacted the way that they did that called attention to the fact that they were perhaps doing something wrong, which, again, if they would have just, you know, hugged each other and moved on, the camera would have gone to the next person. Chris Martin wouldn't have said anything. And we wouldn't be talking about this today. Sam Hawley: And the memes, you know, there's so many of them going around. They're calling it Coldplaygate. Jennifer Forestal: You know, they just kind of all are all over the place and they're all very funny. And I think some of what I think is so striking about this is that, to me, has been picked up in this kind of very funny way where it's not necessarily attacking the people involved, but it's kind of making light of the general situation and putting other people in that kind of circumstances rather than sort of going after the two people that were involved directly. Sam Hawley: The woman who posted this on TikTok, Grace Springer, she told The Sun newspaper that part of her feels bad for turning these people's lives upside down. But she says, play stupid games, you win stupid prizes. But she also said on TikTok that she's glad people are entertained, but she's really urged them to keep in mind the CEO's wife and his family. Grace Springer, TikTok user: But at the end of the day, Andy's wife and his family, they're very real people. So just keep that in mind. Jennifer Forestal: Yeah, of course. And I mean, you know, I've seen this is sort of a topic of debate, especially in this particular instance of public shaming or cancel culture, whatever you want to call it, is that these this particular instance happened in a public forum. You know, kiss cams are not necessarily an unusual invasion of privacy. They've been around for decades or pretty familiar to anybody who's been to a sporting event or a rock show or anything like that. So, you know, there's some argument to the point that's like, you know, if you are going to show up in a concert of 60,000 people, you know, don't expect to see privacy. It's not like they were filmed in their privacy of their own home or in a place that you might expect to get some sort of privacy. On the other hand, you know, it is sort of pointing out the just general surveillance state that we all live under these days, right? That anything can go viral, anything can be filmed by anybody else and uploaded to social media where it could get picked up and viewed by millions. And so I think there's a lot to consider. You know, it's not necessarily a straightforward, you know, they did something wrong and they should pay or they're completely victims in the situation. I just it's I just think it's complicated. Sam Hawley: Well, Jennifer, let's just unpack this a bit more, because as you say, it is actually rather complicated. This is basically public shaming, isn't it? It is. Just explain that a bit more. Jennifer Forestal: Yeah. So public shaming is oftentimes a general term that we use when people have violated some sort of social norm and are sort of publicly shamed, meaning they're like put through the ringer publicly. People sort of admonish them for doing this, whatever sort of violation it is. And so, you know, in a lot of ways, oftentimes when we think about public shaming in a digital age, it's called cancel culture. We think of things like going viral on Twitter, people being racist and things like that. And so what we're seeing here is in some ways an example of public shaming in the sense that this is a couple who have violated a norm of monogamy, presumably, and are sort of being publicly rebuked for going outside of the standard modes of behavior. And so people are sort of taking them to task and ridiculing them for that norm violation. And so, you know, some people would say that this is a violation of their privacy, that this is an overreaction or an inappropriate public reaction. And others would say, you know, it's exactly what they deserve for violating a social norm of monogamy. Sam Hawley: But Byron, he's hardly Jeffrey Epstein, right? Or Harvey Weinstein. He's just some guy who's gone to a concert. And people have deemed that he's behaved badly, but it seems pretty over the top, the amount of interest in him. Jennifer Forestal: Yeah, this is oftentimes one of the criticisms that we see of online public shaming in particular, right? That the scale of social media, the fact that so many people can jump on something so small, the fact that things can go public that wouldn't ordinarily be public, that this is a kind of violation or a kind of pathology of public shaming, that it's no longer working the way we might have in the past intended it to, where people, you know, broke a rule, were shamed for it, they changed their behavior and were welcomed back into the fold. And so, yeah, a lot of people would say this is the problem with cancel culture is that it incentivizes these overreactions, that their mob rule kind of goes unchecked, that there's no accountability for people who shame. And so they kind of, you know, go after people with no real seeming concern about what they might be doing to the victim of public shaming. And, you know, there's a lot to be said for that argument. I think that that is right in a lot of ways. I don't, you know, I think that there is a role for public shaming in public life. And I think it's worth thinking about sort of what is going on in cases of online public shaming, where the scale, the accountability mechanisms are maybe missing to make it valuable. Sam Hawley: Mm, all right. So you believe that public shaming is not bad in all cases. So just give me some examples when in fact it has led to good. Jennifer Forestal: So there are some violations that we, you know, wouldn't want to see people engage in, but we don't want the state to be involved in either. Right. So we don't want people to, for example, lie to their friends, but we also don't want them to be punished, like by jail if they are. In order to make sure that people keep their promises, we would publicly shame the people that don't. And then they would understand that that's a problem. Other people watching the public shaming would understand that they too would be shamed if they lie to their friends. And so we would presumably establish the social norm of not doing that. Other things that are very good candidates for public shaming are things where the state won't, for whatever reason, get involved. So there's a great book by a woman named Jennifer Jacquet about how public shaming has really been effective to use for shaming companies or corporations. So companies are oftentimes outside. They're sometimes not regulated maybe to the extent that people would want. And so public shaming campaigns can oftentimes get corporations to act in ways that people would like to see