Katie Couric: Matt Lauer was a ‘decent’ man I felt ‘heartless to abandon’
Matt Lauer’s 2017 fall from grace was “excruciatingly painful” for Katie Couric, she has revealed in her new scorched earth memoir.
“I am crushed,” she recalls texting him, according to a manuscript read by the Daily Mail. “I love you and care about you deeply. I am here. Please let me know if you want to talk. There will be better days ahead.”
Couric, 64, insists in her book, out next month, that Lauer was a “decent” man despite being fired from NBC due to numerous sexual misconduct accusations.
Couric also revealed that her “heart sank” and she immediately made clear to him she was there should he want her emotional support.
Lauer, 63, responded with a blowing kiss emoji, she wrote.
Even after reading about all the “awful things” the then-married Lauer had done — like exposing himself to a woman in his office, sending another woman a sex toy and explicit note and installing a button under his desk to lock his office door — Couric still felt a great deal of empathy for him and worried he was “sleepless, haggard, depressed, maybe worse” as a result of losing his job and then his wife.
Couric “couldn’t imagine” what the experience was like for her former “Today” colleague of nine years, she writes in “Going There,” set to be published in late October by Little, Brown and Company. Indeed, she felt “heartless to abandon him, someone who’d been by my side, literally, for so many years.”
While admitting that Lauer’s predatory behavior “taking advantage” of young women was “gross,” she says that, as an industry standard, “The general rule at that time was: it’s none of your business.”
When Couric started her media career in 1979, she explained, “fraternization existed and was going on unabated, where people were having relationships with other people within the business.”
Couric’s take on Lauer appears to be one of the more positive accounts in her book, which reportedly mocks and puts down almost all other colleagues and famous friends, from Martha Stewart and Prince Harry to the late Larry King. Even her exes, like TV producer Tom Werner, don’t escape unscathed.
