Matt Lauer’s Accuser Shares the Harrowing Truth About the Situation in New Book Excerpt
Nearly a decade after accusing Matt Lauer of rape, former NBC staffer Brooke Nevils is sharing some dark details about her story.
The Cut recently shared an excerpt from Nevils’ upcoming book, which is titled Unspeakable Things: Silence, Shame, and the Stories We Choose to Believe and will be released on February 3rd. The excerpt begins with a recounting of the assault in question, which allegedly occurred during the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia. After Lauer joined Nevils and Today‘s Meredith Vieira at a bar, Nevils ended up in his hotel room, where Lauer was allegedly “insisting on having anal sex.”
According to Nevils, she woke up the following morning in “undeniable” pain, with her “underwear and the sheet beneath me caked with blood.” She writes that, “It hurt to walk. It hurt to sit. It hurt to remember.”
As Nevils puts it, she did not initially think of her and Lauer’s encounter as rape, arguing that, “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.”
Upon returning from the Olympics, Nevils’ attempts to talk to Lauer about what happened led to them having another sexual encounter. According to her recounting of the events, Lauer “[ducked] out of the room and then [returned], carrying an armful of towels.”
“Just in case, he says generously, because of what happened last time. The implications of this radiate through me. “What happened last time” could only have been the blood,” Nevils writes. “He saw it in Sochi. He has known about it all along. It was not a mistake. It was not a misunderstanding. And then afterward — after he’d seen the blood — he’d asked me if I liked it, and I’d been so broken and humiliated and desperate to please him that I’d said “yes.” But that was then. Why would he have towels now?”
Why Was Matt Lauer Fired From NBC?
In total, Nevils says that she and Lauer had “four more instances of alleged ‘inappropriate sexual behavior in the workplace,’ as NBC News later characterized it,” including “one encounter I even initiated…thinking that this would be the time I took back control. But I never did. I just implicated myself in my own abuse.”
Throughout the excerpt, Nevils recounts her own personal reckoning with whether or not Lauer was abusing her, admitting that, “It would take years — and a national reckoning with sexual harassment and assault — before I called what happened to me assault.”
Eventually, after discovering that Variety and The New York Times were both looking into Lauer, she decided to file an official complaint with NBC. Lauer was questioned and fired soon after, and reporters began to question Nevils directly, leading to her having to take a leave of absence from NBC that would “ultimately prove permanent.”
“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,” she writes. “Now that life was gone, and I barely recognized the train wreck I’d become. 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.”
In the years since, Nevils has gotten married and had two kids, all while she has “painstakingly rebuilt” her life. She writes, “Every moment with my family is a precious piece of the life that I once believed I no longer deserved to live.”
Unspeakable Things: Silence, Shame, and the Stories We Choose to Believe will be released wherever books are sold on February 3rd.
(featured image: Michael Loccisano/Getty Images)
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