A former NBC employee has revealed harrowing new details of an alleged sexual assault by Matt Lauer in her upcoming memoir. Brooke Nevils, whose complaint led to Lauer’s dismissal from the Today show in 2017, recounts the incident during the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia.
In an excerpt published by The Cut on 28 January, Nevils writes of waking up in pain in a hotel room after a night out with her boss Meredith Vieira and Lauer. She initially believed it was a misunderstanding, but later came to view the encounter as sexual assault. “I would never have used the word ‘rape’ to describe what had happened,” she writes, adding that the pain was undeniable.
Nevils, now married with two children, says she spent years rebuilding her life after the assault. Despite the trauma, she continued communicating with Lauer after returning to New York, a decision she examines in her book. She eventually filed a formal complaint with NBC in November 2017, after learning that journalists were investigating Lauer.
Lauer has denied Nevils’ allegations, stating that their relationship was “completely consensual”. He was fired the day after her complaint was filed. Nevils’ memoir, Unspeakable Things: Silence, Shame, and the Stories We Choose to Believe, is set for release on 3 February.
In the book, Nevils also confronts the question of why victims may continue contact with their alleged abusers. “It would take years – and a national reckoning with sexual harassment and assault – before I called what happened to me assault,” she writes. After Lauer’s firing, she struggled with drinking and paranoia, and was briefly hospitalised in a psychiatric ward.
