Ronan Farrow’s new book “Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators” will be available for purchase on October 15th but many journalists have already gotten their hands on the damaging book prior so we already know the most explosive bits.
For instance, we learn Harvey Weinstein went to extraordinary lengths in order to silence Farrow’s October 2017 New Yorker piece that exposed him as an alleged sexual predator. But maybe the biggest bombshell was an accusation that NBC “Today” show’s Matt Lauer raped a colleague at the Sochi Olympics in 2014.
And here’s the inside scoop of the “heated” NBC meeting following Matt Lauer’s rape accusation was made public.
Ronan Farrow’s new book “Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators,” which hits bookshelves on Tuesday, has an exclusive interview with NBC employee Brooke Nevils where she reveals Lauer anally raped her in his hotel room at the 2014 Sochi Olympics.
According to Nevils, she was having drinks at the hotel bar with “Today” co-anchor Meredith Vieira when they bumped into Lauer and he joined them.
Nevils admits that by end of the night, she was intoxicated after consuming five shots of vodka and ended up going to Lauer’s room twice that evening. She claims Lauer was wearing a T-shirt and boxers – pushed his body against hers and forcibly kissed Nevils. He pushed her onto the bed “flipping her over, asking if she liked anal sex.”
Nevils says she “was in the midst of telling him she wasn’t interested again when he ‘just did it.’ Lauer, she said, didn’t use lubricant. The encounter was excruciatingly painful. ‘It hurt so bad. I remember thinking, Is this normal?’”
Farrow also alleges in his new book that there was a massive cover-up to keep Lauer’s accusation from getting out. And he even goes into detail about how Weinstein attempted to squash Farrow’s story by essentially extorting NBC executives that he had damaging information on Lauer.
Once details about Farrow’s upcoming book were revealed, there was apparently a “disastrous” and “heated” meeting at NBC last Thursday morning. Page Six reports that senior correspondents allegedly “attacked” news chief Noah Oppenheim.
The source says that a staffer aggressively pressured Oppenheim into revealing Nevils’ use of the word “assault” in her Human Resources report in 2017.
Oppenheim pushed back saying Nevils had a right to privacy and the source claimed he said, “confidentiality is not something that I am ever going to breach, not only for her sake. The whole point of that is so she can tell her story whenever, however she chooses to and she is doing so now, I think that is appropriate.”
Then the source claimed, “Everyone laughed at him.” A staffer replied, “Pretty sure she’s waived that right. We deserve answers from you.”
Of course, staffers have a right to know. To think otherwise is unbelievably obtuse. This is their livelihoods.
A different source said, “It was very contentious. People want answers. People are demanding answers. They want to know what she told NBC to begin with. Was it rape?”
Lauer has emphatically denied the accusation and, to be fair, Nevils admitted to continuing to have consensual sex with Lauer after the alleged rape in Sochi.
