Watch ‘Today’ Hosts Savannah Guthrie and Hoda Kotb’s Live Responses to Matt Lauer Rape Allegations

Savannah Guthrie and Hoda Kotb reported on the recently revealed allegations of rape against their former Today co-host Matt Lauer on Wednesday, responding to the claims that former NBC News employee Brooke Nevils had made.

“I feel like we owe it to our viewers to pause for a moment. This is shocking and appalling and I don’t even know what to say about it,” Guthrie said on the Oct. 9 broadcast. “I want to say that we know it wasn’t easy for our colleague Brooke to come forward then. It’s not easy now and we support her and any women who have come forward with claims. It’s just very painful for all of us at NBC who are at the Today show. It’s very very very difficult.”

“I’m looking at you and I’m having a weird moment,” Kotb said. “We were sitting here just like this two years ago…you feel like you’ve known someone for 12 years…you feel like you know them inside and out and all of a sudden a door opens up and it’s a part of them you didn’t know. And we don’t know all the facts in all of this, but there are not allegations of an affair, there are allegations of a crime.”

“I think that’s shocking to all of us here who’ve sat with Matt for many, many years,” she continued. “I think we’re gonna just sort of continue to process this part of this horrific story. Our thoughts are with Brooke — it’s not easy, what she did to come forward. It’s not easy at all.”

“I think I speak for all of us — we are disturbed to our core,” Guthrie added. “We have a commitment to keep moving forward and we will continue to do that.”

Nevils’ allegations that she was raped by Lauer during the Sochi Winter Olympics in 2014 led to Lauer’s firing from Today two years ago and were further detailed in Ronan Farrow’s upcoming new book, Catch and Kill. Nevils had her identity kept anonymous at the time of her initial report but revealed her name and full allegations in Farrow’s book, an excerpt of which was published by Variety.

In the book, Nevils claims that Lauer anally raped her in his hotel room in Sochi, with the alleged incident taking place after Nevils was having a drink with former Today co-host Meredith Viera. The two women were joined by Lauer, who invited Nevils, who had had six shots of vodka, back to his room. Farrow wrote that Nevils “had no reason to suspect Lauer would be anything but friendly based on prior experience” but that Lauer pushed Nevils against the door and kissed her once she was in the room.

He allegedly asked her if she liked anal sex, and Nevils “declined several times” and “was in the midst of telling him she wasn’t interested again when he ‘just did it.’”

“Lauer, she said, didn’t use lubricant,” Farrow wrote. “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.”

“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.”

Photo Credit: Getty / NBC