When Julia Cabot’s phone started buzzing with messages earlier this summer, she had a fairly good idea what it was about.
‘I got loads of texts from people who heard what happened,’ the 63-year-old yoga teacher recalls.
‘And 99 per cent of them said the same word: karma.’
That, indeed, was the first word that sprung to her mind after seeing the now infamous kiss-cam footage from a Coldplay concert that had taken place the night before.
The video showed 52-year-old Kristin Cabot – the woman who succeeded Julia as the wife of businessman Andrew Cabot, 60 – in a clinch with a man who was very much not him.
Instead, Kristin had been caught by the roving camera wrapped in the arms of a man called Andy Byron.
Both seemed to be having the time of their lives – that is, until realising that their unbridled joy was being transposed on to a big screen at the 66,000-seater Gillette stadium in Foxborough, a thriving commuter town south-west of Boston, for everyone else to see.
After Kristin had raised her hands to her mouth in the universal sign of shock, both swiftly ducked out of view. Too late!
Kristin Cabot and Andy Byron’s affair was exposed by ‘kiss cam’ at a Coldplay concert
‘Either they’re having an affair, or they are just very shy,’ was the – as it happens rather prescient – response from Coldplay frontman Chris Martin as he caught sight of what was unfolding in the crowd.
It proved to be just the beginning of a story that gripped the world: the footage went viral, and frenzied internet sleuthing swiftly uncovered the identities of the couple involved, who turned out to be, respectively, the chief executive of tech company Astronomer (him) and its human resources manager (her).
Both married, the resulting public drama sent shivers down the spine of anyone who has ever been somewhere with someone they shouldn’t.
It saw Byron, 50, resign his position, while Megan Kerrigan, his 50-year-old wife, swiftly dispensed with both her wedding ring and married name and moved out of the marital home.
In turn Kristin, who initially took a leave of absence from her job, also resigned her post. Her marital status, however, had remained a mystery – until now.
For the Daily Mail has learned that she and husband Andrew – whom his second wife describes as a descendant of a ‘Boston Brahmin’ family, meaning he is from America’s most elite upper class – are now getting divorced.
And it is Kristin who has filed the petition. She lodged papers at a court in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, on August 13, less than a month after the ‘kiss-cam’ debacle.
As one of the wronged parties, you might expect Andrew to be the one devastated by his wife’s behaviour but, according to Julia, her ex-husband is unlikely to be fazed by this turn of events.
Kristin Cabot with her ‘blindsided’ husband Andrew and their children last year
Andy Byron, his wife Megan and their family. Though they have remained ‘tight-lipped’ about the state of their marriage, Megan dropped ‘Byron’ from her surname on social media
For while there is certainly little love lost between Julia and her former husband, she did make a point of contacting him very soon after the Coldplay concert, and reveals she was promptly told in no uncertain terms that he and Kristin were separating.
‘I texted Andrew right after it happened, and he said: “Her life is nothing to do with me,” and said they were separating,’ Julia says, talking exclusively to the Daily Mail.
‘He’s saying it has nothing to do with him, even though they were married and shared a house. But then, the only thing he cares about is money.’
It is a withering assessment, but it is safe to say that Julia, who was married to Andrew for four years before they split in 2018, has very little good to say about her ex-husband. ‘He’s not a nice person. Now something not nice [has] happened to him,’ she says.
‘That’s why after it happened, I got loads of texts from people with that word: karma. It was like: what you give, you get. Personally I don’t think he’s affected by what happened at all. I don’t think his feelings are hurt. He’s probably embarrassed, if anything.
‘He’s a Boston Brahmin, that’s their code: “This isn’t anything to do with me.” His ego is too big to be affected by this and the only thing that he’s bummed about is that he was embarrassed.’
Certainly, in Boston – and much of the east coast of the US – the Cabot name is synonymous with wealth and privilege.
Dating back at least ten generations, it is behind a slew of businesses across New England, spanning shipping, carbon black manufacturing (a critical component in tyre production), and, latterly, rum: Andrew is CEO of a company called Privateer Rum.
The family name is so well established in the area that it even features in a tongue-in-cheek poem paying tribute to their loftiness. ‘And this is good old Boston, The home of the bean and the cod,’ the poem reads. ‘Where the Lowells talk only to Cabots. And the Cabots talk only to God.’
