Catch and Kill

by Ronan Farrow

  But she also said she lived in terror of Lauer jeopardizing her career and that the encounters caused anguish and shame that eventually prompted her to break up with her boyfriend. She said that she successfully avoided the encounters for several months. But ultimately, she found she had to interact with Lauer for professional reasons. In September 2014, when Vieira was decorating her talk show set with photos from colleagues, Lauer’s assistant told Nevils to come to Lauer to collect his pictures. At 9:30 a.m., in the little secondary office over the Today show studio where he and I had sometimes met, he pointed at an electronic photo frame Savannah Guthrie had given him, set on a deep ledge in front of the window. “It’s on there,” he told her. She had to bend over the ledge to reach it. She said that, as she shuffled through the photos and emailed them to herself, he grabbed her hips and fingered her. She told me that she was just trying to do her job. “I just went numb. In my internal narrative I failed because I didn’t say no.” Nevils bruises easily. Lauer left dark purple marks where he’d forced her legs open. Crying, she ran to the new guy she’d started seeing, a producer who was working in the control room that morning, and told him what had happened.

  That November, she volunteered to put together a goodbye video for her ex-boyfriend, who was leaving a job at the network. Such videos were a common gesture for departing employees, and usually featured well-wishes from talent. When she asked Lauer for his, he told her to come to his office to record it herself. When she arrived, she said, he told her to go down on him. “I was really upset. I felt terrible,” she told me. “I was trying to do this nice thing, and I had to give Matt a blow job to get him to film a goodbye video. I just felt sick.” She recalled asking, “Why do you do this?” and Lauer replying, “Because it’s fun.”

  The sexual encounters stopped after that. She said that once, a month later, as she was grappling with depression and felt fearful about where she stood with him, she sent him a text asking if he was in New York. He replied saying he was not.

  Nevils told “like a million people” about Lauer. She told her inner circle of friends. She told colleagues and superiors at NBC. As in so many of the stories I’d reported on, Nevils told some of them a partial story, skipping over some details. But she was never inconsistent, and she made the seriousness of what had happened clear. When she moved to a new job within the company, working as a producer for Peacock Productions, she reported it to one of her new bosses there. She felt they should know, in case it became public and she became a liability. This was no secret.

  And then, for several years, nothing happened. She didn’t know about the pattern of harassment allegations within the company, or the payouts and other appeasements that had concealed them. She didn’t know that control of Peacock Productions, specifically, had once been handed over to Corvo’s accuser.

  “If the Weinstein accusers hadn’t talked to you, I never would have said a word,” Nevils told me. “I saw myself in those stories. And when you see the worst part of your life in the pages of The New Yorker, it changes your life.” As the momentum around the Weinstein story accelerated, colleagues started asking Nevils questions about Lauer. Over drinks, one Today show colleague inquired about how much Nevils appeared to have changed. Nevils, previously as confident and outspoken as her grade-school report cards had projected, had withdrawn. She’d passed up work opportunities, fearing her experiences with Lauer would come up if she stuck her neck out. She started drinking heavily. After years of orienting her life around long-term committed relationships, she fell in and out of them.

  Nevils told the Today show colleague everything. “This is not your fault,” Nevils remembered the colleague saying, bursting into tears. “And trust me, you’re not alone.” The colleague had her own experience with Lauer, and professional fallout from it afterward. The colleague told Nevils she had to tell Vieira. And soon Nevils was at Vieira’s apartment, recounting the whole story again. “It’s Matt, isn’t it?” Vieira asked, at the outset of the conversation. “I was thinking about it and he was the only one who had enough power over you to do that.” Vieira was distraught. She blamed herself for not doing more to protect Nevils, and feared there were more victims. “Think of all the other women I’ve gotten jobs there,” Vieira said. Nevils just kept apologizing.

  Both women knew how far the network would go to shield its top talent. But Nevils felt she had to do something to protect other women. Vieira said if she was going to do anything, she should file a formal report with NBC’s office of human resources. And that’s how, in November 2017, Nevils found a lawyer, and wound up sitting with him opposite two women from NBCUniversal, telling the whole story.

  She asked for, and was promised, anonymity. But she left out nothing. She disclosed the ongoing contact afterward but made it clear it was no affair. She described the incident in detail, making it clear that she’d been too drunk to consent and that she’d said no to Lauer’s request for anal sex repeatedly. She was still early in her process of reliving the trauma—she didn’t use the word “rape” that day. But she described one, unambiguously. Her attorney, Ari Wilkenfeld, paused the proceedings at one point to reiterate that the interaction was not consensual. One of the representatives from NBC replied that they understood, though later the network would say that it had reached no official conclusion on the matter. Stephanie Franco, the NBCUniversal lawyer who had placed the call reminding Lonner’s attorney of the enforceability of her settlement, was present for the meeting.

  At work a few days later, when Nevils learned that Lack and Oppenheim were emphasizing that the incident hadn’t been “criminal” or an “assault,” she left her desk, walked to the nearest bathroom, and threw up. Her distress deepened as articles to which NBC’s communications team contributed began labeling the incident an “affair.” Angry letters began flooding her attorney’s office. “Shame on you for throwing your cunt at a married man,” read one.

