by Ronan Farrow
Some of the women claimed their office encounters with Lauer had not been consensual. One former NBC employee told the New York Times that, in 2001, Lauer summoned her to his office, then pressed the button on his desk that, like those in many executive offices at 30 Rock, remotely shut his door. She said she’d felt helpless as he’d pulled down her pants, bent her over a chair, and had sex with her. She passed out. Lauer’s assistant took her to a nurse.
Over the course of 2018, I’d learn of seven claims of sexual misconduct raised by women who worked with Lauer. Most of the women could point to documents or other people they’d told to back up their accounts. Several said they had told colleagues, and believed the network knew about the problem.
I was also beginning to learn of a pattern surrounding women with complaints. In the years after 2011 or 2012—the time frame in which Harris claimed NBC hadn’t settled with any employees over harassment issues—the network in fact brokered nondisclosure agreements with at least seven women who experienced alleged harassment or discrimination within the company. The agreements also required the women to waive their right to bring suit. In most cases, the women received substantial payouts that parties involved in the transactions said were disproportionate to any conventional compensation for departing the company. When Harris said she was unaware of any harassment settlements, she appeared to be capitalizing on a technicality: many of the payouts were what the network referred to as “enhanced severance,” offered to the women as they left their jobs. But individuals involved—including on the company’s side—disputed that characterization, saying the agreements were designed to restrain women with allegations from speaking.
Several of the women who signed the nondisclosure agreements had complaints that were unrelated to Lauer, about other men in leadership positions within NBC News. Two settlements, reached in the first few years of the period Harris described, were with women who experienced alleged harassment from two senior executives who subsequently left the company. “Everyone knew why they were let go, internally,” said one member of NBC’s leadership who was closely involved in the departure of both men. NBC also brokered the 2017 agreement with the woman who accused Corvo—the Dateline producer who oversaw the review of the Weinstein story—of sexually harassing her.
But other pacts called into question the network’s claim that it had known nothing about women’s allegations against Lauer.
One on-air personality, who signed a nondisclosure agreement in 2012, said that NBC sought the deal after she showed colleagues messages that she took to be propositions, from both Lauer and one of the senior executives who later departed the company. Colleagues recalled both men making lewd remarks about the on-air personality over open mics during broadcasts. “I was like a hanging piece of meat,” she said. “I would walk into work with a knot in my stomach. I would come home and cry.” After she declined the advances, she felt she received fewer assignments. “I got punished,” she said. “My career took a sharp nosedive.” She decided not to make a formal report because she doubted the efficacy of the company’s HR department and feared further harm to her career. She did, however, begin to tell colleagues, and to plan her departure from the company.
When NBC proposed the agreement as she departed, she recalled her agent saying, “I’ve never seen this before in my life. They want you to sign an NDA,” adding, “You must have something huge on them.” The agent told me that he recalled the exchange too. The contract, which I later reviewed, waived the on-air personality’s right to sue. It barred her from making negative statements about NBCUniversal, “except as may be required for bona fide news reporting.” It was on NBC News letterhead, signed by her and the executive she said harassed her.
Another settlement with a woman who disclosed a serious allegation about Lauer within the company was reached in 2013. A few months after the Lauer story broke, I took a seat next to Ann Curry, his former co-anchor, at an Italian restaurant in Greenwich Village. She sat on a bar stool next to me, face graven with concern. She told me that complaints about Lauer verbally harassing women in the office were well known in her day—and that once, in 2010, a colleague had pulled her into an empty office and broken down, saying Lauer had exposed himself and propositioned her. “It was as close as you could get to a woman just melting in front of you in pain,” Curry said.
Later, I’d learn the woman’s identity: Melissa Lonner, the Today producer who met with me after she left to work in radio. As Lonner told the story to colleagues, she and Lauer had been at a work event at 30 Rock the evening before she broke down in front of Curry. Lauer had asked her to leave the event to see him in his office, which she took to be a professional inquiry. When they arrived, he closed the door behind them.
