Ann Curry Says She Warned NBC About Matt Lauer
Matt Lauer was fired from the Today show in November, after alleged “inappropriate sexual behavior.” Lauer issued an apology, expressing “sorrow and regret for the pain I caused.” But Lauer’s former co-anchor, Ann Curry, said she was aware of claims against him from several years ago.
According to a new report in the Washington Post, Ann Curry said that in 2012, a female staffer confided she had been “sexually harassed physically” by Lauer. “A woman approached me and asked me tearfully if I could help her,” Curry told the newspaper. “She was afraid of losing her job. . . . I believed her.”
At the staffer’s request, she didn’t say the woman’s name, but she said she did approach NBC executives about Lauer. “I told management they had a problem and they needed to keep an eye on him and how he deals with women,” Curry said.
But Lauer wasn’t fired until last year. NBC News Chairman Andy Lack, who was not with the company in 2012, said after Lauer’s firing that the complaint against him was the first of its kind in the anchor’s time at the network.
A spokesperson for NBC told the Post they had no record of Curry’s warning, and it was not in Lauer’s file. But the Post talked to 35 current and former NBC employees about their relationships with Lauer, and 12 of them said they were sexually harassed but did not report it. The Post report also details a claim of misconduct against NBC’s Tom Brokaw, who denied it.
Curry, who has opened up about what she called a culture of “verbal sexual harassment” at NBC, told the Post that she understands why women are hesitant to report harassment in general.
“This is one of the problems when we talk about corporations with an HR department being under leadership of someone who might or might not be accused,” she said. “Do you have a system that allows those who feel they have been victimized to air their complaints without fear they will lose their jobs? I don’t know a company that does.”
Lauer gave a rare new statement to the Post, denying any claims of “coercive, aggressive, or abusive actions.” Read his full statement below:
“I have made no public comments on the many false stories from anonymous or biased sources that have been reported about me over these past several months . . . I remained silent in an attempt to protect my family from further embarrassment and to restore a small degree of the privacy they have lost. But defending my family now requires me to speak up. I fully acknowledge that I acted inappropriately as a husband, father and principal at NBC. However I want to make it perfectly clear that any allegations or reports of coercive, aggressive or abusive actions on my part, at any time, are absolutely false.”
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