Former Today co-host Ann Curry reported Matt Lauer for sexual harassment in 2012 on behalf of a female NBC staffer who was afraid for her job and asked Curry to help her.
Curry told the Washington Post: “A woman approached me and asked me tearfully if I could help her. She was afraid of losing her job … I believed her.”
Curry said the woman was “sexually harassed physically” by Lauer, and begged Curry not to tell anyone her name.
Curry went to management and named Lauer as a “person of concern.”
“I told management they had a problem and they needed to keep an eye on him and how he deals with women,” she said.
On the condition of anonymity, the woman in question confirmed to the Post that she did go to Curry with her story. She still fears retaliation.
Because of course. No matter when or how a woman comes forward with her story, she is always the villain.
Curry declined to tell the Post which members of management she spoke with, and NBC said it has no record of her conversation and there is no mention of it in Lauer’s personnel file.
In a previous interview, Curry—who worked on Today for 15 years—said that there was “pervasive verbal sexual harassment at NBC.”
Soledad O’Brien, who worked at NBC for 12 years, told the Post that in the news business, people “generally did not care” about women’s stories of sexual harassment.
“I don’t think that people who were victims would feel particularly supported by going to someone and asking for help, whether that person was in HR or that person was a colleague,” O’Brien said.
While O’Brien said that she did not experience harassment herself while working at NBC, she said that within the industry, “people were mostly concerned they would lose their jobs if they complained. I think those concerns were valid.”
Still.