Brooke Nevils, the former NBC employee who accused Matt Lauer of sexual assault, is releasing a new book next month titled “Unspeakable Things” in which she goes into greater detail about her relationship to the former “Today” anchor. Nevils first went public with her story in Ronan Farrow’s 2019 book “Catch and Kill,” in which she accused Lauer of rape at the 2014 Sochi Olympics where she was working with Meredith Vieira. Lauer has denied all the allegations against him.
“Despite the rounds of vodka shots, the overwhelming power differential, and the bloody underwear and sheets, I would never have used the word ‘rape’ to describe what had happened,” Nevils now writes in the book (via The Cut). “Even now, I hear ‘rape’ and think of masked strangers in dark alleys. Back then, I had no idea what to call what happened other than weird and humiliating. But then there was the pain, which was undeniable. It hurt to walk. It hurt to sit. It hurt to remember. 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 that one reason she did not immediately call the police to report the alleged rape is “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. 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,” she continues. “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.
Nevils recalls feeling “totally alone, drowning in plain sight” after the incident. She writes that Lauer emailed her after saying something along the lines of: “You don’t call, you don’t write — my feelings are hurt! How are you?” After a few days, she emailed him back asking “if he had time for a quick chat” to discuss the encounter. Nevils then sent a second email “literally begging him to call me.”
“I was crying uncontrollably, working my way through vodka, and then at 10:30 or 11 — who even knows what time it was — I used my NBC burner phone to call Matt’s NBC burner phone,” Nevils writes. “He answered right away. He’d obviously been sound asleep. In tears, I said I really needed to talk before I left [Sochi] because I didn’t know what to do. He seemed to have no idea what I was talking about. Then he said — as though he were trying not to wake all the way up — ‘Come see me when we’re back in New York.’ Then he hung up.”
When the two finally met in person at the “Today” offices the following week, Nevils writes that Lauer was “all smiles” and “so sorry he hadn’t seen my emails.” He allegedly invited her to “come to his apartment that night. The look on his face was pleased, flattered, almost boyish. To him, apparently, those emails [I sent] had been a proposition. Another opportunity. I was just relieved he wasn’t mad.”
“When I arrived, he ushered me quickly through a palatial apartment into a kitchen, where he offered me a drink. It was vodka, handed to me with a grin,” Nevils writes. “I was there to block out a memory, to erase it, to replace it with one less humiliating. Matt’s objective, it seemed, was the opposite. His point, apparently, was to re‑create that memory. To reinforce it. To repeat it. The shame flooded over me as I drank, realizing uncomfortably late that Matt was not drinking anything at all but watching me intently, the way a parent administers medicine to a child.”
The night ended with a sexual encounter, Nevils writes. Lauer allegedly brought an “armful of towels” into his bedroom, which she figured was in reference to the blood that caused a mess during the Sochi incident after Lauer had allegedly forced her to have anal sex. When she pushed back on having sex again with Lauer, the “Today” host allegedly told her: “You said you liked it in Sochi.” Nevils ultimately gave in and had sex with Lauer that night and writes that “in the months that followed, there would be four more instances” of similar encounters.
“Once Matt summoned me to his dressing room and I went; two other times I ended up there in the course of my day-to-day job,” she writes. “One encounter I even initiated, telling myself I wasn’t the same naïve idiot I’d been in Sochi or some girl Matt could just summon to her knees in his office, always thinking that this would be the time I took back control. But I never did. I just implicated myself in my own abuse.”
“Why, if an alleged victim was really sexually assaulted, would they continue a relationship with the perpetrator? Why would they go back? This is the question I have been asked too many times to count, including by Matt himself,” Nevils writes, referring to the open letter Lauer published in 2019 in which he said “Brooke’s story is filled with contradictions.”
“If I am walking home at night and a man in a ski mask jumps out and sexually assaults me in an alley, obviously I am not going to chase him down the street afterward and ask if he wants to go get a cup of coffee,” Nevils writes. “Since the assailant is a stranger, neither his opinion of me nor his relationship to me matters. He can’t cost me a job or harm my reputation. No one in my life will blame me for getting him in trouble. But now assume that this happens as most sexual assaults actually do, within the context of a preexisting relationship. I will be much less likely to immediately recognize it as an assault. I have to consider not only whether anyone will believe me but how the allegation will impact everyone else in my life. If that means losing a job, a church, a school, or part of my family, then that’s all the more reason to convince myself that it wasn’t a sexual assault in the first place.”
Nevils recalls how Lauer “was perfectly nice” in work settings during this period of time and that “except for when I was alone with him, he was not monstrous at all but charming and charismatic, powerfully wielding the talent that all great interviewers have of making you feel as though you’re the only person in the world,” which is another reason his alleged behavior confused her and made it harder to speak out.
Nevils filed a complaint to NBC in November 2017 accusing Lauer of sexual misconduct. He was fired within 24 hours. After he lost his job, Variety published a story that detailed other allegations of misconduct by Lauer at Today. When Lauer originally responded to Nevils’ rape accusation with the open letter, he denied any wrongdoing but admited to having an extramarital affair with Nevils.
Variety has reached out to comment from Lauer’s representative regarding Nevils’ new book.
Head over to The Cut’s website to read Nevil’s full book excerpt. “Unspeakable Things” publishes Feb. 3.
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