Matt Lauer accuser Brooke Nevils details allegations in new essay Anna Kaufman, USA TODAY January 29, 2026 at 2:29 AM 22 Brooke Nevils, the onetime NBC talent assistant who accused Matt Lauer of sexual assault in 2017, is speaking out in a new personal essay. Nevils penned a piece for The Cut, published Jan. 28, recounting the night she alleges Lauer assaulted her, and the reason she felt it difficult to speak out.
- - Matt Lauer accuser Brooke Nevils details allegations in new essay
Anna Kaufman, USA TODAY January 29, 2026 at 2:29 AM
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Brooke Nevils, the onetime NBC talent assistant who accused Matt Lauer of sexual assault in 2017, is speaking out in a new personal essay.
Nevils penned a piece for The Cut, published Jan. 28, recounting the night she alleges Lauer assaulted her, and the reason she felt it difficult to speak out.
Describing the incident, Nevils said that while sharing a glass of wine with longtime anchor Meredith Vieira, she sat with Lauer at a hotel bar in Sochi, Russia, amid NBC's coverage of the Olympic Games.
"One strikingly clear thought crossed my mind and then was instantly struck from my consciousness: If anyone else had done this to me, I would have gone to the police," Nevils wrote of waking up in a hotel room in pain with blood on the sheets.
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"In the news business back then, his point of view was reality, and if you disagreed with it, you were wrong," she said of Lauer, who was then the longest-running host of the "Today" show with a reported multimillion dollar contract. Nevils went on to describe how trapped she felt, in a foreign country known for surveillance, with only other NBC employees and an NBC-employed doctor to consult.
"I was surrounded by people whose careers, like mine, were dependent upon Matt's success," she wrote. "Good quarterbacks have short memories, I told myself. Good soldiers fight another day. Good girls don't make a fuss."
USA TODAY has reached out to Lauer's lawyer and NBC for comment.
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Nevils alleged in the piece that Lauer, who was fired in 2017 after the allegations of sexual misconduct became public, forced her to have anal sex. Lauer, who faced multiple accusations, has maintained that the sexual encounter was consensual and denied wrongdoing. He has not faced any criminal charges.
Eager to smooth things over, Nevils alleged that she responded to some emails Lauer had sent to her, wanting to talk before they left Russia. He did not write back, but suggested over phone that they meet in New York, she said. When they did, she alleged he suggested they meet at his apartment.
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"It wasn't like I could say 'no' to Matt Lauer, sitting in his dressing room at Studio 1A in Rockefeller Plaza. It was another trap, and I walked right into it," she wrote. "I left feeling not trapped but triumphant."
She did go to meet him at his apartment, Nevils confirmed, recalling that he offered her a drink but was not imbibing himself. "The shame flooded over me as I drank, realizing uncomfortably late that Matt was not drinking anything at all but watching me intently, the way a parent administers medicine to a child," she wrote. She alleged that he again coerced her into sex.
Weaving in quotes for psychologists, Nevils detailed the ways in which a victim of rape can try to right the relationship with the perpetrator to avoid confronting reality. She did as much with Lauer, she wrote, meeting with him several more times thinking "this would be the time I took back control," but ultimately feeling she had "implicated myself in my own abuse."
"These situations are rarely perfect binaries. It's not an either/or between Matt as a monster or me as innocent. Some of Matt's behavior was innocuous," she wrote. "Some of mine — the countless lies and daily betrayals of people I loved to stay in Matt's good graces — was monstrous, however valid my reasons for it."
When Nevils found out that there were reporters looking into Lauer amid the #MeToo movement, she wrote that she became anxious. "I was no Ashley Judd or Gretchen Carlson," she says, referencing two major accusers of the era. "I was just one woman and nobody's ideal victim. I'd done everything wrong." After submitting a complaint to NBC, Lauer was fired, Nevils writes, and she ultimately took a leave of absence.
"Soon I would find myself in a psych ward, believing myself so worthless and damaged that the world would be better off without me," she wrote. "I didn't feel at all like a survivor. I felt like an idiot, set up to fail from the beginning."
In 2019, Nevils called Lauer's response to her allegations a "case study in victim blaming."
Nevils said she is now writing a book about sexual assault that she wishes she had in the aftermath of her own rape. She has rebuilt her life, gotten married and had children, she said, but she still sees a workplace that is imperfect.
"The process of coming forward is still, broadly speaking, nightmarishly complicated and often self-defeating," she wrote. "The number of sexual assaults that are ever reported, investigated, and prosecuted is still comparatively small."
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Matt Lauer accuser Brooke Nevils recounts assault in The Cut essay
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Published: January 28, 2026 at 04:45PM on Source: PRIME TIME
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