Photo: Getty (3)
Todayshow anchorsSavannah GuthrieandHoda Kotbare speaking out about a new book thatdetails rape allegationsagainst formerTodayanchorMatt Lauer.
In a somber segment Wednesday, Guthrie called the new details of the complaint that ultimately led to Lauer’s 2017 firing “shocking and appalling.”
“I feel like we owe it to our viewers to pause for a moment,” Guthrie said. “This is shocking and appalling. I honestly don’t even know what to say about it. I want to say, I know it wasn’t easy for our colleague Brooke to come forward then, it’s not easy now and we support her and any women who have come forward with claims. And it’s just very painful for all of us at NBC and who are at theTodayshow. It’s very, very, very difficult.”
Becoming noticeably emotional, Guthrie and Kotb said they were still working to process the difficult situation.
“I’m looking at you and having a weird moment: we were sitting here just like this two years ago,” Kotb told Guthrie. “Truth be told, Savannah and I did a little prayer upstairs before just to sort of sort out what we were going to do. I think you feel like you’ve known someone for 12 years. I don’t know if you guys have ever felt like that. You know someone, you feel like you know them inside and out and then all of a sudden, a door opens up and it’s a part of them you didn’t know.”
Kotb continued: “We don’t know all the facts on all of this, but there are not allegations of an affair, there are allegations of a crime. I think that’s shocking to all of us here who have sat with Matt for many, many years. So I think we’re going to just sort of continue to process this part of this horrific story and as you said, our thoughts are with Brooke. It’s not easy what she did, to come forward. It’s not easy at all.”
“We are disturbed to our core,” added Guthrie.
Wesley Mann/August
The allegations are detailed in Ronan Farrow’s new bookCatch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators,which features an interview with Lauer’s victim, former NBC News employee, whose complaint about Lauer led to hisfiringin November 2017.
(At the time, her identity was kept anonymous at her request; this is the first time the full details of her allegations have been made public.)
According toVariety, Lauer, 61, pushed Nevils against a door and kissed her before moving to the bed and “flipping her over, asking if she liked anal sex,” Farrow wrote. “She said that she declined several times.”
She “was in the midst of telling him she wasn’t interested again when he ‘just did it,’ ” Farrow wrote. “Lauer, she said, didn’t use lubricant. The encounter was excruciatingly painful. ‘It hurt so bad. I remember thinking, Is this normal?’ She told me she stopped saying no, but wept silently into a pillow.”
Nevils reportedly claims the encounter was painful and that she “bled for days.”
“It was nonconsensual in the sense that I was too drunk to consent,” Nevils said in the book, according to Variety. “It was nonconsensual in that I said, multiple times, that I didn’t want to have anal sex.”
Nevils said in the book that she had more sexual encounters with Lauer back in New York City, according toVariety, telling Farrow: “It was completely transactional. It was not a relationship.”
At Vieira’s urging, Nevils reported her ordeal to NBC executives in the fall of 2017, in the wake of theHarvey Weinsteinscandal,Varietyreports. Lauer was fired, Nevils went on medical leave in 2018 and was eventually paid, Farrow wrote, according toVariety, “seven figures.”
PEOPLE is out to reps for Vieira and Farrow.
In a statement read on-air Wednesday on theTodayshow, NBC News said, “Matt Lauer’s conduct was appalling, horrific and reprehensible, as we said at the time. That’s why he was fired within 24 hours of us first learning of the complaint. Our hearts break again for our colleague.”
After he was fired,Varietyreleased a report in whichthree additional anonymous women accused the former newsman of sexual harassment.
He addressed his past relationships with colleagues ina second statementto theWashington Postin April 2018.
Catch and Killis out Oct. 15.
If you or someone you know has been sexually assaulted, please contact the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673) or go toonline.rainn.org.
source: people.com
