Matt Lauer’s accuser Brooke Nevils accused the ousted Today show anchor of being a “monster” in an excerpt detailing the aftermath of a 2014 rape allegation.
In her upcoming memoir, “The Unspeakable: Silence, Shame, and the Stories We Choose to Believe,” to be published on February 3, Nevils claims she woke up in a hotel room in Russia with “blood caked on my underwear and the sheets underneath.”
Nevils, who was working as an NBC talent assistant for the Sochi Olympics at the time, had been drinking with her “longtime boss and mentor” Meredith Vieira the night before Lauer joined her, she wrote in excerpts obtained by The Cut.
Ms Nevils claimed she was “drunken and alone”, her body “unstable” and her mind “fuzzy (and) frantic” when Lauer “insisted on having anal sex” in a “rotating room”.
Lauer has always maintained that their relationship was “mutual and completely consensual.”
Nevils highlighted their “rounds of vodka shots” and the “massive power differential” between her and Lauer, saying, “I would never use the word ‘rape’ to describe what happened[next]. Even now, when I hear ‘rape’ I think of masked strangers in dark alleys. … It will take years and a national reckoning on sexual harassment and assault to call what happened to me an assault.”
“At the time, I didn’t know what to call it other than strange and humiliating. But at the time, there was undeniable pain. It hurt to walk, it hurt to sit, it hurt to remember,” she said.
“If someone else had done this to me, I would have gone to the police,” she remembers thinking.
Instead, Nevils “went on with his day as if nothing had happened.”
“I tore the bloody sheets off the bed and piled them in a corner so the maid wouldn’t see the blood. I rolled up my bloody underwear and threw them away,” she wrote.
Nevils also responded to Lauer’s purported message with a “friendly” email that read, “I won’t call you, I won’t write you. My feelings are hurt! How are you?”
She wrote that his words were “strangely comforting,” explaining that they “reaffirmed exactly what I wanted and needed to believe: that it was all a misunderstanding, that everything was okay, that there was no way Today anchor Matt Lauer meant to see blood or cause pain.”
However, Lauer allegedly mentioned the blood when he invited Nevils to his apartment the following week.
Nevils claimed that after “unzipping (her) dress,” Lauer brought her an armful of towels “just in case, because of what happened last time.”
“He saw (the blood) in Sochi. He knew about it all along. It wasn’t a mistake. It wasn’t a misunderstanding. Then, after seeing the blood, he asked me if I liked it. And I was so hurt and humiliated and so desperate to please him that I said yes. But that was then. Why do I have a towel now? ”
“He would do it again because that was the plan all along. … I should have thought, ‘He’s a monster,'” she wrote. Instead, I thought, “This is something you brought on yourself.” ”
This time, Ms Nevils claimed she was “more obsessed with scratching the wool (blanket) against her skin than with what was happening” and reminding herself to “breathe”.
“There were four more incidents over the next few months…once Matt called me into his dressing room, and on two other occasions I ended up going there during routine work.
“One encounter made me realize that I wasn’t the naive fool I was in Sochi, that I wasn’t the girl Matt would kneel in his office, and I always knew it was time for me to take back control,” Nevils continued. “But I never did that. I just involved myself in my own abuse.”
Representatives for Lauer and NBC did not immediately respond to Page Six’s requests for comment.
Nevils, who called Lauer a “monster” in person but “charming and charismatic” in public, filed a complaint against the journalist with NBC in 2017, and several other women have come forward with their own claims.
Lauer, who denies the allegations of sexual misconduct, was fired within 24 hours and has since separated from his wife, Annette Locke.
The Daytime Emmy Award winner has separated from girlfriend Shamina Abbas, but has not been charged or convicted of any crime.
As for Nevils, who first portrayed the rape allegation in 2019’s Ronan Farrow’s Catch and Kill, she took a leave of absence from the network and never returned.
Nevils described herself at the time as a “train wreck”, writing: “I was obsessive, paranoid, and always drinking. I felt I had ruined everything, hurt and humiliated those I loved. I believed I would soon be in a psychiatric ward, that I was worthless and damaged, and that the world would be better without me.”
Since then, she has “painstakingly rebuilt[her]life,” gotten married and welcomed “two beautiful children.”
In the excerpt, she writes:
“But I know that somewhere along the line, others are once trapped in the same impossible situation as me, forced to make the same set of bad choices that I once faced, and believe that they still don’t deserve the future that lies ahead of them.”
If you or someone you know is affected by any of the issues raised in this article, please call the Sexual Assault Hotline at 1-800-330-0226.
