Matt Lauer’s Accuser Complicates Her Story
· The Atlantic
This is the story that has been most commonly told about Brooke Nevils: While she was on assignment for NBC at the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics, the Today show host Matt Lauer joined her and his co-host Meredith Vieira at their hotel bar for drinks. Afterward, she ended up in Lauer’s room. There, she later alleged, he took advantage of their power imbalance and her inebriation to pressure her into nonconsensual sex. In 2017 she reported him to NBC; the network fired Lauer, their $20-million-a-year star anchor. News outlets later revealed other complaints against him. Lauer repeatedly denied wrongdoing, and in a 2019 letter, he asserted that their relationship was consensual and said, “I have never assaulted anyone or forced anyone to have sex. Period.”
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That’s the summary that quickly spread across tabloids and celebrity-news sites. Now Nevils has offered a more expanded account, one that she believes could help an observer gain some understanding of what might have happened in one of the most high-profile cases of the #MeToo era. But her new memoir, Unspeakable Things: Silence, Shame, and the Stories We Choose to Believe, also aims to complicate the story. Nevils agreed to go to Lauer’s hotel room, she writes, in part because she wanted to delete unflattering photos he’d taken of her at the bar. She woke up the next day, she writes, crusted in blood. She recalls that she did not “say no or stop” when Lauer took off her jeans, and eventually “gave up” when he asked for anal sex. Why? As a personal assistant to on-air talent, she says she had learned to “ignore so many basic personal boundaries,” to “do things you don’t personally want to do” and “pretend to enjoy things you do not personally enjoy.” She visited Lauer in New York afterward several times, and had further sexual encounters, she writes, because she wanted to avoid being “a victim” and instead become “a master” of her own fate.
For all of these allegations, Unspeakable Things is less a bombshell than a bomb squad—it wants to carefully separate the wires, to parse and defuse the inner machinery of this kind of scandal. Just as much an investigator as a memoirist, Nevils attempts to tunnel through the lurid details and the #MeToo boilerplate and unearth something much knottier. "My purpose here," she writes in a note at the beginning of the book, “is not to demand that you believe my side of the story without question, but instead to ask that you question all sides of your own beliefs about sexual harassment and assault.”
To that end, Nevils takes on several roles at once. She’s a seasoned journalist who brings to her book the research of more than 20 forensic psychologists, memory experts, scientists, attorneys, and authorities on sexual trauma. She sees herself as a sacrificial lamb, offering her own version of the story 12 years later, to provoke essential new conversations despite layers of pain. And she’s an accidental student, who began learning about sexual-assault myths in the psych ward where she spent 10 days after coming forward. Her big lesson? That rape and sexual-assault victims are more likely than not to behave in ways that would confound the average person, that stories that defy “common sense” are actually the norm, and that the jurors and journalists who weigh in on these cases do not have the full picture. All of this makes Unspeakable Things a particular type of #MeToo memoir, one in which the accuser implicates herself—not as complicit in any assault or harassment, but as fully human, and sometimes confounding even to herself.
[Read: Everything we know about rape is wrong]
Nevils lays out a variety of her own actions, during and after the event, that might baffle anyone who thinks they already understand the contours of #MeToo. When Lauer leaned to open the door to his room after their first encounter, she writes, she misread his body movements and hugged him. When he first kissed her, she admits, “even sober, I would have been flattered.” When he acted coldly toward her afterward, she worried that he was mad at her—and that the anger of “the Most Powerful Face in News” might tank her career—so she quickly tried to assure him, she writes, that she wouldn’t “be a problem.” For years after the incident, she says she told “sanitized” versions of the story, hinting that the two had had some kind of affair. She didn’t report it until a moment when many powerful men were being accused of terrible misdeeds.
After Nevils shares her own version of events, she shifts gears to offer a more general, though quite nuanced, education about sexual-assault myths. As one prominent researcher of violence against women tells her, “rape myths and common sense are the same thing.” (Nevils expresses discomfort with the term rape, though she uses it when discussing research.) She writes that women are often unlikely to behave as you might expect—to scream, to run, to call a friend, to use the word rape, to ask for a rape kit, to blame their attacker. Instead they might freeze, minimize the incident, avoid turning their body into a crime scene, revisit their attacker in an attempt to smooth things over. Just as rapists don’t all fit the image of, as Nevils puts it, “a man in a ski mask,” survivors do not necessarily act in preordained ways. As the forensic psychologist Veronique Valliere succinctly explained in her book Understanding Victims of Interpersonal Violence: “Victims do not expect to be attacked, so have no plan.” What they have instead is a series of instinctual responses to a wounding they might prefer to forget.
Nevils shares startling data to support these expert testimonies. The forensic psychiatrist Barbara Ziv, for instance, estimates that only about 30 percent of women fight back when being sexually assaulted by a stranger. Somewhere from 19 to 32 percent of victims have consensual sex with the perpetrator after an assault, according to a 2022 meta-analysis. And a study by Valliere found that “in 83 percent of cases, the people close to the offenders believed in their innocence, even when the offenders confessed or were caught in the act.”
With all of this in mind, Nevils regards the doubt that many people might feel about her story with a kind of forbearance bordering on the anthropological. In 2019, she spoke with the journalist Ronan Farrow for his book Catch and Kill, which investigated Harvey Weinstein, among others. After an excerpt of his book was leaked, she recalls, she “looked again and again at the comments online and asked myself—had none of this happened to me and I read these allegations, would I have believed me? I knew the answer was no. Even now, with everything I’ve learned, I still understand the hesitation.”
Although Unspeakable Things is a diary about the loss of control—after Sochi, Nevils began drinking heavily—it’s also an attempt to regain it. Nevils knows better than most the way that women in her position can be turned into paper dolls—flattened figures that are then covered up with flimsy constructions. She supplies a third dimension by dragging the reader, as she puts it, “into someone else’s ugly, irreconcilable conflict,” and then explaining why it looks so messy. The reader of Unspeakable Things isn’t being asked to play judge and jury, but to reexamine everything they think they know about sexual assault.
As Nevils explained in one recent interview, she now uses her husband’s last name, has left New York, and no longer works in television. If she hadn’t written this book, she might have been able to elude the tabloids, and the long arm of online search results, for the rest of her life. But Nevils is doing more than just unburdening herself. She is actually building scaffolding that other accusers—or anyone, really—can use to understand their own personal narratives. With that kind of structure, it might be possible to clamber up, take a look around, and see oneself from an unexpected point of view.