She recalled standing expectantly and telling Lauer, “I thought you had to chat.” Lauer told her to sit on his couch and began to make small talk. He joked about how much he disliked work cocktail parties like the one they’d just attended. Then, she told the colleagues, he unzipped his pants and exposed his erect penis.
Lonner was separated from her husband but still married. Born in the slums of Bangkok, she’d worked hard to reach her professional role at the time. She remembered reeling in response to Lauer’s advance, laughing nervously, trying to extricate herself by cracking a joke about not wanting to be intimate in an office where “everyone else has done it.”
Lonner recalled Lauer saying that he knew she wanted it, and, in response to the joke about his office dalliances, that he figured she liked it dirty, and that the encounter would “be a first for you.” Then, by her account, he became angry, saying, “Melissa, you’re a fucking tease. This is not good. You led me on.”
Sources close to Lauer told me he disputed her account of events, saying that he recalled making a joking lewd gesture but not exposing himself or propositioning her. But Lonner, visibly distraught, began recounting her claim in detail the next day, and told it consistently in the years after. She begged Curry and another on-air personality not to report her name, saying she knew Lauer would destroy her career. But Curry did tell two senior executives at the company that they needed to do something about Lauer. “I told them that they had a problem in him. That he had a problem with women. That they had to keep an eye on him.” And then, as far as Curry ever heard, nothing happened.
Lonner told the colleagues that she was miserable afterward. Lauer didn’t talk to her for weeks. Afraid that she’d be fired, she began looking for other jobs. But when she got an offer at CNN, something strange happened: several NBC News executives called her into their offices for meetings and delivered the same message. Each said that Lauer had insisted that she stay. “I don’t know what’s going on between you and him,” one told her, “But I need to keep him happy.”
She stayed at the network. Several years later, as her contract was about to end, she was fired anyway. She told the colleagues she was never given a reason why. A lawyer she consulted noted that the delayed departure prevented her from raising harassment claims due to their statutes of limitations. As Lonner left NBC News, her agent called to report something unusual: in addition to standard nondisclosure and nondisparagement clauses, the network was offering her a six-figure sum in exchange for signing a release of rights. “I’ve never seen that before,” the agent told her. “You must know where all the skeletons are.” Lonner’s understanding was that the primary intention of the payout was to prevent her from talking to the press.
Despite the fact that Lonner was a behind-the-scenes figure, tabloid items surfaced about her, claiming she was difficult to work with. Lonner told friends that she believed she’d been smeared because of her refusal of Lauer’s overture.
When I asked Lonner about NBC, she told me she was unable to comment on her time there. NBC disputed the idea that Lonner’s payout was related to her complaint about Lauer. But the network appeared to harbor some awareness of the connection. In 2018, as a Daily Beast reporter named Lachlan Cartwright pursued a story about NBC’s purport
ed pattern of settlements with sexual harassment victims, Stephanie Franco, the senior employment lawyer at NBCUniversal, contacted Lonner’s lawyer to remind her of the existence, and enforceability, of her pact. NBC’s legal team would later say that the call was in response to a query from Lonner’s attorney, and provided notice of Lonner’s release of legal claims, rather than any nondisclosure provision.
The settlements continued in the years after. In 2017, the senior member of the Today show team I’d seen crying on set a year before received a seven-figure payout in exchange for signing a nondisclosure agreement. In communications that I reviewed surrounding the contract, attorneys emphasized that the promise of silence was the primary objective, not an incidental provision. As her contract with the network ended, she’d raised harassment and discrimination concerns, though the network said that the payout was unrelated to any specific complaint. She had also mentioned Lauer and sexual harassment to one senior vice president—though she didn’t share with them the material I later reviewed that showed Lauer had left voicemails and sent texts that she saw as passes at her. When he took her responses as a cold shoulder, she felt he’d retaliated against her, spreading negative rumors in the office.
