Ann Curry: I reported a female NBC News staffer's sexual harassment complaint against Matt Lauer in 2012

The Washington Post

When NBC News chairman Andy Lack fired Matt Lauer last November, he said in a statement that it was "the first complaint about his behavior in the over twenty years he's been at NBC News." Yet Curry -- who has a non-disclosure agreement with NBC -- disclosed to The Washington Post that "a woman approached me and asked me tearfully if I could help her. She was afraid of losing her job. . . . I believed her.” Curry said she reported the accusation to two members of NBC News' management team. “I told management they had a problem and they needed to keep an eye on him and how he deals with women,” she says. The woman, who prefers to remain anonymous, confirmed Curry's story. Curry declined to name the two NBC bosses. Additionally, The Post spoke to 12 women who've accused Lauer of sexual harassment, but chose not to report it. "Three of the 12 told The Post about sexual advances from Lauer," The Post's Sarah Ellison reports. "One woman said that the anchor exposed himself in his office and asked her to touch him, and a second said he had sex with her in the middle of the day in his office — alleged incidents that have not been previously reported. A third woman told The Post that Lauer gave her a sex toy, as first reported by Variety at the time he was fired." The Post got Lauer to release a new statement denying that he was "coercive, aggressive or abusive" to female staffers whom he had relationships with. “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," Lauer said. “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.”