Matt Lauer Accuser Details Alleged Rape and Complicated Relationship in New Book

A new book authored by the woman who accused Today host Matt Lauer of rape, setting off a chain of events at NBC that saw the $25 million-a-year morning show host fired within 24 hours and cast out of his life in New York, details the initial alleged assault and provides an explanation as to why she carried on a relationship with him as she was allegedly assaulted multiple additional times.

Former NBC talent assistant Brooke Nevils told NBC News human resources about the instances of alleged sexual assault and the relationship that she developed with the influential host in 2014. In her soon-to-be-released book, Unspeakable Things, Nevils details how her professional relationship with Lauer, a top talent figure who she was charged with appeasing and keeping happy, fundamentally changed on the night she went out for a drink with her boss, Meredith Vieira, and Lauer turned up.

In a section of her book that was published by The Cut on Wednesday, Nevils describes hiding the bloody sheets in her hotel room after Lauer allegedly anally raped her while the two were in Russia to cover the Winter Olympics. That blood, she writes, lingered in her mind as she tried to justify all other aspects of the encounter with Lauer; as she describes, Nevils was attempting to convince herself that her alleged sexual assault was a normal encounter. But the blood, she wrote, was never going to be explainable, to herself or to anyone else.

“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,” she 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. 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.”

Lauer maintains the encounter with Nevils in Sochi was “mutual and completely consensual.” As of publication, he has not been charged with or convicted of any crime and denies all allegations of abusive or coercive sexual conduct and nonconsensual sex with any woman at any time.

The day following the alleged assault, with the intrusive thoughts of what had happened to her racing through her head, Nevils went about her business, not reporting the alleged attack to anyone, even as she sat and had lunch with her colleagues. This was because, she explains in the book, NBC had cloned their phones and they would be cross-checked upon their return to the U.S. to ensure they were not compromised or tampered with while in Russia. Because of this, she could not even call her mother or a friend to talk about her experience. Nevils writes that she was not even comfortable doing a web search to find out what to do about the bleeding she was experiencing following the assault, lest it be seen by NBC security or Russia’s politsiya.

Lauer, she writes, did contact her following the initial encounter in Sochi, emailing her a note along the lines of, “You don’t call, you don’t write — my feelings are hurt! How are you?” Nevils explains in her book how this message was jarringly confusing and led her to second-guess what had happened, ultimately leading her back to the belief that the nature of the encounter was nothing alarming. She wrote back an innocuous message: “All good,” she writes in the book.

“Ignoring the talent was not an option, and if he needed reassurance, I would reassure him,” she writes. “It’s never enough just to refrain from making a powerful person feel bad about something they’ve done. You have to assure them that they have no reason to feel bad at all, lest they associate that nagging, uncomfortable feeling — personal accountability — with you. We tend to avoid people who make us feel bad, and once the talent starts avoiding you for whatever reason, your days are numbered.”

While she was in Sochi to cover the games, Nevils writes, she made several attempts to contact Lauer via email to go over what had happened. Lauer never responded and she only reached him by waking the anchor in the middle of the night. Nevils writes that he told her to get in touch when the two of them were back in New York.

When they were back at 30 Rockefeller Plaza, Nevils writes that she made an excuse to go to the Today studio and when Lauer saw her, he waved her into his office and shut the door. Lauer told her that he had not read her emails and invited her to his Manhattan apartment. Once there, she recounts the humiliation she felt as Lauer took her into his walk-in closet, unzipped her dress while she sat on his bed and then popped out of the room to return with a stack of towels — “because of what happened last time,” she recalls that he said to her. This was a reference to the bleeding.

“‘I like it because it’s transgressive,’” he says, plainly acknowledging what was suddenly obvious to me — that what he likes is not intimacy but the degradation and humiliation of someone less powerful,” she writes in the book.

Four sexual encounters followed over the next several months, Nevils writes. As the situation morphed and she carried on justifying and second-guessing in her head, she began to drink to the point of keeping bourbon in her purse, dyed “garish blond highlights” into her hair, dropped some weight and wore high-heeled shoes. Her friends noticed the changes; at a point, her best friend learned of the encounter and, to her surprise, was not curious about her encounters with a celebrity other than to ask if the Sochi incident was consensual.

“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.”

Nevils describes Lauer as no monster when they were alone, but “charming and charismatic” in the ways that a morning news anchor has learned to be.

“These situations are rarely perfect binaries. It’s not an either/or between Matt as a monster or me as innocent. Some of Matt’s behavior was innocuous. Some of mine — the countless lies and daily betrayals of people I loved to stay in Matt’s good graces — was monstrous, however valid my reasons for it,” she writes.

As the #MeToo movement began to topple powerful men in media, entertainment and other industries, Nevils wrote that she learned that a reporter was looking into allegations against Lauer. This was the moment that she decided she would need to retain an attorney — a difficult decision, as she considered her colleagues at the network her family: “To talk to a lawyer about NBC, to even think of myself as separate from NBC, felt like a betrayal,” she writes.

But Nevils, in the end, decided that it was the best thing for her personal well-being that she come forward about the alleged assault in Sochi.

When Lauer was fired from NBC News in 2017, the Today show said in a statement, “On Monday night, we received a detailed complaint from a colleague about inappropriate sexual behavior in the workplace by Matt Lauer. As a result, we’ve decided to terminate his employment.”

Two years later, when Nevils opened up about the alleged assault in Ronan Farrow’s book Catch and Kill, NBC said in a statement, “Matt Lauer’s conduct was appalling, horrific and reprehensible, as we said at the time. That’s why he was fired within 24 hours of us first learning of the complaint. Our hearts break again for our colleague.”