Brooke Nevils is denying Matt Lauer’s account of their “consensual” sexual relationship years after her alleged 2014 rape.
“Consent and agreement are not synonymous,” Nevils said in her NPR interview on Thursday. “When one person has power over the other, it’s not really consent. It’s submission.”
“So when you’re a subordinate and the most powerful person in your industry asks you to come to his hotel room, which in our industry, hotel rooms aren’t [looked at the same] way they are in a social sense, [it’s different]. We work in hotel rooms all the time. I’d been to his hotel room already for a rehearsal, I’d been there earlier that night. They’re not freighted places the way they are in other industries.”
“When your job is to work with the talent, when these are people who have to be kept happy, their opinion of you can make or break your career. Annoying them can mean you’re never allowed on a set again — that changes the dynamic of every single interaction that you have,” she said.
“And another part of that is that any attention that they give you professionally, you feel is a positive thing that you are lucky to get. And people who are in power know they’re in power. That’s something that they wield every single day.”
A rep for Lauer did not immediately respond to Page Six’s request for comment.
In 2017, Nevils first came forward with claims that Lauer, now 68, anally raped her in his hotel room while she was working as Meredith Vieira‘s personal assistant, covering the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia.
Within 24 hours after she filed her complaint, Lauer was fired from his post on the “Today” show and NBC, and several other women came forward with accusations against him.
Two years later, when Variety published an excerpt from Ronan Farrow’s book “Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators” — which contained a message from Nevils about the alleged sexual assault saying she “declined” Lauer and was “too drunk to consent” — Lauer responded to Nevil’s claims, describing their sexual relationship as “consensual.”
“The story Brooke tells is filled with false details intended only to create the impression this was an abusive encounter. Nothing could be further from the truth,” Lauer claimed at the time.
In her forthcoming memoir “Unspeakable Things: Silence, Shame, and the Stories We Choose to Believe,” Nevils recounts the details of the incident in her own words.
In an excerpt from the book published by The Cut, Nevils says the pain she felt the morning after her assault was “undeniable.”
“It hurt to walk. It hurt to sit. It hurt to remember,” she shares. She goes on to share that Lauer emailed her later that day with a message that read, “You don’t call, you don’t write — my feelings are hurt! How are you?”
“I had no idea how to respond, but I knew that to ask anyone for help would only make it worse,” Nevils writes in her memoir, per the excerpt. “Shameful secrets are like that. To trust anyone is to give them power over you. I was totally alone, drowning in plain sight.”
“Unspeakable Things: Silence, Shame, and the Stories We Choose to Believe” comes out Tuesday.
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