CHAPTER 56:
ZDOROVIE
The complaint that prompted Lauer’s firing ended in the same way—with a payout, and a nondisclosure agreement. When we first spoke, Brooke Nevils, the unnamed colleague whose story NBC leadership and the press had deemed a consensual affair, doubted she’d ever be able to go public. As I stepped out of hard rain into her New York apartment, she kept an eye over my shoulder until she locked us in. “I just live in terror,” she said. “And after your story about the spies, I got even more scared. I knew who I was up against. And the shady shit they did.”
She was in her early thirties, but with a gangly, adolescent quality. “Tall, awkward, and flat-chested,” she said with a laugh. In her apartment, art and books were everywhere. As in a Murakami novel, cats were everywhere. Nevils had six, until that morning, when one had to be put down due to kidney failure.
She told me this with the affectless delivery of someone who had been through too much. Over the course of the past two years, Nevils had attempted suicide. She’d been hospitalized for post-traumatic stress disorder, descended into heavy drinking, pulled herself back. She’d lost fourteen pounds, and gone to doctors twenty-one times in a single ten-month period. “I’ve lost everything I cared about,” she said. “My job. My goals.”
Nevils was raised in the suburbs of Chesterfield, Missouri. Grade-school report cards said she spoke up a lot, smiled a lot, had a sharp sense of humor. Her dad was a Marine in Vietnam, earned a PhD in marketing, and became a civilian contractor for the Pentagon. Her mother, a TWA flight attendant, died of a heart attack a little over a year before our meeting. Nevils told me that her mother was “just that kind of a person that wanted the world to be better.”
Nevils had wanted to be a journalist since she was thirteen and learned that Hemingway wrote for the Kansas City Star. “You go into journalism because you believe in the truth. That people’s stories matter.” She frowned. Rain drummed at the windows. “I believed we were the good guys.” After college at Johns Hopkins, she interned at a few newspapers. In 2008, she got her dream job as an NBC page—the network’s career development program. Over the following years, she worked her way up from giving tours to helping with big stories and staffing big stars.
In 2014, she was doing just that, working for Meredith Vieira—a personal hero of hers, on whose career she hoped to model her own. When Vieira got tapped to cover the Olympics in 2014, the two headed off to Sochi, a coastal resort city in Russia. At the end of one of their long work days, Vieira and Nevils hit the bar at the luxury hotel where the NBC team was staying. They laughed and gossiped over martinis. It was late, midnight maybe, when Lauer walked in and scanned the bar for familiar faces. “I had always been so intimidated by him. He really was kind of a bully at work. Had we not been in such a happy mood…” She trailed off. But the women were in a happy mood. And they’d been drinking. She patted the low seat next to her, invited Lauer to join.
Sitting down next to her, Lauer surveyed the martinis and said: “You know, what I really like is a nice cold vodka.” He ordered shots of Beluga vodka. Nevils had six. “Na zdorovie!” Lauer cried—literally, to health. When Lauer took out his iPhone and started snapping pictures, Nevils felt some worry seep into the fun. Lauer was known for jokingly putting after-hours photos of colleagues on air, part of the prankster culture he presided over at Today. Nevils felt drunk, and worried she looked it in the photos.
After they parted ways—Lauer to his room, the women to theirs, higher up in the hotel—Vieira grinned and produced Lauer’s official press credential that granted him access to the events they were covering. Vieira and Lauer had a teasing, sibling-like rapport. This was the latest in a long history of mutual pranks. The women called Lauer and asked, between fits of tipsy laughter, if he was missing anything. Nevils recalled Lauer asking if she had looked for her credential lately. He had it.
Nevils went to Lauer’s room, a massive suite with wide views of the Black Sea, to retrieve her credential. She found him still professionally attired, and the two had an uneventful exchange about the credential heist. Nevils noticed his fancy stationery, with “Matthew Todd Lauer” in raised navy ink, and thought about scrawling “sucks” underneath as another drunk prank, but decided against it. Lauer was at times formal and high-handed with junior staff like her. She’d been watching him on television since she was thirteen years old. She worried she’d get in trouble.
