On Wednesday evening, Matt Lauer’s rape accuser Brooke Nevils ripped the former NBC daytime news host’s open letter defense, accusing him of “victim blaming.”
“There’s a Matt Lauer that millions of Americans watched on TV every morning for two decades. And there is the Matt Lauer who this morning attempted to bully a former colleague into silence,” Nevils wrote in the statement to NBC News, according to Page Six.
“His open letter was a case study in victim blaming. I am not afraid of him now regardless of his threats, bullying, and the shaming and predatory tactics I knew he would and now has tried to use against me,” the accuser added.
Nevils’ rape allegation against Lauer hit the press earlier on Wednesday. Nevils, a former NBC News employee herself, told journalist Ronan Farrow she was anally raped by Lauer in 2014 while covering the Sochi Olympics.
After socializing at a hotel bar with Lauer and then-“Today” anchor Meredith Vieira, Nevils said she went to Lauer’s room to get back her press credentials, which she said were taken by Lauer as a joke. She then returned to his room a second time upon his invite, when the alleged rape took place.
“Once she was in his hotel room, Nevils alleges, Lauer — who was wearing a T-shirt and boxers — pushed her against the door and kissed her. He then pushed her onto the bed, ‘flipping her over, asking if she liked anal sex,’ Farrow writes. ‘She said that she declined several times,'” the Variety report said.
Nevils claims she “was in the midst of telling him she wasn’t interested again when he ‘just did it,'” Farrow wrote in his book “Catch and Kill.”
“Lauer, she said, didn’t use lubricant. The encounter was excruciatingly painful. ‘It hurt so bad. I remember thinking, Is this normal?’ She told me she stopped saying no, but wept silently into a pillow,” the book claimed.
“It was nonconsensual in the sense that I was too drunk to consent,” the former NBC employee told Farrow. “It was nonconsensual in that I said, multiple times, that I didn’t want to have anal sex.”
Nevils admitted that she had consensual — though she described them as “transactional” — sexual encounters with Lauer, some of which she initiated, after the alleged rape took place.
Lauer flatly denied the rape allegation in a fiery open letter, saying Nevils’ accusations “defy common sense.” He also noted that his past silence on the matter was “a mistake.”
“Over the past two years people have asked why I have not spoken out to defend myself more vigorously against some of the false and salacious allegations leveled at me,” Lauer wrote in the letter, which was released by his lawyers and published by The Hollywood Reporter. “It is a fair question and the answer is deeply personal. Despite my desire to set the record straight and confront the individuals making false allegations, I wanted nothing less than to create more headlines my kids would read and a new gathering of photographers at the end of our driveway. So I decided to just stay quiet and work on repairing my relationship with the people I love. It has been the most important full-time job I have ever had.”
“But my silence has been a mistake,” he continued. “Today, nearly two years after I was fired by NBC, old stories are being recycled, titillating details are being added, and a dangerous and defamatory new allegation is being made. All are being spread as part of a promotional effort to sell a book. It’s outrageous. So, after not speaking out to protect my children, it is now with their full support I say ‘enough.'”
Related: READ IT: Matt Lauer’s Open Letter Slams Accusers: ‘My Silence Has Been A Mistake’