In her memoir, Unspeakable: Silence, Shame, and the Stories We Choose to Believe, Brooke Nevils details the horrific sexual assault she claims took place between her and Matt Lauer, who he promised would be “over in a minute.”
A former NBC employee recalls Lauer asking her to come backstage to “Today” after she returned from the 2014 Sochi Olympics, where she alleges that Lauer anally raped her.
“Before I sat down,” she writes, “his hands were again on either side of my face, just as they had been in Sochi…and he pulled back and said, ‘I can’t fuck you here,’ as if it were perfectly normal to hint at sex in the dressing room of one of the world’s most famous television studios.”
Nevils claims that Lauer pulled her against a diagonal wall in her dressing room, pushed her down by the shoulders until she was on her knees, and then began removing her pants.
“I said, ‘No, I don’t want this,'” she wrote, but Lauer didn’t care.
“It only takes a minute,” he reportedly replied.
Nevils tried to make excuses, but the newscaster “got tired of arguing and pressed my mouth against his exposed, erect penis,” he said.
“Then I had no choice but to get over it.”
After Nevils finished speaking, Lauer saw Nevils getting dressed, opened the door for her to leave, and called out her assistant’s name.
“I walked away as if nothing had happened,” she added.
A representative for Mr. Lauer did not respond to Page Six’s request for comment.
Nevils filed a complaint with NBC in 2017 against her then-co-host on the “Today” show. Several other women also came forward with their claims.
Lauer was fired within 24 hours and has since separated from his wife, Annette Locke.
He issued a statement expressing remorse for some of his actions, but said his relationship with Mr Nevils was “consensual”.
In a recent interview, Nevils slammed Lauer’s characterization.
“Consent and assent are not synonymous,” Nevils said in an interview with NPR. “When one side has power over the other, it’s not really consent. It’s submission.”
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.
