Brooke Nevils has denied testifying about a “consensual” sexual relationship years after Matt Lauer’s 2014 rape allegation.
“Consent and agreement are not synonymous,” Nevils said in an NPR interview Thursday. “When one side has power over the other, it’s not really consent. It’s submission.”
“So when you’re a subordinate and the most powerful person in the industry asks you to come to his hotel room, and in our industry hotel rooms don’t (look) the same in a social sense, (it’s different). We work in hotel rooms all the time. I had already been to his hotel room for rehearsals, and I was there early that night. It’s not a freight-shipping place like in other industries.”
“When your job is to work with talent, and they’re people you have to keep happy, their opinion of you can make or break your career. Annoying them could mean you’re never allowed on set again. It changes the dynamics of every interaction you have,” she said.
“And the other part of it is that any attention they give you professionally, you feel positive that you’re lucky to get it. And the people who are in power know that they have power, and that’s what they exercise every day.”
A representative for Mr. Lauer did not immediately respond to Page Six’s request for comment.
Nevils first came forward in 2017 to allege that Lauer, now 68, anally raped her in a hotel room while she was working as Meredith Vieira’s personal assistant while covering the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia.
Lauer was fired from her roles at the Today show and NBC within 24 hours of filing the complaint, and several other women also came forward with allegations against Lauer.
Two years later, when Variety magazine published an excerpt from Ronan Farrow’s book Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Predator-Protection Conspiracy, it included a message from Nevilles about the sexual assault allegation in which she “turned down” Lauer and was “too drunk to consent” — Lauer responded to Neville’s claims and said their sexual relationship was “consensual.”
“The story Brooke has told is full of false details whose sole purpose is to create the impression that this was an abusive encounter. Nothing could be further from the truth,” Lauer claimed at the time.
In her upcoming memoir, The Unspeakable: Silence, Shame, and the Stories We Choose to Believe, Nevils recounts the details of the incident in her own words.
In an excerpt from the book published by The Cut, Ms Nevils said the pain she felt the morning after the assault was “undeniable”.
“It hurt to walk, it hurt to sit, it hurt to remember,” she says. She went on to reveal that she received an email from Lauer later that day that read, “Don’t call me, don’t write me, my feelings are hurt! How are you?”
“I had no idea how to react, but I knew that asking for help would only make things worse,” Nevils wrote in an excerpt from her memoir. “That’s what shameful secrets are like. To trust someone is to give them power over you. I was completely alone, drowning in the mundane.”
“The Unspeakable: Silence, Shame, and the Stories We Choose to Believe” will be released on Tuesday.