them act without necessarily getting the state involved in regulating them. Sam Hawley: Well, we do live in a world, Jennifer, where it can take a very long time to build up a reputation, but a moment to lose it. Do you think there is actually a lesson in all of this for us? Jennifer Forestal: I think that there's probably a few lessons, maybe not all of which are actionable. You know, the first is that there's a kind of a pragmatic warning in this, which is, you know, for better or worse, people are watching you in public spaces and you can get filmed doing whatever you do. And so people should probably be aware of that. Again, I'm not sure that that's necessarily a good thing or the kind of world that we want to live in, but it is the world that we do live in. And so it's important that people just, you know, remember that when they go about their daily business. More sort of philosophically, I think that it's important to when we think about public shaming and when we think about people going viral, it is also important to remember that those are real people. You know, what seems to one person to just be a kind of joke that they throw off into a tweet doesn't matter as much from that perspective. But from the perspective of the butt of the joke, it's 100,000 mean comments or 100,000 jokes at your expense. And that can oftentimes do more damage than I think we tend to think about when it's just us writing our individual response. Also thinking about ourselves in terms of the sort of collectives that we are in online. Social media platforms are oftentimes not designed to help us think about ourselves as part of communities or collectives, but we are. And so I think, again, thinking a little bit more about our online presence as part of communities rather than as individual or isolated actions is also something to keep in mind as well. Sam Hawley: What do you think? Do you think this couple deserved the level of public shaming that they were exposed to? Jennifer Forestal: You know, I don't. I don't. Probably not. No. But I will say this. It was striking to me as someone who's been thinking about this for a while that I actually don't think that Andy Byron got the same level of kind of vitriolic response that other victims of public shaming have. So if you think about high profile cases of public shaming in the past, people like Justine Sacco, who had the kind of racist South Africa tweet, or Amy Cooper, who had an altercation with a Black man in Central Park a few years ago, that these women in particular were dragged through the mud. They wereâ€'death threats were sent to them. They faced all sorts of personal attacks in a way that I have not heard is true of Andy Byron. So there, I think, is also an important thing to consider here in terms of gender, which is how your social position can sometimes insulate you from the effects of public shaming and what kinds of people are oftentimes more vulnerable to these kinds of situations. And so while I wouldn't say that anyone is sort of deserving of this kind of attack, especially individuals like that, I also am sort of aware and cognizant of the fact that different people in different social positions sort of react to or have a different response to that kind of situation. Sam Hawley: And also, I guess, the lesson, the big one, is if you don't want to be seen with someone at a big public event, perhaps don't go to that event with that person. Jennifer Forestal: Yeah, or again, maybe just play it cool. If you're caught doing something that you don't want people to react to, don't react to it yourself. Sam Hawley: Yeah, the poker face would have gone a long way. Jennifer, thank you so much. Jennifer Forestal: Of course. Thank you for having me. Sam Hawley: Jennifer Forstall is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Loyola University in Chicago. This episode was produced by Sydney Pead. Audio production by Sam Dunn. Our supervising producer is David Coady. I'm Sam Hawley. Thanks for listening.
News.com.au
6 hours ago
- News.com.au
Oasis' Liam Gallagher takes aim at Coldplay after kiss cam scandal
Oasis have declared their shows are a safe place for cheaters. The UK band's frontman Liam Gallagher addressed the Coldplay kiss cam scandal at his Manchester concert this week, asking the crowd if there were 'any lovebirds in the house?' 'Don't worry, we don't got any of that Coldplay snidey f**king camera shit,' the 52-year-old said. 'Doesn't matter to us who you're f**king mingling with, tingling with. None of our f**king business.' He continued, 'This one's for the lovebirds anyway', before the opening chords of Slide Away began. It comes as Astronomer CEO Andy Byron has been forced to take leave after his alleged affair with the firm's chief human resources officer, Kristin Cabot, was caught on Coldplay's jumbotron at the band's Boston show on Wednesday. Astronomer said in a statement on Friday that Byron was placed on leave and that Pete DeJoy, co-founder and chief product officer, would serve as interim CEO. 'We will share more details as appropriate in the coming days,' the company said in a statement on X. Earlier, the company confirmed it launched an investigation into the matter. In the viral video, the couple scrambled to hide their faces when an image of them getting cosy appeared on the big screen at Gillette Stadium. As the camera zoned in on the cuddling pair, Cabot quickly covered her face and turned in the opposite direction, while Byron ducked behind a barricade. 'Oh, what?' frontman Chris Martin responded to the scenes while onstage. 'Either they're having an affair or they're just very shy,' he added. Per the official Astronomer website, the pair worked together at the AI and data company valued at an estimated $US1.2 billion. Byron's wife, Megan Kerrigan Byron, reportedly removed his last name from her Facebook page shortly after the scandal went public, and later deleted her account entirely. Meanwhile, reports suggest Cabot is married to the CEO of Privateer Rum, a Massachusetts-based liquor brand. According to property records obtained by the New York Post, Cabot has shared a New Hampshire address with Andrew Cabot since at least 2023.
AU Financial Review
6 hours ago
- AU Financial Review
A 17-year-old who sent Paul Bassat a cold email now has a $2m cheque
Paul Bassat's Square Peg Capital has invested in its youngest start-up founder, leading a funding round in Liam Fuller's artificial intelligence software firm Source, months after the Irish teenager went viral with a LinkedIn photo showing him taking a business call from a high-school toilet. Fuller was 17 when he met with Bassat and a string of other investors on a short holiday to Australia from Dublin in March, when his precocious entrepreneurialism won him a $US1.4 million ($2.1 million) cheque.