This long-standing history is matched only by the family wealth, which is believed to stand today at about $15billion (£11.16 billion).
Yet money and social standing are no protection against public embarrassment, as Andrew Cabot now knows. According to sources close to the family, he was initially blissfully unaware that his wife was the source of headlines around the world, until he returned from a lengthy work trip to Japan three days on from the kiss-cam incident to find reporters thronged near the marital home in Rye, New Hampshire.
‘Blindsided’ was the word used by one source to a US magazine.
While he has not spoken publicly since, the same source claimed that family members had disclosed that the marriage was already in trouble even before Cabot left for Asia.
‘The family is now saying they have been having marriage troubles for several months and were discussing separating, which I find interesting since, as of a month ago, they were saying how in love they are,’ the source said.
Publicly available court documents suggest the couple had tried mediation. Either way, Andrew Cabot is now facing ‘divorce number three’ as Julia rather crisply put it to the Daily Mail this week. ‘I wouldn’t say he’s husband material, but she doesn’t seem like wife material either,’ she added.
Julia, who today lives in Concord, Massachusetts, is Andrew’s second wife and met him in the wake of his divorce from his first, from whom he separated in 2011 after 18 years of marriage.
Privateer Rum’s website lists Andrew Cabot as its CEO and COO, and public documents show that he has been married at least twice before, in 1993 and 2014
He and his first wife had two children, now grown up, and court papers show that Andrew handed over the marital home in Beacon Hill, a wealthy area of Boston, to his first wife, along with a holiday home on the coast, as well as a number of investments.
Amicable, alas, is not a word that could be used for the dissolution of Andrew’s marriage to Julia, which became mired in disagreements, largely centred on Andrew’s desire to enforce the prenup that was put in place before their May 2014 wedding.
While Julia did not want to be drawn on the details of her own marriage breakdown this week, public court documents uncovered by the Daily Mail show that it took nearly two years of legal wrangling before their divorce was finalised in March 2020.
The couple had been living separately since July 2018 following what Andrew Cabot referred to in court papers as an ‘irretrievable breakdown’ of their marriage on the 7th of that month – a claim disputed by Julia. She ultimately left the marriage with $1 million (£750,000) from the sale of the
$1.9 million (£1.4 million) family home, $600,000 (£445,000) in cash, and a Jaguar car.
Several miles away, in New York, Kristin filed for divorce from her husband of 11 years in the same year that the Cabot marriage broke down.
She is understood to have met Cabot in 2020 after joining the advisory board of Privateer Rum in September that year – a fact that was once recorded on her newly deleted profile on the networking site LinkedIn. The couple married in 2023, and in February this year, bought a $2.2 million (£1.6 million) waterfront home in Rye, which, by all accounts, was intended to be their permanent marital home.
A ‘doer-upper’ they apparently had grand restoration plans for the four-bedroom classic clapboard New England home, which is situated on 1.42 acres of land.
Those plans have now been upended, another fallout from that moment of abandon on a warm evening in July which has left at least one broken marriage and two job losses in its wake.
However, will that now be two broken marriages?
At the time of writing, Andy Byron and his wife Megan, who works in the education sector, have remained tight-lipped on the state of their marriage, although in the aftermath of that Coldplay concert Megan dropped the name ‘Byron’ from her surname on social media, instead using her maiden name, Kerrigan.
Her Facebook account, which was once full of happy pictures of family life with their two teenage sons, was then deleted.
Megan also moved out of the main marital home in Northborough, Massachusetts, to the couple’s luxury holiday estate in Kennebunkport, Maine, more than 100 miles away.
It was here that she was said to be being supported by her close-knit family, particularly her older sister Maura.
It is unclear whether she remains there, although the Daily Mail understands that neither of the Byrons has yet filed for divorce.
Kristin and Andrew Cabot and Andy and Megan Byron did not want to comment when approached by the Daily Mail
Whatever happens, one party has very little sympathy for the ‘Coldplay two’.
‘That stadium is a place where you run into people if you’re from Boston. It’s more something you’d expect from 18-year-olds, not people their age,’ Julia said this week. ‘It’s so dumb what they did.’
A summary of this saga with which, whatever your sympathies for any of those involved, it is difficult to disagree.
