Ex-NBC News staffer responsible for Matt Lauer's firing alleges that he raped her

Variety

Brooke Nevils, the anonymous former NBC News employee whose sexual misconduct complaint led to Lauer's firing two years ago, alleges in Ronan Farrow's new book Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators that Lauer anally raped her in his hotel room at the 2014 Sochi Olympics. That's according to Variety, which obtained a copy of the book before its release next Tuesday. Nevils was working closely with Meredith Vieira at the Sochi Olympics. On the night of the alleged rape, Nevils says she drank six shots of vodka with Vieira and Lauer at a hotel bar. Per Variety, Nevils says she 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." Nevils goes into graphic detail about the alleged rape. “It was nonconsensual in the sense that I was too drunk to consent,” she says. “It was nonconsensual in that I said, multiple times, that I didn’t want to have anal sex.” Back in New York City, Nevils says she had more sexual encounters with Lauer. "What is not in dispute is that Nevils, like several of the women I’d spoken to, had further sexual encounters with the man she said assaulted her," Farrow writes. "This is what I blame myself most for," she tells Farrow. “It was completely transactional. It was not a relationship.” Farrow writes that Nevils was terrified about the control Lauer had over her career. After Lauer's firing, she says that NBC News bosses emphasized that the alleged Sochi incident hadn't been "criminal" or an "assault." She was also promised anonymity, but soon everybody found out it was her and she found working at NBC News to be "torture." Nevils took a medical leave in 2018 and exited NBC News with a settlement worth "seven figures." According to Farrow, NBC "proposed a script she would have to read, suggesting that she had left to pursue other endeavors, that she was treated well, and that NBC News was a positive example of sexual harassment." NBC News declined to comment to Variety on Farrow's book, while Lauer didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.