Former Today Show producer Brooke Nevils grew up in St. Louis, where she watched the NBC show every morning before school, and felt a special connection to its hosts.
"When Today would come on and you heard that opening music, it felt like you were transported to the center of the world where everything was happening," she says. "It was Matt [Lauer], Katie [Couric], Ann [Curry] and Al [Roker]. It felt like family to me."
After studying journalism in college Nevils was thrilled when she landed a job in the NBC page program and was assigned to Today. In 2014, she traveled to Sochi, Russia, to assist in NBC's coverage of the winter Olympics.
"I was mainly there just as a talent assistant," Nevils says. "So, it was my job to make sure things went as smoothly as possible for [host Meredith Vieira] and the other talent that was there."
The other talent included longtime Today host Matt Lauer. Nevils says that one night, toward the end of her time in Sochi, she was celebrating in a bar with Vieira and other colleagues when Lauer joined their table.
"He came over and sat with us, and I felt like it couldn't possibly be real," she says. "These were two people [Lauer and Vieira] that I had admired as journalists, as people, since I was a little girl. And I truly could not believe I was sitting there with a seat at the table with them. And I think I got carried away."
Nevils says Lauer ordered vodka shots, which she drank. She says he invited her back to his hotel room and then sexually assaulted her. They had additional sexual encounters after they returned to New York following the Olympics. In a 2019 statement, Lauer wrote that his interactions with Nevils were "completely mutual and consensual."
Nevils says she didn't initially report the Sochi incident for several reasons, primarily fear for her career. But a few years later, as the #MeToo movement gained momentum, she went to human resources and Lauer was fired.
Ronan Farrow reported Nevils' allegations in his 2019 book Catch and Kill. Now, Nevils tells her story in the new memoir, Unspeakable Things: Silence, Shame, and the Stories We Choose to Believe. As a married mother of two, she worries that her children may one day be "tortured" by what she writes about. But, she adds, "it's my job to prepare them for the hard things in life, and part of that is giving them the opportunity to learn from my mistakes, to be honest with them and say I wasn't perfect — but I still didn't deserve what happened to me."
Interview highlights
On the power differential between her and Lauer
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.
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. … So when you're a person in power and you ask someone less powerful to do something, you have the responsibility to think about whether they are able to say no, whether they will feel comfortable saying no, whether they can be penalized for saying no.
On believing that if she went to HR, her career was over
I assumed that the only career that would be ended by that would be mine.Brooke Nevils
When I made that complaint, I knew who Matt Lauer was. I knew what he meant to the company. I knew what the Today Show meant to millions and millions of people because I was one of those people. It meant the world to me. I knew what NBC meant to me, it was my family. It was my identity. And I knew I was breaking a sort of code by speaking up. And I assumed that the only career that would be ended by that would be mine. And I was OK with that, because whatever the consequences were, I knew I could not live with the knowledge that if I didn't say something, it could continue.
On writing a very detailed account of the alleged assault
What was important to me was to acknowledge how complicated it was, how confusing it was, how I came to be in that room in the first place and how these things really happened. Because when we're talking about something difficult, something painful, I think the human impulse is to make it easy to understand, is to simplify it and kind of make it more black and white, so it's easier to talk about. But the point of talking about this is to acknowledge just how devastating and confusing these things are, how quickly it happens, how you react in the moment.
"Reaction" is really the right word. It's more a reaction than a choice. And when you look back on it later, you second guess absolutely every single move that you made without really understanding what happened. Because in the aftermath of sexual harassment, of sexual assault, you're always looking to give the benefit of the doubt, especially when it's someone you know. You don't want this horrible thing to have happened. You want things to be OK. So you blame yourself as a way of convincing yourself you were in control the whole time.
On using the word assault and not rape
Rape is a word I hardly ever use because when you hear the word rape, you think of a guy in a ski mask in the dark alley and fighting for your life. And that's just not the reality of how sexual assaults happen when most of the time it's someone that you know and trust. So we don't really have language to talk about this and we certainly didn't in 2017 when I was reporting it. It takes a very long time to really process and get to the point where you can talk about it in those terms, and those terms are devastating. When you say sexual assault, when you say rape, your life changes. You have a target on your back. Every single thing that you say or that you don't say becomes evidence.
Anna Bauman and Thea Chaloner produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Beth Novey adapted it for the web.
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