Last Thursday, the Washington Post published a bombshell story about the rotten state of NBC News. The management at NBC News had been actively looking the other way and silencing women accusing their main male anchors of harassment, abuse and impropriety. Matt Lauer was fired when one woman told her story to executives last year, but literally everyone knew Lauer was a massive douchebag for years. Ann Curry even reported him in 2012, and then she was the one who got fired. WaPo also spoke to two women who said that Tom Brokaw harassed them in the 1990s. One woman, Linda Vester, went on the record with WaPo and Variety about how Brokaw assaulted her in a hotel room.

All of it just felt… disappointing. Much like my disappointment with Charlie Rose, I genuinely thought Brokaw was one of the good guys. But I believe Linda Vesper, just like I believe the woman who didn’t want her name published (who said Brokaw harassed her and suggested that she could get a promotion if she came to his office). The day after WaPo published their article, Brokaw emailed colleagues at NBC News, and his email was leaked. Here’s part of it (you can read the full piece here):

It is 4:00 am on the first day of my new life as an accused predator in the universe of American journalism. I was ambushed and then perp walked across the pages of The Washington Post and Variety as an avatar of male misogyny, taken to the guillotine and stripped of any honor and achievement I had earned in more than a half century of journalism and citizenship.

I am angry, hurt and unmoored from what I thought would be the final passage of my life and career, a mix of written and broadcast journalism, philanthropy and participation in environmental and social causes that have always given extra meaning to my life.

Instead I am facing a long list of grievances from a former colleague who left NBC News angry that she had failed in her pursuit of stardom. She has unleashed a torrent of unsubstantiated criticism and attacks on me more than twenty years after I opened the door for her and a new job at Fox news.

Linda Vester was given the run of the Washington Post and Variety to vent her grievances, to complain that I tickled her without permission (you read that right), that I invaded her hotel room, accepted an invitation to her apartment under false pretenses and in general was given a free hand to try to destroy all that I have achieved with my family, my NBC career, my writing and my citizenship.

My family and friends are stunned and supportive. My NBC colleagues are bewildered that Vester, who had limited success at NBC News, a modest career at Fox and a reputation as a colleague who had trouble with the truth, was suddenly the keeper of the flame of journalistic integrity.

Her big charge: that on two occasions more than 20 years ago I made inappropriate and uninvited appearances in her apartment and in a hotel room. As an eager beginner, Vester, like others in that category, was eager for advice and camaraderie with senior colleagues. She often sought me out for informal meetings, including the one she describes in her New York hotel room. I should not have gone but I emphatically did not verbally and physically attack her and suggest an affair in language right out of pulp fiction.

She was coy, not frightened, filled with office gossip, including a recent rumor of an affair. As that discussion advanced she often reminded me she was a Catholic and that she was uncomfortable with my presence. So I left, 23 years later, to be stunned by her melodramatic description of the meeting. A year or so later, as I passed through London after covering end of WWII ceremonies in Moscow, I saw her in the office, chatted and agreed to a drink later. (If NY was so traumatic, why a reunion?) She knew a bar but by that late hour it was closed so she suggested her nearby apartment (not, “Well, no where to go. See you tomorrow”).

Again, her hospitality was straight forward with lots of pride in her reporting in the Congo and more questions about NY opportunities.

As I remember, she was at one end of a sofa, I was at the other. It was late and I had been up for 24 hours. As I got up to leave I may have leaned over for a perfunctory goodnight kiss, but my memory is that it happened at the door – on the cheek. No clenching her neck. That move she so vividly describes is NOT WHO I AM. Not in high school, college or thereafter.

[From THR]

Do I think it’s possible that Linda Vesper is lying? I mean, sure. It’s possible that people lie. But what I keep thinking about is WHY lie? Why would someone, out of the blue, lie about Tom Brokaw of all people? This is the equivalent of “oh she’s just doing it to get famous” – but that argument has fallen flat repeatedly in the era of #MeToo – there were so many women who were famous, who had platforms, who likely would have been believed years ago, and they didn’t speak out because they were traumatized or afraid they would ruin their careers or they were intimidated by a power structure which was not built for them? So why would Linda Vesper lie? Why would the second woman lie?

Meanwhile, the women of NBC News have launched a defense of Brokaw. Mika Brzezinski, Andrea Mitchell, Rachel Maddow, Maria Shriver and 60 other NBC-employed women all signed an open letter saying that while they “fully endorse the conversation around abuse of power in the workplace,” they all feel that Brokaw is a “a man of tremendous decency and integrity” who treated all of them with “fairness and respect.” I’m a little bit disappointed that Maddow didn’t sit this one out and wait to see, you know? While I’m sure Brokaw has treated those 64 women with respect, that doesn’t negate the idea that he sexually harassed several other women, you know?

Photos courtesy of WENN.