What started out as only vague accusations of sexual misconduct against broadcast icon Matt Lauer became more detailed on Wednesday with the publication of a long anticipated and devastating exposé in Variety.
As the co-host of NBC’s “Today,” Matt Lauer once gave a colleague a sex toy as a present, according to an accuser covered in the Hollywood trade outlet’s exclusive article. “It included an explicit note about how he wanted to use it on her, which left her mortified,” wrote the magazine’s New York bureau chief Ramin Setoodeh. “On another day, he summoned a different female employee to his office, and then dropped his pants, showing her his penis. After the employee declined to do anything, visibly shaken, he reprimanded her for not engaging in a sexual act.”
The magazine said reporters spoke with dozens of current and former “Today” staffers to build their case against Lauer and, specifically, three sexual harassment accusers.
“He would sometimes quiz female producers about who they’d slept with, offering to trade names,” Setoodeh wrote. “And he loved to engage in a crass quiz game with men and women in the office: ‘f–, marry, or kill,’ in which he would identify the female co-hosts that he’d most like to sleep with,” added the Variety writer.
While the Variety story adds graphic new details, none of the women they spoke with were willing to go on the record and all accusations against Lauer remain anonymous. In addition to Variety, The New York Times was also known to have been working on their own Matt Lauer piece, according to multiple reports.
The 20 year veteran anchor of “Today” was abruptly canned after a detailed accusation was presented to NBC management on Monday. Lauer was terminated within 24 hours and the news was broken live on “Today” by Lauer’s former colleague Savannah Guthrie.
NBC News chairman Andy Lack explained the decision to part ways with Lauer in an internal memo to employees and said a “detailed complaint” against the host had been filed by a staffer on Monday night.
“It represented, after serious review, a clear violation of our company’s standards,” Lack wrote. “While it is the first complaint about his behavior in the over 20 years he’s been at NBC News, we were also presented with reason to believe this may not have been an isolated incident.”
In a statement to TheWrap, the accuser’s lawyer Ari Wilkenfeld said he was proud of his client and pleased with how NBC responded to her accusations.
“My client and I met with representatives from NBC’s Human Resources and Legal Departments at 6 p.m. on Monday for an interview that lasted several hours,” said Wilkenfeld, of the firm Wilkenfeld, Herendeen & Atkinson. “Our impression at this point is that NBC acted quickly, as all companies should, when confronted with credible allegations of sexual misconduct in the workplace.”