Chapter 1: What events led to Brooke Nevils' confrontation with Matt Lauer?
This week on Consider This, ICE agents in Minnesota now reporting to Tom Homan, the architect of the president's family separation policy. Who does Homan report to? Up until now, it's been Stephen Miller, but I think the administration is seeing how much trouble listening to Miller has gotten them in when it comes to public opinion.
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This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley. Before we get started, a heads up that today's interview includes a discussion of sexual assault. It's been eight years since Matt Lauer was fired from NBC at the height of the Me Too movement. In the years since, public attention has shifted, and some of the men who were forced out during the reckoning are beginning to test whether there's a way back.
According to reports, Matt Lauer is one of them. Today, we're hearing from one of the women whose allegations helped bring his career to an end. For 20 years, Lauer was the most trusted man in morning television.
Hundreds gathered outside of Rockefeller Center in New York each morning for a glimpse of him and his co-hosts, while millions more watched at home as he sat on the Today Show couch, interviewing presidents, celebrities, and everyday Americans. At the height of his power, NBC paid him $25 million a year, more than any other news anchor in the country.
But behind the scenes, there were complaints, rumors, and an atmosphere of fear. In his 2019 book, Catch and Kill, journalist Ronan Farrow documented a pattern in which Lauer pursued women on staff at NBC over the course of decades.
One of those women was Brooke Nevels, who was in her late 20s and working with former Today Show co-anchor Meredith Vieira on NBC's coverage of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia. According to her account, first reported by Farrow, one night after drinks with colleagues at a hotel bar, she went to Lauer's room. There, she says, he sexually assaulted her, an allegation Lauer denies.
Nevels did not report what she says happened at the time. She has said that she was terrified of Lauer's power and of what coming forward could mean for her career. But as the Me Too movement gained momentum following the public downfall of Harvey Weinstein, Nevels went to human resources and Lauer was fired.
now nearly a decade since she came forward about the alleged assault, Brooke Nevels is telling her story in her own words, in a new memoir called Unspeakable Things, Silence, Shame, and the Stories We Choose to Believe. Brooke Nevels, welcome to Fresh Air. Thank you so much for having me.
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Chapter 2: How did the Me Too movement influence Brooke's decision to come forward?
And those were actually words that you yourself used at certain points throughout the years before you came to understand. When did your understanding of what happened start to shift? In the aftermath of a sexual assault, yes.
Which is a loss of power and control. That's really what it is. You realize that you are powerless and something scary is happening and you're trying to cling to whatever control you have. So part of reclaiming that control is telling yourself it wasn't that bad. It was a misunderstanding. It was anything but the devastating thing that is a sexual assault.
And in my particular situation, the power differential was as extreme as it could possibly be. When your job is to work with the talent, when these are people who have to be kept happy, who their opinion of you can make or break your career, annoying them can mean you're never allowed on a set again. That changes the dynamic of every single interaction that you have.
And another part of that is that any attention that they give you, professionally, you feel is a positive thing that you are lucky to get. And people who are in power know they're in power. That's something that they wield every single day.
So when you're a person in power and you ask someone less powerful to do something, you have the responsibility to think about whether they are able to say no, whether they will feel comfortable saying no, whether they can be penalized for saying no. And we always talk about fight or flight, but the most common reaction to being scared or nervous is freezing. It's called tonic immobility.
And we go back and we blame ourselves for that. Why did I just freeze? Why didn't I say anything? Why was I so complacent? Why was I being so deferential? Well, you're doing that as a way of trying to maintain control.
I want to get back to the language thing a little bit because I think it's just really important. You spend a lot of time on it in the book. And I bring up what Matt said happened because he continually refers to it as an affair. For some time, you talked about it as an affair. But when you read the story from your point of view... It wasn't even transactional.
There was nothing romantic about it. There wasn't even anything. It didn't even read like a hookup where there are two people who mutually agree. We're going to just meet and have this, you know, this liaison that we have. You talked about the difference between consent and agreement. And can you explain that distinction?
Because I think it's at the heart of why these cases are so confusing to people.
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Chapter 3: What challenges did Brooke face after reporting the assault?
They're not freighted places the way they are in other industries.
You do work there when you're out on assignment.
Yeah, you work there. But when someone asks you to go who has power over you, you're thinking about the consequences of saying, no, I don't want to make this weird. I So you just go. And are you really empowered in that situation? I don't think that you are.
Our guest today is Brooke Nevels. Her new memoir is Unspeakable Things. Silence, shame, and the stories we choose to believe. We'll be right back after a short break. I'm Tanya Mosley, and this is Fresh Air.
This week on the NPR Politics Podcast. For months, the president's immigration strategy has been on full display. Now some Republicans are having a hard time defending it. Yeah, I think that's a good weather vane for where the politics are headed in all of this. Cracks in the MAGA coalition. This week on the NPR Politics Podcast. Listen on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.
You went to Meredith Vieira, who had been your boss for many years, and she told you to go to HR with a lawyer. And you did that also knowing what reporting would cost you. You couldn't live with this anymore. You felt like you were a fraud. You were drowning in your own addiction.
Yes.
But you also describe it as committing career suicide, that your career in this industry that you had grown up wanting to be a part of was essentially over. And you decided to do it anyway.
Yeah, when I made that complaint, I mean, I knew who Matt Lauer was. I knew what he meant to the company. I knew what the Today Show meant to millions of millions of people because I was one of those people. It meant the world to me. I knew what NBC meant to me. It was my family. It was my identity. And I knew I was breaking a sort of code, you know, by speaking up.
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