‘I Felt I’d Ruined Everything’

Warning: This story contains explicit language and graphic descriptions of sexual assault and misconduct.

Brooke Nevils is opening up about what happened after she filed a complaint against Matt Lauer at NBC that resulted in his firing in 2017.

In Nevils’ upcoming memoir, Unspeakable Things: Silence, Shame, and the Stories We Choose to Believe (out Feb. 3), she details her sexual encounters with the former Today show anchor, who was fired in 2017 after she reported his alleged assault that took place in 2014 during the Winter Olympics in Sochi.

In an excerpt published by The Cut on Jan. 28, Nevils shared more about how her mental health suffered as a result of the repeated sexual encounters she had with Lauer, now 68, that she kept a secret for years. She remembered feeling “totally alone, drowning in plain sight” and like she’d “obviously done something wrong” in the aftermath of their first encounter together in Sochi, when Lauer “insist[ed] on having anal sex.”

She initially decided she “would bury what happened,” but after Lauer asked her in an email the next day how she was doing, she wrote, “There was no way forward but panic and confusion.”

There were several more instances of what NBC News would later label as “alleged ‘inappropriate sexual behavior in the workplace'” between Nevils and Lauer before she filed a complaint in 2017.

In 2019, Lauer denied raping Nevils in a lengthy letter to Variety.

“Once Matt summoned me to his dressing room and I went; two other times I ended up there in the course of my day-to-day job. One encounter I even initiated, telling myself I wasn’t the same naïve idiot I’d been in Sochi or some girl Matt could just summon to her knees in his office, always thinking that this would be the time I took back control. But I never did. I just implicated myself in my own abuse,” Nevils wrote.

The encounters made her feel “more and more like I was being drawn into quicksand, disappearing,” and “no amount of alcohol could make that fraudulent, invisible feeling bearable.”

“Until I reported Matt, I probably told about 10 or 12 people sanitized, idealized versions of what happened, never suggesting that it had been anything other than my choice,” Nevils wrote. She said after telling friends, their faces would go “pale.” They advised her that she “had to get out of” NBC.

“It would take years — and a national reckoning with sexual harassment and assault — before I called what happened to me assault,” she continued.

Nevils reported Lauer after she learned that “at least two teams of reporters from two different publications, Variety and the Times,” were looking into the news anchor. She said she knew it was a “matter of time” before her experiences came to light, and she “had no idea what to do,” but ended up reporting him.

Afterwards, she worked at NBC for “a few more months before taking a leave of absence that would ultimately prove permanent.”

“I barely recognized the train wreck I’d become,” she said of the time after she reported the complaint. “I was compulsive, paranoid, and drinking all the time. I felt I’d ruined everything, hurt and embarrassed everyone I loved. Soon I would find myself in a psych ward, believing myself so worthless and damaged that the world would be better off without me.”

Nevils is now happily married with “two beautiful children,” and has “painstakingly rebuilt my life” since leaving NBC nine years ago.

“Every moment with my family is a precious piece of the life that I once believed I no longer deserved to live,” she wrote, referring to the period of time when she was suicidal.

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The first time Nevils shared her story in her own words was in 2019, in Ronan Farrow’s book Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators. Farrow wrote in the book that Nevils had “attempted suicide” in the two years that had passed since Lauer was fired, and had “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-month period,” Farrow wrote of Nevils.

In the book, Nevils wrote that she “lost everything I cared about” as a result of the alleged rape and the aftermath of reporting Lauer.

Several other women came forward with allegations against Lauer after Nevils filed a complaint, and he broke his silence on the allegations in a statement that was read by his former colleagues on air. “Some of what is being said about me is untrue or mischaracterized, but there is enough truth in these stories to make me feel embarrassed and ashamed,” the statement said.

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 to rainn.org.