Brooke Nevils Details Lauer Assault in New Memoir

Brooke Nevils, a former NBC News producer, has detailed her allegations of sexual assault against Matt Lauer in a forthcoming memoir, offering new insights into an encounter that led to the anchor's firing nearly a decade ago. The book, titled Unspeakable Things: Silence, Shame, and the Stories We Choose to Believe, is set for release in February 2026 and recounts events from 2014 during the Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, where Nevils was working as a producer.

Nevils describes waking up in her hotel room the morning after drinking with colleagues, including Lauer, to find blood on her underwear and sheets. She alleges that Lauer anally raped her while she was intoxicated and had repeatedly said no to the act. "It hurt to walk. It hurt to sit. It hurt to remember," Nevils writes in an excerpt. Initially, she struggled to identify the incident as assault, viewing it instead as "weird and humiliating" amid the power imbalance: Lauer was NBC's highest-paid anchor, earning a reported $25 million annually, and she was abroad in Russia, surrounded by colleagues.

Several factors complicated her response at the time, according to the memoir. Nevils notes the challenges of reporting...