Former NBC staffer Brooke Nevils recalled telling her mom about what happened between her and Matt Lauer before she officially reported her alleged assault.
“Until I reported Matt, I probably told about 10 or 12 people sanitized, idealized versions of what happened, never suggesting that it had been anything other than my choice,” Nevils wrote in an excerpt from her upcoming book, Unspeakable Things, shared via New York Magazine’s The Cut on Wednesday, January 28. “One of those people was my mother. I’d almost convinced myself that she would be proud of me for handling the situation — and that this powerful man that even she admired had ‘chosen’ me. Even though I’d framed the situation as positively as I could manage, there was no pride on the other end of the line.”
Instead, Nevils recalled hearing her mom’s “low, slow, labored breathing, as though she were struggling for air,” before she finally spoke “in a voice I would not have recognized.”
“Goddamn him,” her mother said. When Nevils insisted she was “handling” the situation, her mom replied, “You think you’re being a grown‑up, but you’re being a stupid little girl.”
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According to Nevils, the response was “the meanest thing she had ever said to me” in her life.
“Of course, I could have no idea then of the sheer magnitude of the pain I had just caused her,” Nevils continued. “Until I had a daughter of my own, I could never have imagined the primal rage she must have felt as she gathered that a powerful man nearly her age had preyed upon the body of the daughter who meant everything to her but nothing at all to him.”
Before Nevils hung up the phone, she remembered her mom warning: “You are nothing to that man but a convenience.”
Lauer, 68, allegedly raped Nevils in his hotel room in Sochi, Russia, during the 2014 Winter Olympics. Lauer was fired by NBC three years later, with NBC News chairman Andrew Lack noting in a 2017 statement that the company had “reason to believe this may not have been an isolated incident.”
Nevils previously opened up about the assault in Ronan Farrow‘s 2019 book, Catch and Kill, insisting that she was “too drunk to consent.” Lauer shut down the allegations in a letter shared via his lawyer, claiming that the pair had an “extramarital, but consensual, sexual encounter.”
In the excerpt from her own book, Nevils shared even more harrowing details about the Sochi assault, as well as another incident which allegedly took place in a New York City apartment after the Olympics. She claimed there were “four more instances,” including one where she was allegedly “summoned” to Lauer’s dressing room.
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“It would take years — and a national reckoning with sexual harassment and assault — before I called what happened to me assault,” Nevils wrote, referring to the MeToo movement.
Lauer was fired in the fall of 2017, and Nevils “made it a few more months” at the network “before taking a leave of absence 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. 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,” she wrote. “Soon I would find myself in a psych ward, believing myself so worthless and damaged that the world would be better off without me.”
Nearly 10 years later, Nevils is committed to moving forward and has a family of her own. Unspeakable Things, out Tuesday, February 3, is “the book about sexual harassment and assault that I wish had existed for me.”
If you or someone you know has been sexually assaulted, contact the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673). If you or someone you know is struggling or in crisis, help is available. Call or text 988 or chat at 988lifeline.org.
