Ronan Farrow is standing by the claims made in his book Catch and Release, which includes former NBC employee Brooke Nevils‘ rape allegation against Matt Lauer, and says the information published was “extensively fact checked.”
The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist made his comments on ABC’s Good Morning America on Friday, two days after the news made headlines and spurred a lengthy letter of denial of assault or unconsensual sex from the fired Today show co-host, who lost his job at NBC News in 2017 over alleged sexual misconduct..
“Obviously, in the book, we include his exact thinking without violating any ground rules,” Farrow said. “We had very strict rules about what we could reveal about what conversations we had with many of the sources in the book.”
The information in Catch and Release, he said, was “extensively fact-checked, as with everything in this book.”
When asked if he talked to Lauer for the book, Farrow said, “I can’t answer specific questions about that but I can say that Matt Lauer’s thinking, presented in this letter, is in the book.”
“I think this young woman, this journalist, Brooke Nevils, presents what I found to be a persuasive response to that,” he continued. “The facts of her case, which were backed by documentation and eyewitnesses, suggests that there was an encounter here, that she consistently has described as nonconsensual and she says regardless of what happened before and after that and how he interpreted that, she said no to a physical act.”
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Nevils claims Lauer forced her to have anal sex in a hotel room after a night of drinking in Sochi, Russia, where they covered 2014 Olympics. She said it was nonconsensual. In his letter of denial, Lauer said the two had consensual sex and then continued an extramarital affair back in New York.
“Today, nearly two years after I was fired by NBC, old stories are being recycled, titillating details are being added, and a dangerous and defamatory new allegation is being made,” Lauer wrote in his statement. “All are being spread as part of a promotional effort to sell a book.”
“There’s the Matt Lauer that millions of Americans watched on TV every morning for two decades, and there is the Matt Lauer who this morning attempted to bully a former colleague into silence,” Nevils said in a statement to NBC News, in response to Laure’s denial of her allegations. “His open letter was a case study in victim blaming… I am not afraid of him now, regardless of his threats, bullying, and the shaming and predatory tactics I knew he would (and now has) tried to use against me. The shame in this story belongs to him.”