In 2017, multiple women came forward to share horror stories with NBC brass.
That is why disgraced former Today show host Matt Lauer is no longer lurking on people’s screens.
One of his accusers — the one whom he pursued at the Sochi Olympics — describes him as a “monster” in her upcoming book.
She shares the graphic, bloody details, explaining that if it had been anyone else, she’d have gone to the police.
Next year, it will have been one decade since Lauer’s reign came to an end
Brooke Nevils’ complaint to NBC in 2017 helped oust Lauer.
Her book, Unspeakable Things: Silence, Shame, and the Stories We Choose to Believe is out on February 3.
Within its pages, she details her horrifying experience in Sochi, where Lauer allegedly preyed upon her while they were both there to cover the Sochi Olympics in 2014.
According to Page Six, Nevils writes that she awoke in her hotel room with her “underwear and the sheet beneath me caked with blood.”
She had been drinking with her boss and mentor, Meredith Viera, the night before. So, she explained, she was later “drunk and alone” when Lauer allegedly seized his chance.
According to Nevils’ deeply harrowing account, Lauer “insist[ed] on having anal sex” with her, an intoxicated lower-level employee of NBC.
She recalled the “spinning room” and her “unsteady” body while her mind felt both “blurred” and “frantic.”
Lauer did admit to some of their interactions, but claimed that this was a “mutual and completely consensual” relationship.
“I would never have used the word ‘rape’ to describe what happened,” Nevils wrote, despite her intoxication and the time and the massive power differential.
“Even now, I hear ‘rape’ and think of masked strangers in dark alleys,” she confessed. “It would take years — and a national reckoning with sexual harassment and assault — before I called what happened to me assault.”
Even in her own mind, she didn’t call it ‘rape’ yet
“Back then, I had no idea what to call what happened other than weird and humiliating,” Nevils admits.
“But then there was the pain, which was undeniable,” she describes.
Nevils details: “It hurt to walk. It hurt to sit. It hurt to remember.”
She recalls thinking: “If anyone else had done this to me, I would have gone to the police.”
Instead of that, Nevils writes that she “went on with my day as though absolutely nothing had happened.” This is extremely common in the aftermath of sexual assaults.
“I pulled the blood‑streaked sheets off the bed and piled them in the corner so that the maid would not see the blood,” Nevils describes. “I wadded my bloody underwear into a ball and threw it away.”
Later, Lauer allegedly messaged her: “You don’t call, you don’t write — my feelings are hurt! How are you?”
Her reply, Nevils writes, was “friendly” because his alleged message felt “oddly comforting.”
She explains: “It reaffirmed exactly what I wanted and needed to believe, which was that it had all been a misunderstanding, that everything was all right, that Matt Lauer — anchor of ‘Today’ — couldn’t have seen the blood or meant to cause pain.”
It was only later, after what she says were repeated attempts to discuss what had happened, that she realized that he’d known about the blood.
‘It was not a mistake. It was not a misunderstanding’
Nevils describes Lauer allegedly wanting a repeat, and this time bringing towels — planning ahead for the bleeding that he planned to cause.
“He saw [the blood] in Sochi,” she writes. “He has known about it all along. It was not a mistake. It was not a misunderstanding.”
Nevils also realized: “He’s going to do it again. Because that has been the plan all along. … I should have thought, ‘He’s a monster.’”
She admits in her book: “Instead I thought, ‘You brought this on yourself.’”
Too often in our culture, victim-blaming begins in the victim’s own mind.