Brooke Nevils, who accused the former NBC anchor Matt Lauer of raping her in 2017, shared that she ended up in a psych ward following her exit from the network.
Nevils opened up about her allegations against Lauer through an excerpt from her upcoming book “Unspeakable Things,” which she published Wednesday via an essay on The Cut. Nevils, who began her NBC career as a page on “The Today Show,” starts the piece describing the day she woke up bloodied from Lauer’s alleged rape.
She explained that she initially didn’t know who to turn to after the first instance, which allegedly took place in 2014 while she and her NBC team were working the Sochi Olympics. At the time, she was an NBC talent assistant.
“One strikingly clear thought crossed my mind and then was instantly struck from my consciousness: ‘If anyone else had done this to me, I would have gone to the police,’” Nevils writes “But it was an utterly useless thought to have, if only because I knew that I would never, ever, have let anyone else do that to me and because I was in freaking Russia. Who would I call? Putin? The KGB? There was only NBC, and Matt Lauer was ‘Today’s’ longest-serving anchor with the biggest contract in the 60-year history of morning television, worth a reported $25 million a year.”
She continued. “In the news business back then, his point of view was reality, and if you disagreed with it, you were wrong. The whole thing had to have been my fault. I had given him the wrong idea, failed to be clear, failed to convince him, failed to stop him, failed to find a graceful way out of the situation without embarrassing him. I certainly should not have bled. The only thing to do was to smooth it over, and smoothing things over for the talent was my actual day job. That, at least, I knew how to do.”
She goes on to explain that she went on to have more sexual encounters with Lauer, which she explained was due to her fear that Lauer could negatively impact her career at the network. However, the day after she filed her complaint, NBC questioned and subsequently fired him within 48 hours. After his firing went public, Nevils said an investigative reporter started texting her and tabloids labeled her as Lauer’s “mistress who’d gotten fired” to her coworkers.
A few months later, Nevils writes that she decided to exit the company completely after taking a leave of absence.
“I’d started at NBC giving studio tours, and it had taken nearly a decade to work my way up to salaried prime-time news producer. Now that life was gone, and I barely recognized the train wreck I’d become,” Nevils explained. “I was compulsive, paranoid, and drinking all the time. I felt I’d ruined everything, hurt and embarrassed everyone I loved. Soon I would find myself in a psych ward, believing myself so worthless and damaged that the world would be better off without me.”
NBC fired Lauer in 2017 following a complaint of inappropriate sexual behavior in the workplace.
The announcement was made at the top of the “Today” show, which he joined full-time in 1994 as news anchor and then as co-host three years later. “I am heartbroken,” said Savannah Guthrie, who has served as co-anchor for the last five years.
In a memo to employees, NBC News chairman Andy Lack said that he had received a “detailed complaint” from a staffer.
“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 … Our highest priority is to create a workplace environment where everyone feels safe and protected, and to ensure that any actions that run counter to our core values are met with consequences, no matter who the offender.”
