“Oh my God, Katherine. Oh my God.” Terry always called me Katherine.
“What the hell, Frances?” I always called her Frances.
We sat on the phone and compared notes on the Matt we knew.
“He was always so sweet to me,” she said. “When I needed money to finish a documentary I was working on, he sent me a check. No questions asked; he didn’t want any credit. He just did it.”
I reached out to Jennie Thompson, who’d produced a slew of great stories for me, especially during the Olympics.
“Jennie,” I said, “did you know this side of Matt? This super-sleazy side?”
“No, never,” she said. “I remember whenever we flew back to New York after a long trip, he got a cab for me and made sure I was taken care of. He didn’t have to bother with that. He was always such a gentleman.”
There was still a part of me that wondered if it was just a rumor running wild. Preposterous stories were regular tabloid fodder, like the photoshopped tabloid cover years ago that featured me, Jay, and Matt under the giant headline “Caught in a Love Triangle!”
Incriminating footage would start to surface. TMZ unearthed a piece of video from Andy Cohen’s show Watch What Happens Live where he asks me what Matt’s most annoying habit was during our time as co-anchors.
“He pinched me on the ass a lot,” I say.
I thought it was pretty obvious that I was joking, given our sibling dynamic on-air. But the clip went viral, and so did one of Matt sitting on the sofa during a commercial break, eyeing Meredith as she leans in to grab a script from the coffee table in front of him. Says Matt casually, “Keep bending over like that, it’s a nice view.”
But nothing cast Matt in a promiscuous light quite like his 2008 Friars Club roast. Martha Stewart starts things off with “I hear NBC executives call Matt ‘the Cock of the Rock.’” I do a Letterman-like top-ten list. Number ten: According to his wife, he’s not really an early riser, if you know what I mean. Number two: He loves to eat Curry. The ballroom at the New York Hilton erupts; Ann blanches. “What? Indian food! What’s wrong with you people?”
It was pretty raunchy—uncomfortably so in places, but standard fare for a roast. And it only got raunchier when Matt stepped up to the podium. Now, as people pored over every Matt-related clip and utterance with forensic intensity, two of his lines suggested to some that he had sex-with-co-workers on the brain.
Referring to my on-air colonoscopy he cracked, “Let me just say I saw that colon a lot before the rest of you saw it.” And later: “What’s with all the small-dick jokes?…It’s fun to look over and see Ann Curry laughing—like she doesn’t know how big my dick is.” Oh God.
Meanwhile, some of Matt’s interviews, which might have seemed merely flirty at the time, suddenly felt skeevy. During a sit-down with Anne Hathaway following a really unfortunate up-skirt paparazzo shot, he said with a touch of lasciviousness, “Seen a lot of you lately.” Talking to Sandra Bullock about The Proposal, Matt seemed less flirty than horny when he couldn’t stop mentioning her semi-nude scenes: “You’re naked for most of this movie!” he said. And “Did I mention you have a nude scene in this movie?,” adding that he’d made it his screen saver.
Taken together, the salacious snippets painted a damning portrait of Matt—but it just wasn’t how I saw him. All I could hope was that more information would come to help me understand exactly what he had done.
November 29, 2017
ME—12:16 P.M.
Matt,
I am crushed. I love you and care about you deeply. I am here. Please let me know if you want to talk. There will be better days ahead.
Love,
Katie
MATT—4:15 P.M.
??
92
Hero to Zero
THE IRONY WASN’T LOST on me that I was in LA investigating the mistreatment of women in the workplace. But it was hard to focus. An hour or so after I’d reached out to Matt, a friend forwarded an article in Variety:
As the co-host of NBC’s Today, Matt Lauer once gave a colleague a sex toy as a present. It included an explicit note about how he wanted to use it on her, which left her mortified. On another day, he summoned a different female employee to his office and dropped his pants, showing her his penis. After the employee declined to do anything, visibly shaken, he reprimanded her for not engaging in a sexual act.
Jesus, Matt…
The allegations were part of Variety’s two-month investigation. The piece included the reason Matt was fired: an NBC employee had gone to management with a complaint about “inappropriate sexual conduct” that started at the Sochi Olympics in 2014 and went on for months.