By Dan Calabrese —— Bio and Archives November 30, 2017
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Despite being married, Lauer was fixated on women, especially their bodies and looks, according to more than 10 accounts from current and former employees. He was known for making lewd comments verbally or over text messages. He once made a suggestive reference to a colleague’s performance in bed and compared it to how she was able to complete her job, according to witnesses to the exchange. For Lauer, work and sex were intertwined. “There were a lot of consensual relationships, but that’s still a problem because of the power he held,” says a former producer who knew first-hand of these encounters. “He couldn’t sleep around town with celebrities or on the road with random people, because he’s Matt Lauer and he’s married. So he’d have to do it within his stable, where he exerted power, and he knew people wouldn’t ever complain.” Lauer, who was paranoid about being followed by tabloid reporters, grew more emboldened at 30 Rockefeller Center as his profile rose following Katie Couric’s departure from “Today” in 2006. His office was in a secluded space, and he had a button under his desk that allowed him to lock his door from the inside without getting up. This afforded him the assurance of privacy. It allowed him to welcome female employees and initiate inappropriate contact while knowing nobody could walk in on him, according to two women who were sexually harassed by Lauer. According to sources, the sexual harassment extended to when Lauer traveled on assignment for NBC. Several employees recall how he paid intense attention to a young woman on his staff that he found attractive, focusing intently on her career ambitions. And he asked the same producer to his hotel room to deliver him a pillow, according to sources with knowledge of the interaction.
This was part of a pattern. According to multiple accounts, independently corroborated by Variety, Lauer would invite women employed by NBC late at night to his hotel room while covering the Olympics in various cities over the years. He later told colleagues how his wife had accompanied him to the London Olympics because she didn’t trust him to travel alone.That's about as much as fair use really permits us to excerpt, so you should click over to Variety and read the whole thing. The picture that emerges of Lauer is a total horndog who know perfectly well that his position of importance at the network would make women fear they would face reprisals if they turned down his sexual advances. He also had himself quite the setup so he could engage in hanky panky in his office if he wanted to, without anyone seeing what was going on. And on the road? Pretty much all bets were off. I don't like stories that are totally based on anonymous sources, so I'll point out that this is the case here and that does make the story somewhat less effective than one that names its sources. But if all this had been made up, then NBC would not have fired Lauer as they did, so there's no sense ignoring the story based on the use of unnamed sources given everything else that's already happened. But there's another thing this story tells us: Some of these women had complained to network executives, who did nothing because Lauer was such a high-priced and important property to NBC. They were paying him $25 million a year and his show was number one in the ratings. They didn't want to mess with that so when they got complaints, they shoved them under the rug.
Dan Calabrese’s column is distributed by HermanCain.com, which can be found at HermanCain
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