Matt Lauer’s accuser Brooke Nevils branded the ousted “Today” show anchor a “monster” in an excerpt detailing the aftermath of her alleged 2014 rape.
In her upcoming “Unspeakable Things: Silence, Shame and the Stories We Choose to Believe” memoir, out Feb. 3, Nevils claims she woke up in her Russia hotel room with her “underwear and the sheet beneath [her] caked with blood.”
Nevils, who was working as an NBC talent assistant for the Sochi Olympics at the time, had been drinking with “longtime boss and mentor” Meredith Vieira the previous evening when Lauer joined them, she writes in an excerpt obtained by The Cut.
Nevils alleges that she was “drunk and alone” when Lauer “insist[ed] on having anal sex” in a “spinning room” with her body “unsteady” and her mind “blurred [and] frantic.”
Lauer has always maintained their relationship was “mutual and completely consensual.”
Highlighting their “rounds of vodka shots” and “the overwhelming power differential” between herself and Lauer, Nevils writes, “I would never have used the word ‘rape’ to describe what happened [next]. Even now, I hear ‘rape’ and think of masked strangers in dark alleys. … It would take years — and a national reckoning with sexual harassment and assault — before I called what happened to me assault.”
She notes, “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.”
She recalls thinking, “If anyone else had done this to me, I would have gone to the police.”
Instead, Nevils “went on with [her] day as though absolutely nothing had happened.”
She writes, “I pulled the blood‑streaked sheets off the bed and piled them in the corner so that the maid would not see the blood. I wadded my bloody underwear into a ball and threw it away.”
Additionally, Nevils replied with a “friendly” email back to Lauer’s alleged message: “You don’t call, you don’t write — my feelings are hurt! How are you?”
She writes his alleged words were “oddly comforting,” explaining, “It reaffirmed exactly what I wanted and needed to believe, which was that it had all been a misunderstanding, that everything was all right, that Matt Lauer — anchor of ‘Today’ — couldn’t have seen the blood or meant to cause pain.”
However, Lauer allegedly mentioned the blood the following week when Nevils — after what she describes as repeated attempts to talk to him about what happened — was invited to his apartment.
After “unzipping [her] dress,” Nevils alleges Lauer brought her an “armful of towels … ‘just in case, because of what happened last time.’”
Nevils then came to believe, “He saw [the blood] 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?”
She writes that she realized, “He’s going to do it again. Because that has been the plan all along. … I should have thought, ‘He’s a monster.’ Instead I thought, ‘You brought this on yourself.’”
This time, Nevils alleges, she “fixate[d] on the scratching of [a] wool [blanket] against [her] skin rather than what [was] happening” and reminded herself “to breathe.”
She claims, “In the months that followed, there would be four more instances. … 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.
“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,” Nevils continued. “But I never did. I just implicated myself in my own abuse.”
Reps for Lauer and NBC did not immediately respond to Page Six’s requests for comment.
Nevils, who called Lauer “monstrous” when alone but “charming and charismatic” in public, filed a complaint to NBC against the journalist in 2017 — and several other women came forward with claims of their own.
Lauer, who has denied the sexual misconduct allegations, was fired within 24 hours and subsequently split from wife Annette Roque.
The Daytime Emmy winner, who moved on with girlfriend Shamina Abas, has not been charged with or convicted of any crime.
As for Nevils, who first described the alleged rape in Ronan Farrow’s “Catch and Kill” in 2019, she took a leave of absence from the network and never returned.
Nevils described herself as a “train wreck” at that time, writing, “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.”
She has since “painstakingly rebuilt [her] life,” getting married and welcoming “two beautiful children.”
In the excerpt, she writes, “Every moment with my family is a precious piece of the life that I once believed I no longer deserved to live.
“Yet I know that somewhere, others are trapped in the same impossible situation I once was, left with the same set of bad choices I once faced, believing they don’t deserve the futures that still lie ahead of them.”
If you or someone you know is affected by any of the issues raised in this story, call the Sexual Assault Hotline at 1-800-330-0226.
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