Last Friday night, Kristin Cabot went to a Jack Johnson concert in New Hampshire, a low-key show that, for her, had one major thing in its favor: “No jumbotron — only the one that showed him.”
It was Cabot’s first time going to a concert since the one, literally, heard ’round the world, when a few seconds of Cabot and her then-boss were shown embracing, then hiding, on the Gillette Stadium jumbotron during a Coldplay show, thrusting the pair into a viral firestorm.
At the Jack Johnson show, one person recognized Cabot, a common occurrence since the incident quickly dubbed Coldplaygate. “Wow, you’re back on the concert circuit!” Cabot recalled the person saying to her. “I was like, ‘Zip it!’”
Reemerging into the public world, and finding humor in its inevitable snags, is part of how Cabot, 53, is rebuilding her life post-anonymity, nearly a year after her overnight transformation from New Hampshire mom of two to grist for the social media outrage mill.
“I’m still a hot mess, but I’m better,” Cabot said Tuesday at a swanky Newbury Street boutique during a fireside chat with Sherry Hakimi, the chief executive of Pirth.org, a nonprofit that helps people facing online harassment. “I just feel so turned inward, which I don’t like. That’s not me. But I’ll get there.”
For those not familiar with the saga: During a Coldplay concert last July, Cabot, then the chief people officer at the tech company Astronomer, and Andy Byron, then the company’s chief executive, were seen on the jumbotron, arms wrapped around each other. When they realized they were on the big screen, Cabot threw her hands over her face and turned around; Byron ducked.
“Either they’re having an affair or they’re just very shy,” quipped Chris Martin, the band’s frontman.
Years ago, the embarrassment might have started and ended in Foxborough.
Instead, a video of the interaction began circulating on TikTok. Online sleuths quickly figured out the pair’s identities — and that they were both married to other people.
Cabot was separated from her husband at the time of the concert, but to the online masses, drunk on schadenfreude, that didn’t matter. The clip exploded on social media — the TikTok video has since been viewed more than 130 million times — turning Cabot and Byron into a punchline that drew worldwide headlines. Byron, who declined to comment for this article, stepped down from his job. Days later, Cabot followed.
“I had no ability to control my own story,” Cabot said. “People thought it was very funny, but they forget that there’s real people attached to it.”
The fallout didn’t end there. Paparazzi lingered at Cabot’s house for weeks. People accosted her in public. Her phone was inundated with death threats, telling her to watch her back the next time she was grocery shopping at Market Basket or pumping gas at Cumberland Farms. It all took a major toll on her, as well as her children, now 15 and 17.
“I made a mistake. I’ll own that all day,” Cabot said to the Globe in an interview, among her first since the jumbotron incident. “I made a really poor judgment call in the moment. I’m not denying that or being defensive about that. But, I mean, you shouldn’t be killed for that.”
Eleven months, plenty of therapy, and many games of tennis — she’s “become addicted” — later, Cabot’s life has returned to something resembling normalcy. After leaving her house only sparingly for much of last summer, she’s spent this season enjoying the beach and dining in downtown Portsmouth, not far from her Rye home. Her kids didn’t want her to come to their schools for the fall semester, but she later returned to going to campus events. The death threats have stopped, though only “not too long ago,” she said.
But in other ways, her reality is far from what it was before she became, as Hakimi put it, “the internet’s main character.”
The hardest part, she said, has been the hit to her career; Cabot is still unemployed. She said she is in the running for two high-level roles, though neither of them is in human resources, a field she loved. In the meantime, she said, to support herself and her children financially, she has been “eating into college money and retirement.”
She continues to get the occasional taunting text and is still approached in public, which has given her newfound social anxiety. However, since she detailed her plight in a New York Times profile and an episode of "The Oprah Podcast," she’s gotten a slew of apologetic messages from people, mostly women, and real-life interactions have “been very positive,” she said.
A couple weeks ago, for instance, a Randolph woman approached her at Logan Airport. “She’s like, ‘And the girls in Randolph have your back,’” Cabot said.
She’s even eager to start dating again — she and her ex started official divorce proceedings last year — but doesn’t feel like she can put herself on the apps.
“I don’t know if people are going to think it’s funny to go out with the Coldplay lady, if they do recognize me,” she said.
So for now, Cabot is trying to focus on picking spots where she can make the most of what she calls her “unintended platform.” She has some “big, juicy projects” in the works, the first of which is her new role serving on the global advisory board of Pirth.org, which she said is “exactly where I want to pour my energy into.”
“This was such a disaster of epic proportions, and the worst thing that could come of it would be that I just go back to what I used to do as if it never happened,” she said. “Talking about it and trying to make an impact is going to help me heal.”
Hakimi, an Iranian American nonprofit leader, started Pirth.org a few years ago, after facing death threats of her own on social media in the wake of a meeting with Antony Blinken, then the secretary of state, to discuss women-led protests in Iran.
The goal of the organization, Hakimi said, is to be a one-stop shop for people experiencing digital harassment. Once a user makes a report, Pirth.org offers them information about resources like helplines, legal aid, and emergency funding. The organization also has a direct line to social media platforms to get them to address harassing content, Hakimi said.
A mutual friend introduced Hakimi to Cabot, who said during Tuesday’s event that she had little luck reporting the social media harassment she faced. “I had hit brick walls everywhere I went, trying to get help, to make it stop,” she said. This struggle is particularly difficult for women, who make up 60 percent of Pirth.org’s users, Hakimi said.
“I can’t change what happened to me, but I can try to create change for those who come after,” Hakimi said. “And Kristin is doing the same thing.”
Another big part of recovering from the onslaught, Cabot said, has been leaning on family and friends, of which Byron is no longer one. “I think there was a lack of transparency, and maybe not as much honesty as I would have liked in the whole thing,” she said. “I couldn’t have that in my life anymore.”
“And I’m sad about that,” she added. “He’s the only one in the whole world that knows what this is like. And I remember us saying, even after the fact, ‘Thank God we have each other to talk to,’ and that’s gone now.”
One new person in her corner, Cabot said, is Monica Lewinsky, who works with the same public relations firm as Cabot. In the decades since Lewinsky’s own anonymity evaporated after the onetime White House intern’s affair with President Bill Clinton, she has become a fierce anti-bullying activist.
“She was just really supportive and gave me the hope that things could go back to normal,” Cabot said. “She was just like, ‘You’re going to see, this will get better.’”
Like Lewinsky, Cabot said she has no plans of retreating into the shadows. “All the people online that are like, just, ‘No one cares, go away,’ I’m not doing that, and they put me here,” she said.
In other words: If she’s forever on the world’s jumbotron, she’s done trying to hide.
“My goal,” she said, “is not to be recognizable in Logan Airport for anything other than, ‘Oh, I saw her speak on something that really gave me a lot of new ways of thinking about how I interact with people, or how I judge.’”
Dana Gerber can be reached at dana.gerber@globe.com. Follow her @danagerber6.