Over the last several years, I have somehow found myself obliged to defend some of the country’s most unpopular men against what appear to be flimsy or false allegations of sexual abuse. As a father of two girls, I loathe the whole topic.
Yet because the questions at stake are so important, I feel impelled to do so — in this case in response to the explosive rape allegations against Matt Lauer in Ronan Farrow’s new book.
Full disclosure: The former NBC host interviewed me on the “Today Show” three times. More precisely, we prominently clashed on-air, and there is no love lost between us, though I have always respected his journalistic integrity.
It seems safe to say that Lauer was a womanizing cad, who inappropriately used his position of power to seduce multiple women into having affairs with him. For a long time, everyone looked the other way, until #MeToo radically altered the equation.
None of this is directly relevant to whether Lauer raped Brooke Nevils, a former NBC producer, while covering the 2014 Olympics. But it is critical to understanding the political climate that caused all of this to become public — and to obscure many serious problems with Farrow’s reporting.
By his own admission, Farrow has a couple of troubling conflicts of interest on this subject. In his book, Farrow accurately describes how NBC News killed his original Harvey Weinstein exposé.
Sources close to Lauer believe this motivated NBC to throw Lauer under the bus — that is, it gave the network a chance to demonstrate that it took #MeToo allegations seriously.
Farrow also had a short-lived MSNBC show which was unceremoniously canceled. This creates, at the very least, the appearance that Farrow has a significant axe to grind with NBC. Consider also the reality that Farrow has effectively become a #MeToo activist, making his interviews with accusers to be suspect for possible manipulation.
Which brings us to Lauer’s accuser. Her current story, which Lauer vehemently denies, is that the host raped her as she was too drunk to give consent and repeatedly declined his request to have anal sex. “It was nonconsensual in the sense that I was too drunk to consent,” she told Farrow. “It was nonconsensual in that I said, multiple times, that I didn’t want to have anal sex.”
Nevils said that the two of them continued a “consensual” sexual relationship long afterward, which she described as “transactional” in nature.
Is this account plausible? Sure, but there is no evidence for it. No criminal charge or even civil complaint was filed. As Lauer argues, common sense belies the accusation.
An adult woman voluntarily participating in a long-term consensual relationship with a man she believed had raped her: It’s plausible, but it detracts from her credibility.
Another confusing element: Farrow claims that Nevils’ story was an open secret within NBC News, because she told people about it long before anything was done. But a source close to the situation tells me the “it” that was “known” within NBC may very well have been an affair, not the “rape” allegation. Farrow, in other words, may be pulling a bait-and-switch here.
To be clear, I am not defending Lauer. At best he played with fire far too long and got burned. At worst, he may have committed rape.
I am arguing here that the standards for reporting a rape allegation against a public figure matter. If this case is the new normal, it will create a potentially perilous precedent that will lead to innocent people being falsely accused.
The bottom line is that the more we learn, the worse everyone involved in this saga — including NBC management and staff, as well as the news media, which have covered it in an extremely biased fashion — appear. As for Lauer, he may have deserved his firing, but to declare him a rapist based on the current factual record is both wrong and dangerous.
John Ziegler is a senior columnist for Mediaite, from which this column was adapted. Twitter: @Zigmanfreud
