Katie Couric now comes to the defense of Matt Lauer, who for twenty years cursed the dawn with his playfully misogynist on-camera antics and off-camera sneering, and now faces allegations of serial sexual harassment and rape in his office. “I had no idea this was going on during my tenure or after I left,” she tells People. “I think I speak for many of my former colleagues when I say this was not the Matt we knew. Matt was a kind and generous colleague who treated me with respect.”
This seems unlikely.
It is very hard to believe that a journalist who spent 15 years co-hosting with Matt Lauer would not have picked up on some signs that he is at least a creep. First, there’s well-circulated footage of Lauer telling co-host Meredith Vieira to bend over because “that’s a nice view.” Why do we have this clip? Likely because a PA saved it for later or remembered this instance so clearly that he/she would go through years of footage to dig it up again. Then there’s the question of how one hypothetically (allegedly) transports a rape victim from Matt Lauer’s office to the hospital with the entire Today show staff none the wiser, if the allegation is true. Couric’s statement also suggests that she’d never heard the story about how he gave a colleague a sex toy and said he wanted to use it on her, or that he allegedly quizzed female producers on whom they’d slept with, or that he pulled down his pants in his office in front of another colleague, or of the several women who reportedly complained to the network, which “fell on deaf ears given the lucrative advertising surrounding Today.” Even just this cringeworthy on-camera segment of Lauer casually deriding Savannah Guthrie for not being able to work a vacuum should have raised a flag to literally anybody watching the Today show.
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