Matt Lauer: Former NBC host accused of raping colleague Brooke Nevils at 2014 Sochi Olympics

Allegations were made by Nevils in Ronan Farrow’s new book

Matt Lauer has been accused of rape by his former NBC colleague Brooke Nevils, whose complaint against him led to his firing from the Today show in 2017.

The full details of Nevils’s allegations are made public for the first time in Ronan Farrow’s new book, Catch and Kill.

In the book, seen by Variety, Nevils alleges that at the 2014 Sochi Olympics, Lauer anally raped her in his hotel room.

Lauer has denied the allegations in a statement, claiming the pair had consensual sex.

In 2018, Lauer previously denied allegations of assault, saying: “I fully acknowledge that I acted inappropriately as a husband, father and principal at NBC.

“However I want to make it perfectly clear that any allegations or reports of coercive, aggressive or abusive actions on my part, at any time, are absolutely false.”

According to Nevils’s account in the book, she went up to Lauer’s hotel room and he pushed her onto the bed, “flipping her over, asking if she liked anal sex”.

Farrow writes: “She said that she declined several times … [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?’ She told me she stopped saying no, but wept silently into a pillow.”

Nevils tells Farrow: “It was nonconsensual in the sense that I was too drunk to consent [and said] multiple times that I didn’t want to have anal sex.”

She said she had more sexual encounters with Lauer when they returned to New York, adding: “It was completely transactional. It was not a relationship.”

After Nevils reported her ordeal to NBC executives, Lauer was eventually fired.

A statement from NBC News, read out during Wednesday’s Today show, said: “Matt Lauer’s conduct was appalling, horrific and reprehensible, as we said at the time. That’s why he was fired within 24 hours of us first learning of the complaint. Our hearts break again for our colleague.”

Catch and Kill is published on 15 October.