Brooke Nevils is speaking publicly about her experiences involving former Today show anchor Matt Lauer in a new memoir — but she says she’s uneasy about what releasing the book could mean for her family.
Nevils, a former NBC employee who accused Lauer of rape that she says occurred in his hotel room during the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, has written a book titled Unspeakable Things: Silence, Shame, and the Stories We Choose to Believe. The memoir, out Feb. 3, focuses on the fallout that followed her allegations. After Nevils reported Lauer, now 68, to NBC in 2017, he was fired within 24 hours.
In a recent interview on NPR’s Fresh Air podcast, Nevils said she has mixed feelings about the book’s release — especially when it comes to how it might affect her children in the future. (Nevils is now married and has two children.)
“It’s my job to prepare them for the hard things in life, and part of that is giving them the opportunity to learn from my mistakes, to be honest with them and say I wasn’t perfect — but I still didn’t deserve what happened to me,” she said, according to NPR.
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Nevils previously released an excerpt of the memoir with The Cut on Jan. 28. In it, she wrote that she is now happily married with “two beautiful children.” After leaving NBC, where she worked as a prime-time news producer, she said she “painstakingly rebuilt my life.”
“Every moment with my family is a precious piece of the life that I once believed I no longer deserved to live,” she wrote in the excerpt.
Another detail shared in the excerpt was that Nevils spent time in a psychiatric ward following what she alleges happened in 2014.
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She wrote that she “barely recognized the train wreck I’d become” after reporting Lauer. “I was compulsive, paranoid, and drinking all the time. I felt I’d ruined everything, hurt and embarrassed everyone I loved. Soon I would find myself in a psych ward, believing myself so worthless and damaged that the world would be better off without me.”
After the allegations became public, NBC said in a statement: “Matt Lauer’s conduct was appalling, horrific and reprehensible, as we said at the time. That’s why he was fired within 24
