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New Ronan Farrow book alleges Matt Lauer raped NBC News colleague, report says

Posted at 1:15 PM, Oct 09, 2019
and last updated 2019-10-09 15:15:16-04

**WARNING: Some readers may find details in this story to be disturbing

A new book by former NBC News reporter Ronan Farrow reveals new allegations against former Today Show anchor Matt Lauer, Variety reported.

“Catch and Kill” is Farrow’s upcoming book that recounts his investigation of Harvey Weinstein and the hurdles he faced that lead him to take the story from NBC News to the New Yorker instead.

In the book, Farrow talked to the former NBC News staffer whose complaint against Lauer lead to his firing back in 2017.

Brooke Nevils, whose identity was initially protected by NBC News at her request, agreed to talk to Farrow for the book. In the book, obtained by Variety, Nevils claims that Lauer anally raped her in his hotel room while they were in Russia for the 2014 Sochi Olympics.

According to Variety:

In Sochi, Nevils was tasked with working with former “Today” co-anchor Meredith Vieira, who’d been brought back to the show to do Olympics coverage. In her account, one night over drinks with Vieira at the hotel bar where the NBC News team was staying, they ran into Lauer, who joined them. At the end of the night, Nevils, who’d had six shots of vodka, ended up going to Lauer’s hotel room twice — once to retrieve her press credential, which Lauer had taken as a joke, and the second time because he invited her back. Nevils, Farrow writes, “had no reason to suspect Lauer would be anything but friendly based on prior experience.”

Once she was in his hotel room, Nevils alleges, Lauer — who was wearing a T-shirt and boxers — pushed her against the door and kissed her. He then pushed her onto the bed, “flipping her over, asking if she liked anal sex,” Farrow writes. “She said that she declined several times.”

According to the book, Nevils told Farrow the encounter was painful and that “she stopped saying no, but wept silently into a pillow.”

When Lauer asked her if she liked it, Farrow wrote, she told him yes, Variety reported.

“It was nonconsensual in the sense that I was too drunk to consent,” Nevils told Farrow. “It was nonconsensual in that I said, multiple times, that I didn’t want to have anal sex.”

When they returned to New York, Nevils claimed she had more sexual encounters with Lauer.

“This is what I blamed myself most for,” Nevils said. “It was completely transactional. It was not a relationship.”

According to the account of Farrow’s book in the Variety article, Nevils was “terrified about the control Lauer had over her career.”

Nevils told Farrow she told “like a million people” what happened.

It wasn’t until Farrow’s bombshell story on Weinstein was published back in 2017, that Nevils said Viera urged her to go to NBC Universal human resources with a lawyer. She did and Lauer was fired.

Nevils went on medical leave in 2018 and received a payout of more than $1 million, Farrow wrote in the book which comes out next week.

Variety said a representative for Lauer did not immediately respond to their request for comment. Back in 2018, Lauer gave the following statement to The Washington Post:

“I have made no public comments on the many false stories from anonymous or biased sources that have been reported about me over these past several months . . . I remained silent in an attempt to protect my family from further embarrassment and to restore a small degree of the privacy they have lost. But defending my family now requires me to speak up.

“I fully acknowledge that I acted inappropriately as a husband, father and principal at NBC. However I want to make it perfectly clear that any allegations or reports of coercive, aggressive or abusive actions on my part, at any time, are absolutely false.”

In a statement included in an NBC News report on the new allegations Wednesday morning, the network said:

“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.”