Former NBC journalist says she was raped by Matt Lauer in Sochi hotel room

Lauer, 61, was not fired until 2017.

Nevils said she ran into Lauer while she was having drinks at their hotel bar with former Today anchor Meredith Vieira, who’d been brought back to the show for Olympics coverage. Nevils said she had six shots of vodka by the end of the night and went to Lauer’s hotel room twice — once to retrieve her press credentials and then later when he invited her back.

Nevils alleged that Lauer, wearing a T-shirt and boxers, pushed her against the door and kissed her. He then forced her on the bed “flipping her over, asking if she liked anal sex,” Farrow wrote. “She said that she declined several times.”

Nevils “was in the midst of telling him she wasn’t interested again 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 she stopped saying no, but wept silently into a pillow,” Farrow wrote.

Lauer then asked Nevils if she liked it, and she said yes. She bled for days after, she told Farrow.

“It was nonconsensual in the sense that I was too drunk to consent,” she told Farrow. “It was nonconsensual in that I said, multiple times, that I didn’t want to have anal sex.”

When the two returned to New York City they had more “sexual encounters.” Nevils told Farrow that she continued seeing Lauer because was scared of what he could do to her career.

After the encounters stopped, Nevils said she told “like a million people” about the situation, including her superiors. She then moved to NBC’s Peacock Productions to be a producer “and reported it to one of her new bosses there.”

As the #MeToo movement was gaining steam, Nevils told Vieira what happened. Vieira, who was distraught, urged Nevils to go to NBC Universal human resources with a lawyer.

Nevils said she was then bullied at work by colleagues who were loyal to Lauer. She went on medical leave in 2018 and was paid “seven figures,” according to Farrow.

Lauer — who shares son Jack, 18, daughter Romy, 16, and son Thijs, 12, with ex-wife Annette Roque — denied that he raped Nevils, referring to their first encounter in Sochi as the beginning of an extramarital affair.

“I had an extramarital affair with Brooke Nevils in 2014. It began when she came to my hotel room very late one night in Sochi, Russia. We engaged in a variety of sexual acts. We performed oral sex on each other, we had vaginal sex, and we had anal sex. Each act was mutual and completely consensual,” he said in a letter published by Variety.

“Brooke now says that she was terrified about the control I had over her career and felt pressure to agree to our encounters after Sochi. But at no time during our relationship did Brooke work for me, the Today Show, or NBC News. She worked for Meredith Vieira (who had not worked for the Today Show in several years) in a completely different part of the network, and I had no role in reviewing Brooke’s work.”

Other women have also alleged sexual misconduct by Lauer, including that he gave an NBC staffer a sex toy, that he had sex with a woman in his office, and that he exposed himself to a woman asking her to touch him.

Today hosts Savannah Guthrie and Hoda Kotb were emotional discussing the allegation Wednesday.

“This is shocking and appalling. I honestly don’t even know what to say about it,” Guthrie said. “It wasn’t easy for our colleague Brooke to come forward then. It’s not easy now. We support her and any women who come forward with claims.”

“They’re not allegations of an affair. They’re allegations of a crime,” Kotb said. “Our thoughts are with Brooke.”