I don’t know Matt Lauer and I don’t care about him. He may be the biggest scumbag on earth for all I know, but when I see a rape accusation against a man with obvious, glaring inconsistencies in it, it bothers me that this whole thing is being made public.
Because just from what we know, we have a lot of reasons to doubt what his accuser, Brooke Nevils, has to say. The first is her explanation of how the rape happened. It’s not exculpatory for Lauer, but it does raise some serious questions.
She told Farrow that while in Sochi, she and former “Today” co-anchor Meredith Vieira were having drinks at a hotel bar when they ran into Lauer, who joined them.
The book details Nevils’ account of going to Lauer’s hotel room two times — once to retrieve her press credential, which she said Lauer had taken as a joke, and a second time after he invited her.
Nevils alleges Lauer pushed her against the door and kissed her, before forcing her on the bed and “flipping her over, asking if she liked anal sex,” the book says. Nevils reportedly “said that she declined several times,” according to Variety.
Nevils “was in the midst of telling him she wasn’t interested again when he ‘just did it,'” and it was not consensual, the book reportedly says. Lauer then asked Nevils if she liked it and she told him yes, the booked alleges.
“It was nonconsensual in the sense that I was too drunk to consent,” Nevils told Farrow, according to Variety. “It was nonconsensual in that I said, multiple times, that I didn’t want to have anal sex.”
So, she had been drinking with Lauer and he invited her back to his hotel room. This is the world’s most obvious code for “let’s have sex” and notice the weasel words she uses, “It was nonconsensual in the sense that I was too drunk to consent.” In other words, they were both drinking, he invited her back to his room and she willingly had sex with him, but in her mind, the consent doesn’t count because she was drunk. Was Matt Lauer drunk, too? If two drunk people willingly go somewhere with the intention of having sex, how can it be that one of them is a rapist if the other isn’t? That raises a lot of questions.
As to him raping her by forcing her to have anal, when you see what happened afterward, you have to question what she’s saying.
Nevils also told Farrow that she later had other sexual encounters with Lauer. Sources close to Lauer said she sometimes initiated contact, Farrow wrote.
She said she blames herself for those encounters and was terrified of the control Lauer had over her career, according to Variety.