So, Matt Lauer has been fired for sexual misconduct and is now at the center of a scandal after countless stories of sexual harassment and other creepy, unacceptable behavior emerged about him.
Even so, he"s apparently trying to keep his life from falling apart. Specifically, as you"ll see in the video below, Lauer is trying to keep his marriage together.
That could be challenging, especially since his wife fled the country when news broke of his many misdeeds.
For decades, Matt Lauer masqueraded as a pillar of the broadcasting community.
In many ways, viewers perceived him as something like "America"s Dad." He was awkward, but in a way that many people found to be endearing.
Endearing enough that most viewers were apparently happy to overlook his creepier moments — like his infamously bad interview with Ann Hathaway.
All of that changed when the news broke of Matt Lauer"s firing.
Though he was fired for the harassment of one employee, NBC admitted that they had reason to believe that it was not isolated.
And now that we"ve heard details about Matt Lauer"s sex toy "gifts" and pants-dropping and worse, it looks like they were right about that.
We heard about how Matt Lauer allegedly leveraged his position within NBC to pressure women into performing sex acts.
This included treating NBC trips, such as for the Olympics, as his own personal hunting ground, identifying ambitious and attractive young NBC employees and either inviting or luring them to his hotel room.
Reportedly, he gave a female coworker a sex toy as an unsolicited "gift" … and made it immeasurably worse by including a note about how he"d like to use it on her.
Another time, he"s said to have invited a colleague into his office and dropped his pants, presenting his genitals to her … and later chastising her for not performing a sex act.
We heard about Matt Lauer"s creepy button, installed on his desk at his request, that would remotely lock his office door.
That button figured into one woman"s grim accusation that Matt Lauer raped her, as he apparently did not begin propositioning her until after he had already locked his office door.
(And, from her description, it sounds like he stopped asking anything altogether, and only unlocked the door sometime after she passed out during the assault)
We"ve mentioned this before, but there are comedian brothers known as the McElroys who suggest, as a general rule, to never ask out a woman in a situation when she couldn"t run away.
Not in an elevator, not on a car ride, not when she"s a cashier or barista, and definitely not just after you remotely locked the door to your office.
As we mentioned, Lauer"s wife, Annette Roque, fled the country with the couple"s two youngest sons in the immediate aftermath of the scandal.
(We don"t think that her leaving their 16-year-old behind necessarily signifies anything beyond the fact that every 16-year-old would rather stay home alone than go visit family in Europe)
That was an understandable reaction.
Learning that your husband is a cheater is hard — that alone is enough to end plenty of marriages.
But for your husband to be outed as a serial predator in one of the biggest stories of a scandal-filled year?
That"s almost unimaginable.
Matt Lauer offered a vague apology without really admitting to any significant wrongdoing. He spoke about being embarrassed and ashamed in the same breath as he claimed that at least some of the charges are false.
That was public. In private, we"re sure that he"s been trying even harder to apologize to his wife. Strangely, it seems to be working.
As you can see in the video below, E! News reports that Matt Lauer and Annette Roque are trying to make their marriage work.
Yeah.
Apparently, they believe that it will be best for their children.
If this were just an embarrassing cheating scandal, we"d be inclined to agree — if the couple had made nice and just needed to wait out the public embarrassment.
But the Matt Lauer scandal isn"t about him having a bunch of mistresses. It"s about him having a bunch of victims.
Women who fled from promising careers after he allegedly preyed upon them. Women who may have missed out on well-deserved promotions because they turned him down.
And a woman whom he allegedly locked in his office, bent over a chair, and raped.
Even if he manages to avoid hard-to-prove charges for sexual assault, which he very well may (just look at Bill Cosby!), Matt Lauer could be faced with a number of lawsuits in the near future.
If we were friend with Annette Roque, we"d advise her that she doesn"t need to leave the country to avoid the coming storm. But she might want to go ahead and leave her husband.
He might lose everything.
