Megyn Kelly: Attacks on Lauer rape accuser ‘are deeply misguided’

Former NBC “Today” host Megyn Kelly is voicing support for the woman who accused Matt Lauer of rape, saying attacks on Brooke Nevils are “deeply misguided.”

“The attacks being heaped on Brooke Nevils by ppl who have no clue how unchecked power can infect a workplace are deeply misguided,” Kelly tweeted late Wednesday night to her 2.4 million followers.

“No sane person can think Lauer’s behavior here-that to which he *admits*-was anything less than abhorrent,” she added. “How was he able to get away w/it so long?”

The attacks being heaped on Brooke Nevils by ppl who have no clue how unchecked power can infect a workplace are deeply misguided. No sane person can think Lauer’s behavior here-that to which he *admits*-was anything less than abhorrent. How was he able to get away w/it so long?

— Megyn Kelly (@megynkelly) October 10, 2019

Kelly’s defense of Nevils comes nearly two years after NBC fired Lauer amid multiple allegations of sexual misconduct.

After Lauer’s departure, Kelly publicly urged NBC brass to bring in an external firm to conduct an investigation of the network’s handling of the Lauer allegations. The former Fox News host also interviewed several of Lauer’s accusers in the weeks that followed on “Megyn Kelly Today,” the only NBC program to do so at the time.

“I didn’t let anyone stop me at Fox, and I’m not going to let anyone stop me at NBC,” she told US Weekly last October. Weeks later, Kelly and NBC abruptly parted ways over her comments around Halloween and blackface, which she said at the time was “OK” to wear when she was growing up “as long as you dressed up as a character.” She quickly apologized, but NBC still canceled her show.

In his new book, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Ronan Farrow details Nevins’s allegations that Lauer raped her while they were covering the Winter Olympics for NBC in Sochi, Russia, in 2014. Variety first reported the accusations contained in “Catch and Kill,” which will be released next Tuesday.

Lauer vigorously denied Nevils’s allegation in a lengthy statement to Variety.

“I had an extramarital affair with Brooke Nevils in 2014. It began when she came to my hotel room very late one night in Sochi, Russia. We engaged in a variety of sexual acts. We performed oral sex on each other, we had vaginal sex, and we had anal sex. Each act was mutual and completely consensual,” Lauer said.

“The story Brooke tells is filled with false details intended only to create the impression this was an abusive encounter. Nothing could be further from the truth. There was absolutely nothing aggressive about that encounter,” he added.

In Farrow’s book, Nevils claims she entered Lauer’s hotel room on two occasions in Sochi — the first time to retrieve her press credentials, which she says Lauer took as a joke, and a second time at his invitation.

On the second occasion, Nevils claims the former “Today” host forced her on his bed, “flipping her over, asking if she liked anal sex.”

“Lauer, she said, didn’t use lubricant. The encounter was excruciatingly painful. ‘It hurt so bad. I remember thinking, Is this normal?’ She told me she stopped saying no, but wept silently into a pillow,” Farrow writes, adding: “Lauer then asked her if she liked it. She tells him yes. She claims that ‘she bled for days.’ ”

“It was nonconsensual in the sense that I was too drunk to consent,” Nevils told Farrow. “It was nonconsensual in that I said, multiple times, that I didn’t want to have anal sex.”

Nevils also says she experienced more sexual encounters with Lauer after they returned to New York.

“Sources close to Lauer emphasized that she sometimes initiated contact,” Farrow writes.