Nevils went back upstairs and, as she and Vieira said their good nights, texted one to Lauer, too, with a joking reference to the trouble the women were having drunkenly fitting their key cards into their doors. A few minutes later, as Nevils was brushing her teeth, her work BlackBerry buzzed. A message from Lauer’s work email suggested that she should come back downstairs. She replied that she’d only come if she could delete the photos of her looking drunk at the bar. He told her the offer expired in ten minutes. Later, sources close to Lauer told me that he considered her concern about the photos to be a thin pretext, and her messages to be come-ons. Nevils said that she found the idea of flirting with Lauer unthinkable. She had intended the messages to be playful, in line with his rapport with her and Vieira throughout the night. In retrospect, she considered going into a man’s room at night, by herself, unwise. She said that she was drunk, didn’t consider the implications deeply, and had no reason to suspect Lauer would be anything but friendly based on prior experience. “He always treated me like a little sister,” she said. “I had been to his room many times.” She didn’t put herself together before heading down. She was still dressed for work, in maroon jeans from Uniqlo, a baggy green sweater from Target, and one of the Nike Sochi Olympics jackets that had been handed out to NBC staff. She hadn’t shaved her legs for weeks. She said that she assumed she’d be right back up.
In her apartment, years later, Nevils tried not to cry, and did so anyway. “I do this PTSD therapy, right? Every week, a different thing messes me up. I just get so angry how this one thing derailed my life.”
When Nevils arrived at his door, Lauer had changed into a tee shirt and boxers. As he pushed her against the door and began to kiss her, she became aware of how drunk she was. She recalled the room spinning. “I thought I was going to throw up,” she said. “I kept thinking, I’m gonna throw up on Matt Lauer.” She said that she felt acutely embarrassed about her baggy clothes and unshaved legs.
She recalled Lauer pushing her onto the bed, flipping her over, and asking if she liked anal sex. She said that she declined several times, replying, at one point, “No, that’s not my thing.” Nevils said that she was still in the midst of telling him she wasn’t interested when he “just did it.” 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 that she stopped saying no, but wept silently into a pillow.
After Lauer finished, Nevils recalled him asking if she liked it.
“Yes,” she said, mechanically. She felt humiliated and in pain. She told him that she needed to delete the drunk photos of her, and he gave her his phone to let her do so.
“Did you tell Meredith anything?” she remembered him asking.
“No,” she said.
“Don’t,” he told her. Nevils wondered if it was advice or a warning.
Back in her room, she threw up. She took off her pants, passed out. When she woke up, blood was everywhere, soaked through her underwear, soaked through her sheets. “It hurt to walk, it hurt to sit.” She was afraid to google the problem on her work devices. Later, she was afraid to get tested for sexually transmitted diseases—what would her boyfriend of five years say? She bled for days.
Nevils said that, regardless of Lauer’s interpretation of their exchanges before and after, what transpired in his room was not consensual. “It was nonconsensual in the sense that I was too drunk to consent,” she said. “It was nonconsensual in that I said, multiple times, that I didn’t want to have anal sex.”
The next day, Lauer emailed her a joke about her not writing or calling. Nevils told him everything was fine. She told me that she was terrified she’d angered him, a concern that deepened as he appeared to ignore her for the remainder of the trip. When she finally worked up the nerve to call him, he said they could talk back in New York.
On their return, she said that Lauer would ask her to his palatial Upper East Side apartment, where they had two sexual encounters, and to his office, where they had more. Sources close to Lauer emphasized that she sometimes initiated contact. What is not in dispute is that Nevils, like several of the women I’d spoken to, had several further sexual encounters with the man she said assaulted her. “This is the thing I blame myself most for,” she said. “It was completely transactional. It was not a relationship.” Nevils told friends at the time that she felt trapped. Lauer’s position of authority—over both her and her boyfriend, whose brother worked for Lauer—made her feel unable to say no. She said that, in the first weeks after the alleged assault, she attempted to convey that she was comfortable and even enthusiastic about the encounters. She even tried to convince herself of the same. She readily admitted that her communications with Lauer might have appeared friendly and obliging.