Matt Lauer Allegedly Had Secret Button Under Desk To Lock Office From Inside — Shocking Details Emerge

Just hours after NBC News Chair Andy Lack fired longtime Today Show host Matt Lauer on Wednesday, over what Lack called “inappropriate sexual behavior in the workplace,” the entertainment industry trade magazine Variety published the results of its two-month investigation into Lauer, revealing disturbing details of the veteran Today anchor’s alleged sexual harassment and assaults against female employees of NBC.

According to the Variety report, which may be read in its entirety by visiting this link, Lauer made sure that his office was located “in a secluded space” and that Lauer had a secret button installed under his office desk which, when he pushed it, locked his office door automatically — without requiring Lauer to move from his seated position behind the desk.

The secret button allowed Lauer “privacy” to invite female NBC employees into his office and then “initiate inappropriate contact” with the women, secure in the knowledge that no one could walk in on him in the midst of his predations, the trade magazine reported.

According to TV veteran and comedian Andy Richter, “lots of fancy TV types” keep buttons on their desk allowing them to close their office doors without getting up, but Richter said on his Twitter account that he had never heard of “a secret button that locked it! Yeesh!”

While in Lack’s statement announcing the termination of Lauer’s contract with NBC News he said that NBC had received only one complaint against Lauer, the statement also said that the network had “reason to believe this may not have been an isolated incident.” And indeed, Variety reporters Ramin Setoodeh and Elizabeth Wagmeister wrote that they interviewed “three women who identified themselves as victims of sexual harassment by Lauer,” whose stories were corroborated in “dozens of interviews with current and former (NBC) staffers.”

Among the other details of the allegations uncovered by Variety, Lauer “once gave a colleague a sex toy as a present. It included an explicit note about how he wanted to use it on her, which left her mortified.”

On another occasion, the magazine reported, Lauer summoned a female employee into his office and exposed his penis to her. When the shocked and shaken employee refused to participate in a sexual act with Lauer, he “reprimanded” her, according to the Variety article.

Lauer also made frequent inappropriate sexual remarks while in the workplace, according to the magazine. He especially enjoyed engaging both male and female colleagues in a game called, “F***, Marry, Kill,” in which Lauer would name female co-hosts he wanted to have sex with, Setoodeh and Wagmeister reported.

The complaint that resulted in Lauer’s firing was filed by a female NBC employee who said that Lauer sexually assaulted her during the network’s coverage of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, according to numerous media reports.

In fact, Variety reported, Lauer was well-known at NBC for alleged sexual misconduct during the Olympics and other remote assignments away from NBC’s New York City headquarters. “Lauer would invite women employed by NBC late at night to his hotel room while covering the Olympics in various cities over the years,” the magazine reported. “He later told colleagues how his wife had accompanied him to the London Olympics because she didn’t trust him to travel alone.”

While some of the employees interviewed by Variety said that sexual relationships between the married Lauer and female NBC employees were often apparently consensual, “that’s still a problem because of the power he held,” one NBC producer told the magazine.

Until Wednesday morning, Lauer had anchored Today continuously since 1997. He reportedly earned an annual salary of $25 million, making him the third-highest-paid TV show host in the industry, trailing only “Judge Judy” Sheindlin, who earns a reported $47 million per year, and daytime syndicated talk show host Ellen DeGeneres, who receives a $50 million annual salary, according to a list compiled by Business Insider.