I was confused, and simply not ready to take on the role of sympathetic friend and colleague just yet.
93
Addie
December 14, 2017
MATT—3:36 A.M.
Tried you yesterday but went to voicemail. Give a ring when you can.
ME—8:45 A.M.
Hey was in Erie PA all day and have two shoots today. This afternoon? Around 5? Will that work for you?
MATT—8:46 A.M.
Yep
ME—8:49 A.M.
Ok great will call then.
MATT—9:10 A.M.
Have a good day
I was glad we’d finally nailed down a time.
That afternoon, a friend sent a link to another article in Variety. It was about a woman named Addie Zinone.
Addie.
Zinone was her married name. I knew her as Addie Collins.
Nearly two decades earlier, Addie, then a broadcast journalism major on scholarship at Temple University, had sent me a fax （remember those?）。 She said she loved the show, loved the profession, loved me, and wondered if she could shadow me for a day or however long to see what it was really like behind the camera.
“This is the kind of person we should be helping—she has no connections and she wrote to me out of the blue,” I said to my assistant, and asked her to call Addie.
She took a Greyhound bus from Philadelphia and found a cheap room through the Salvation Army. Addie’s day with us led to an internship, which led to production assistant jobs on a number of shows. I remember seeing her diligently handing out scripts and working late in the edit room—I was so proud of her.
Now I was reading that Addie had been one of Matt’s conquests. After four years at NBC, she’d been hired as a local anchor/reporter in her West Virginia hometown. Once he learned she had only a few weeks left at 30 Rock, he summoned her repeatedly to his dressing room, his office, a bathroom at the Staples Center in LA during the Democratic National Convention for wholly transactional sex. It nauseated me.
ME—5:59 P.M.
Let me call you in a few days
December 22, 2017
ME—6:42 P.M.
Hi you.
I’m sorry I haven’t been in touch. It’s been a bit confusing for me. How are you?
ME—7:08 P.M.
Can I call you tomorrow? I’m heading to Aspen in the am but will arrive tomorrow afternoon.
December 25, 2017
ME—2:26 P.M.
Merry Christmas Matt.
Hang in there. Xoxo.
January 2, 2018
ME—6:35 A.M.
Hey.
MATT—7:57 A.M.
Hi
ME—7:59 A.M.
Thinking of you
MATT—7:59 A.M.
Thank you
94
The Leon Trotsky of 30 Rock
I KNOW. I WAS a mess.
By this point, it seemed clear that Matt had done some terrible things. It was awful. And yet…it felt so heartless to abandon him, someone who’d been by my side, literally, for so many years. Reading these texts and seeing my halting efforts to connect, I feel as if I was trying to salvage my relationship with the Matt I thought I knew.
It had been more than a month since he was fired, and I had yet to say anything publicly. To some, my silence was deafening. Maybe even incriminating.
Finally, I gave a statement to People about how upsetting and disorienting this all was to me and that it didn’t reflect my experience with Matt. That way, every time I was asked about it, I could tell reporters I’d said what I had to say.
I truly had no interest in piling on. Already, Matt was the Leon Trotsky of 30 Rock: Photos of him had been taken down, his image had been scrubbed from social media and TODAY show retrospectives, his nameplate had been removed, his office demolished. It was as if Matt never existed.
In the karma-is-a-bitch department, Ann Curry resurfaced, revealing that she’d been approached by a tearful staffer about Matt’s sexual advances, which Ann then reported to NBC management. It made me wonder why no one had ever come to me.
FOR MONTHS, MATT’S fate was topic A. At dinners, the grocery store, Starbucks…everywhere I went, there were incredulous looks, opinions, fresh anecdotes. People shared stories about him testing the waters—even with the wives of friends—via text. One woman told me that after she and her boyfriend, a well-known TV journalist, had dinner with Matt and Annette, Matt started reaching out to her, asking if she’d like to bring her son to see his horses. No mention of the boyfriend. She found it bizarre and so not cool.
Jill Rappaport, who had dated Matt for several years in his single days, reminded me that during the course of their relationship, he cheated on her all the time, then wrote her apologetic letters saying he was “like two people.” As though his sexual appetite were beyond his control.