The morning after Sochi, Brooke Nevils woke up in a hotel room thousands of miles from home and immediately knew something was very, very wrong.
Her underwear and bedsheet, she writes, were 'caked with blood'. She hid the stained linen in a corner, balled up her underwear and threw it in the bin, desperate that the maid not see. Then came the pain — 'undeniable', constant. It hurt to walk. It hurt to sit. It hurt simply to remember.
Only years later, and after a global reckoning over sexual abuse and power, would she give that night its real name: rape.
The man she accuses is not a stranger in a corridor, but one of American television's most recognisable faces: formerTodayanchor Matt Lauer.
Nevils, once an NBC talent assistant, has laid out her account in a new memoir,Unspeakable Things: Silence, Shame, and the Stories We Choose to Believe. It is an uncomfortable title, and the details are worse.
Back in 2014, she had been in Sochi,Russia, for NBC's coverage of the Winter Olympics. One evening, she writes, she was sharing a glass of wine with her 'long-time boss and mentor', presenter Meredith Vieira, when Lauer joined them. Rounds of vodka shots followed. Nevils makes no attempt to hide the fact she was drunk.
From there, the now‑68‑year‑old anchor, she says, 'insist[ed] on having anal sex' back at her hotel. There is nothing coy in her telling. She describes pain, shock, the visceral physical aftermath she discovered the next morning — and how, at the time, she did not have the language or the safety to call it what it was.
In Sochi, there was no HR department on the next floor, no obvious route for a junior staffer to say her network's biggest male star had hurt her. So she did what many women did in the pre‑#MeToo era: she coped, she minimised, she tried to survive.
Lauer's version of events is aggressively different. When the allegations first surfaced in 2017, he insisted their encounters were 'completely consensual', describing Nevils as 'a fully enthusiastic and willing partner'. He has repeated that line since. To him, she says, what happened in Sochi was an affair. To her, it was assault.
Her book is, in many ways, an extended dismantling of that word.
Source: International Business Times UK