  Nevils’s work life became torture. She was made to sit in the same meetings as everyone else, discussing the news, and in all of them, colleagues loyal to Lauer cast doubt on the claims, and judgment on her. In a Dateline staff meeting, Lester Holt asked skeptically, “Does the punishment fit the crime?” Soon, colleagues were averting their eyes in the hallways. After the items characterizing the relationship as an affair, her boyfriend at the time became sharply less supportive, asking her, “How could you?” NBC management had turned her into a pariah. “You need to know that I was raped,” she told a friend. “And NBC lied about it.”

  The network appeared to be doing little to protect Nevils’s identity. Lack announced that the incident had taken place in Sochi, narrowing the potential complainants to a small group of women on that trip with close proximity to Lauer. A member of the communications staff identified Nevils by name in conversations with colleagues. Sources familiar with the matter later said that Kornblau had warned that member of his team not to do so. Wilkenfeld publicly accused NBC of outing Nevils. “They know exactly what they’ve done and they need to stop,” he said.

  Nevils hadn’t initially asked for money. She’d wanted to do right by other women, then carry on with a job she loved. But as public scrutiny of the story and of Nevils mounted, NBC offered her one year’s salary to depart and sign a nondisclosure agreement. Nevils felt her reputation had been damaged. She was grappling with losing both the job she loved and the possibility of finding future employment. She threatened to sue the network, and a protracted and punishing negotiation commenced. Sources familiar with the talks said that lawyers working with the network argued that Nevils’s distress flowed from her mother’s death and was unrelated to the alleged assault. In the end, her lawyer told her not to mention grief to her therapist, fearing NBC might subpoena her therapy records. The network would later deny that it made the threat or raised her mother’s death. As the negotiations stretched over the course of 2018, Nevils took medical leave. Eventually, she was hospitalized for post-traumatic stress and alcohol abuse.

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sp; In the end, NBC wanted the problem gone. It offered Nevils a growing settlement sum—seven figures, finally, in exchange for her silence. The network proposed a script she would have to read, suggesting that she had left to pursue other endeavors, that she was treated well, and that NBC News was a positive example of how to handle sexual harassment. The sources familiar with the talks said that the network initially sought to include a clause that would have prevented Nevils from talking to other Lauer accusers, but Nevils pushed back. The network later denied they’d pressed for the provision.

  Lawyers closed ranks and pushed Nevils to take the offer, as they had with Gutierrez and so many other women. For Comcast, the sum was a rounding error. For Nevils, it was a matter of survival. She surveyed the professional future she had lost, and the damage she felt the network had done to her reputation, and felt she didn’t have a choice. NBC took the extraordinary step of having not only Nevils but also her lawyer and others close to her sign away their right to ever speak about the network.

  CHAPTER 57:

  SPIKE

  The allegations about Lauer weren’t the only ones emerging. From the first days after the Weinstein story broke, NBC had been buffeted by allegations about men in its upper echelons. Shortly after the first New Yorker story about Weinstein, the network fired Mark Halperin, MSNBC and NBC News’s most prominent political analyst, after five women told CNN he had been harassing or assaulting women in the workplace—grabbing, exposing himself, rubbing an erection against one woman—dating back to his days at ABC more than a decade earlier.

  Days later, NBC fired Matt Zimmerman, the senior vice president of booking at the Today show and a close confidant of Lauer’s, for sleeping with two underlings. Less than a month after the Lauer story broke, multiple outlets reported that the network had paid an assistant producer $40,000 in 1999, after she raised a verbal harassment allegation against Chris Matthews, one of MSNBC’s biggest stars.

  More news followed. There had been the large-scale payout to David Corvo’s accuser during his involvement in the Weinstein story. And there was a more startling claim that shook me personally: three women had accused Tom Brokaw of unwanted advances, many years earlier. These weren’t claims of assault. But coworkers, at times young ones, beginning their careers, as he was at the apex of his, said he’d propositioned them and that they’d felt frightened. Brokaw was furious, heartbroken, denied it all.

  Practically alone among the prominent figures of NBC News, Brokaw had objected to the killing of the Weinstein story. He’d told me how he’d protested to the network’s leadership. In one email to me, he called the killing of the story “NBC’s self inflicted wound.” But both things could be true. Tom Brokaw, a principled defender of a tough story, had also once been part of a network news culture that made women feel uncomfortable and unsafe, and left little room for accountability around its larger-than-life stars.

  Six, and then twelve, and then dozens of current and former employees gave me a similar account of a permissive atmosphere when it came to harassment by prominent men at the network. Several of the employees said that they believed the years-long pattern of settlements had allowed the behavior to continue. Some said that the problems had deepened under Andy Lack’s leadership. When Lack began his first tenure as president of NBC News, in the nineties, “it was a fundamental shift of, all of a sudden, a tolerance for abusive behavior, whether it was sexually harassing or it was just verbally abusive,” Linda Vester, who raised the first complaint about Brokaw, told me. “Degrading, humiliating talk, mainly to women. And that became the climate under Andy Lack. It was just—it was very stark.”

