Matt Lauer Accuser Brooke Nevils Recounts How Denying Her Own Trauma Nearly Destroyed Her

Brooke Nevils, an NBC producer and the first woman to accuse former Today Show host Matt Lauer of sexual assault, told CNN that denying her trauma had dire personal consequences.

Nevils promoted her new book on CNN Thursday about how she accused Lauer of continuous sexual abuse that she said began in 2014 at the Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia. Nevils submitted a complaint to NBC in 2017, and Lauer was ultimately fired.

Nevils grew emotional while telling CNN’s Pamela Brown about how she tried to manage the situation.

“My job was to smooth things over for the talent. So I thought, ‘This I know how to do, I can smooth this over,'” Nevils said. “And so I went back, and when I went back, the first thing that happened was he suggested I come meet him in his apartment.”

“And when you’re sitting in the dressing room of the anchor of The Today Show in Studio 1-A, are you really in a position to say no? Of course you’re not,” Nevils said. “And that just happened again and again. And the most confusing part of it was that every single time, I thought I was fixing it, I was taking back control — but really what I was doing was implicating myself and my own abuse. And then by the time I understood that I was trapped, I knew I was going to be blamed for all of it. And I blamed myself.”

“In your journey trying to get to the truth, you ended up in a psych ward,” Brown said.

“After I made my complaint, someone asked me, you know, how I was doing with the trauma of what had happened to me, and I was just like, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking — I have plenty of problems, but trauma isn’t one of them. I’m fine,'” Nevils said.

“And saying you’re fine is avoidance. That’s a classic symptom of PTSD that I didn’t recognize,” Nevils said. “It was not until nine months later, when I had been outed by a tabloid, I took a leave of absence from my job that had essentially been my entire identity. You know, as long as I was a producer at NBC, then I had to have been okay because I was doing this incredibly important, hard job that I loved, and all of a sudden I wasn’t fine anymore. I didn’t want to live anymore. I couldn’t live with myself anymore.”

Matt Lauer has never been charged with criminal wrongdoing, and claimed that his relationship with Nevils was consensual. After his firing, additional women made accusations of sexual assault.

Watch the clip above via CNN.

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