A few months after his demise, I reached out to Addie when I was in LA. She was living in Southern California, where she had moved in 2003. I’d watched her share her story with Megyn Kelly, but I wanted to see Addie in person and make sure she was okay amid the media firestorm. Over a glass of wine by a heat lamp at an outdoor café, we filled in the blanks of the past several years. How she had joined the army and served two tours in Iraq, gotten married, and had two children, a boy and a girl.
Then the conversation turned to Matt. Looking at me with those large, aquamarine eyes that matched her paisley peasant blouse, Addie told me how devastating that chapter had been, how much it had impacted her life and thrown her off course. Yes, the relationship was consensual, technically, but what does that really mean when it’s between a 24-year-old production assistant and a wildly powerful 42-year-old?
Then she told me about sex in the bathroom at the Staples Center: Afterward, Matt tapped her butt and said, “I’m gonna miss this.”
To put it mildly, there were aspects of Matt’s character I didn’t know at all and would never fully wrap my head around.
I asked Addie why she never came to me. The look on her face told me she hadn’t even considered it. “I was so ashamed and humiliated,” she said, adding Matt knew he was the only person she could talk to. Their shared secret kept her isolated and silenced. Addie feared coming forward, telling me she thought she’d be “swallowed whole” by NBC, reminding me what a different era the early 2000s were.
IN THE WEEKS that followed, I kept trying to resolve the cognitive dissonance. Why was I so conflicted? Was I concerned about the fact that Matt’s exploits had been happening on my watch? Was I worried about my legacy, which had become so entwined with his? Having come of age in the business at a time when men behaving badly was commonplace, had I somehow become inured to it?
There were so many things swirling in my head: Our relationship. My own moral outrage. The weight of a long-overdue movement bearing down, expecting me to excoriate Matt. Anything I said would be scrutinized, weaponized, taken out of context, and used to further a whole host of agendas.
I also wrestled with the tricky notion of agency. I kept asking myself, Why didn’t these women just tell Matt to take a hike? But the more I thought about it, the more I realized not everyone is built for that kind of confrontation. And maybe they aren’t in a position to deal with the consequences of speaking up, which, for too many women, includes losing their jobs.
And why should the onus be on women to navigate men’s advances and not on men to stop making them? In the case of Matt, people still tell me, “Oh, women were always throwing themselves at him.” And maybe some of them were. But Matt shouldn’t have interpreted that as a green light. As Peter Parker in Spider-Man reminds us, “With great power comes great responsibility,” and Matt seriously abused his.
Time passed. Our chance to connect evaporated, along with our friendship.
I know Matt thinks I betrayed him, and that makes me sad. But he betrayed me, too, by how he behaved behind closed doors at the show we both cared about so much. He’d done incredible damage—to himself, to his family, to TODAY, to NBC. As for the women…I connected with some in addition to Addie, and all these years later, I could hear the pain in their voices.
I’ve thought a lot about the talented women who left TV news because of situations like this. There was the former associate producer who told me she had volunteered to go to Haiti to be part of the team covering the earthquake. The problem: She’d be working with an anchor who was a serious lech, always hitting on female colleagues when the show was on the road. So her EP sent a male producer instead, depriving her of a potentially career-making assignment.
And that was cable. Imagine the accommodations they’d make for a huge network star. After I left TODAY, a producer friend told me that when Matt was on location for a week, a pretty PA was sent home early. “We had to bring her back—for Matt’s sake,” a male producer explained, alluding to the trouble Matt could get into if she stayed. The trickle-down effect of sexual harassment: young women paying for the sins of their bosses.
Matt was seen as indispensable. Did that make him feel invincible? That level of fame and power, where you’re surrounded by smiling yes-men and -women whose job it is to keep you happy and make you believe you can do no wrong, can lead to your downfall.
One summer day in East Hampton, John and I were taking a walk when a white Jeep drove by: Matt. I’m sure he saw us; needless to say, he didn’t stop. I knew in that moment we’d never speak again.