Brooke Nevils is recalling the moments before, during and after she accused disgraced Today host Matt Lauer of sexual assault.
“Rape is a word I hardly ever use because when you hear the word rape, you think of a guy in a ski mask in the dark alley and fighting for your life,” Nevils told NPR in an interview published on Thursday, January 29.
“And that’s just not the reality of how sexual assaults happen when most of the time it’s someone that you know and trust,” she continued. “So we don’t really have language to talk about this and we certainly didn’t in 2017 when I was reporting it.”
At the height of the #MeToo movement, Nevils alleged Lauer, 68, sexually assaulted her in 2014 while the pair were on assignment in Sochi, Russia, covering the Winter Olympics. Nevils further alleged that they continued to have “sexual encounters” after they returned to New York City. Lauer was subsequently fired from his job at Today. In a 2019 open letter, Lauer denied the allegations, claiming the alleged interactions were “completely mutual and consensual.”
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Nevils took a leave of absence from NBC — a leave that eventually became permanent. Her allegations were included in reporter Ronan Farrow’s 2019 book Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators.
“It takes a very long time to really process and get to the point where you can talk about it in those terms, and those terms are devastating,” Nevils continued to NPR. “When you say sexual assault, when you say rape, your life changes. You have a target on your back. Every single thing that you say or that you don’t say becomes evidence.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Nevils shared how she assumed that her job was the only job on the line after she came forward with her allegations.
“When I made that complaint, I knew who Matt Lauer was,” she explained. “I knew what he meant to the company. I knew what the Today Show meant to millions and millions of people because I was one of those people. It meant the world to me. I knew what NBC meant to me. It was my family. It was my identity. And I knew I was breaking a sort of code by speaking up. And I assumed that the only career that would be ended by that would be mine.”
She added, “And I was OK with that, because whatever the consequences were, I knew I could not live with the knowledge that if I didn’t say anything, it could continue.”
Nevils — who is sharing her side of the story in her new memoir Unspeakable Things: Silence, Shame, and the Stories We Choose to Believe — also detailed why she felt it important for her to write about her alleged assault.
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“What was important to me was to acknowledge how complicated it was, how confusing it was, how I came to be in that room in the first place and how these things really happened,” she said. “Because when we’re talking about something difficult, something painful, I think the human impulse is to make it easy to understand, is to simplify it and kind of make it more black and white, so it’s easier to talk about.”
She continued, “But the point of talking about this is to acknowledge just how devastating and confusing these things are, how quickly it happens, how you react in the moment.”
If you or anyone you know has been sexually assaulted, call the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673). A trained staff member will provide confidential, judgment-free support as well as local resources to assist in healing, recovering and more.