  All of the employees said that they were concerned about the effect the pattern of complaints and settlements had on the network’s coverage. That knock-on effect, said Vester, was one of Lack’s trademarks. “He would spike stories about women,” she told me. “And this happened routinely.”

  NBC was embattled. Over the course of 2018, investigative stories in the Washington Post, Esquire, and the Daily Beast described a culture of harassment at the network. As the Post prepared to report that Ann Curry had told NBC executives about Lauer sexually harassing women, Stephanie Franco, the same NBCUniversal employment attorney who had attended the meeting with Nevils, called Curry. Franco, as Curry recalled the conversation, wanted to know what she was telling the press. “It was really a call to try to intimidate me,” Curry said. “That was my impression.” Dismayed at what she took to be a focus on silencing her rather than addressing the sexual harassment problem at the network, she became direct. “You need to be taking care of these women,” Curry told Franco. “This is your job. You should be making sure these women are protected from this guy.”

  “I try to do that when they let me do it,” Franco said. Later, the internal report on Lauer would cite the call to Curry as part of its research. Curry said Franco made no mention of a report, and asked no questions about sexual harassment at the network.

  Several of the current and former employees recalled other instances in which the network appeared to be working to forestall disclosures. In one case, NBC hired as a paid contributor a reporter who had, until just before the hiring, been making calls to women at the network, inquiring about harassment. One of the women the reporter had contacted texted me: “Coverup.”

  No publication had circled the sexual harassment claims at the network, and the allegations against Lauer, more closely than the National Enquirer. Over the years, the tabloid had pursued Lauer’s accusers. In 2006, when Addie Collins was working as a local anchor in West Virginia, she came home to a stakeout: a reporter from the Enquirer approached, peppering her with questions about Lauer. After his firing, the tabloid focused on Nevils, whose name was not yet public. It was her résumé that had been attached to internal emails at AMI that I later reviewed. Soon after she registered her complaint, the Enquirer began calling Nevils’s colleagues and, eventually, Nevils herself.

  In May 2018, after the meeting in which Oppenheim and Harris tried to explain the internal investigation of Lauer to a skeptical investigative unit, William Arkin, one respected member of that unit, called me, troubled. He said that two sources, one connected to Lauer, the other within NBC, had told him that Weinstein had made it known to the network that he was aware of Lauer’s behavior and capable of revealing it. Two sources at AMI later told me they’d heard the same thing. NBC denied any threat was communicated.

  But there was no doubt that the allegations against Lauer, and NBC’s wider use of nondisclosure agreements with women who experienced harassment, were under threat of exposure during our reporting. That precarious culture of secrecy made NBC more vulnerable to Harvey Weinstein’s intimidation and enticement, delivered through lawyers, and intermediaries, and calls to Lack and Griffin and Oppenheim and Roberts and Meyer that the network initially concealed. That pattern of nondisclosure agreements and ongoing threats to enforce them was playing out as the network acquiesced to Weinstein’s argument that his own similar pacts were ironclad and couldn’t be reported on. And, as Weinstein huddled with Dylan Howard, all these secrets had been under threat. The Enquirer had pulled Lauer’s file, and called one NBC employee after another with questions about him, and begun to run articles that threatened the future of the star anchor, who had become synonymous with the network’s value.

  CHAPTER 58:

  LAUNDER

  Rich McHugh spent the year grappling with fallout from the story, too. In his meeting with Oppenheim, he’d declined to yield to the network president’s characterizations of the reporting, and watched Oppenheim grow agitated and curse at him, and wondered what the implications would be for his future. As he continued to speak up in the group meetings, McHugh said, “I was basically put on watch.” HR began to call, offering him a raise to stay and—he felt this, after the meeting with Oppenheim—sign onto the party line. On the other hand, the network reminded him that his contract was about to run out.

  “No one knows my name,” he
told me, sitting at the corner diner near my place on the Upper West Side. “They can say whatever they want about me. They can keep me from getting a job.”

  “Do what’s best for your girls,” I said.

  McHugh shook his head. “I don’t know if I can.” Bringing up the family was no use—it was the man’s conscientiousness about the world his daughters were stepping into that had prompted these fits of principle in the first place.

  In the end, he decided he couldn’t take the money. “I sat in the meetings while they lied to the rest of the people,” McHugh said. “Had to bite my tongue. And then decided not to.”

  A year after he was ordered to stand down on the Weinstein reporting, McHugh resigned. Then he gave an interview to the New York Times, saying that the reporting had been killed at “the very highest levels of NBC,” that he’d been ordered to stop taking calls about the story, and that the network had lied about what happened.

  Mark Kornblau and the NBC News public relations machine went apoplectic. Lack, resisting calls for independent review as he had in Lauer’s case, released to the press another self-report. I sat in one of the glassed-in offices at The New Yorker, and read his memo, and wasn’t sure what to make of it. Later, the network would acknowledge that it had conducted no fact-checking on the memo. Within hours of its release, many of the sources discussed in it had made public statements disputing its contents.