Matt Lauer Has Been Creepy Since At Least 2009, Maybe

You know, when you go to press with a story, you go with the facts as you have them at the time. Sometimes, after that happens, more facts come out. So when I told you about Matt Lauer, what we knew about what he had done at the time made it sound like his behavior could have been something that, while obviously wrong, could have been something he considered harmless. What we learned after that was that, well, there’s no way he didn’t know he was up to some pretty bad s**t.

Like, you should know that it isn’t okay to send a co-worker a sex toy and tell her how you want her to use it. You should know it isn’t okay to call a subordinate employee into your office and take your dick out. That’s just common sense. You can maybe say that playing F**k, Marry, Kill isn’t that bad as long as you’re not using people you work with as the examples, but it’s still something HR is going to tell you to avoid because it can make people uncomfortable, and someone like Lauer should know that.

But now we’re pouring over everything he’s ever done to prove what a creep he is. He pulled his dick out in front of a coworker and got mad that she didn’t blow him, we’ve got the proof, guys. But now the whole internet is talking about how creepy Lauer was in this interview with Sandra Bullock, in which he opens by asking her about a nude scene she has in her then-new film The Proposal.

I’m gonna be honest, this isn’t “creepy” to me. I’ve been an interviewer and Lauer is just trying to set a light mood for his actual question, which is about how Bullock had said she’d never do a nude scene. Bullock is an actress, and one of the best, but she doesn’t look visibly uncomfortable, she’s joining Lauer in joking around.

I know that when you find out someone is a sex addict and a sexual harasser it changes the way things like this are seen, and that’s normal. But if there was anything out of the ordinary about this interview, wouldn’t people have said that at the time? We’re talking about an interview that happened with one of the biggest celebrities in the world on one of the highest rated daytime TV shows in the country, loads and loads of people saw this interview and saw nothing wrong with it.

It reminds me of something comedian Todd Glass said when he came out as gay. Basically, if anyone told their friends and family they were gay, even if they were straight, some people are bound to say “Oh, that explains why you did this or that”. Knowing that Matt Lauer is a creep may make him talking to an actress about a nude scene seem creepy, but it’s just a normal part of his job.

Matt Lauer did bad things. We known what those things are. He sexually harassed his co-workers and pressured his subordinates to have sex with him. That’s bad. Joking with an actress about a nude scene in a movie after she said she would never do a nude scene or playing hardball with Hillary Clinton aren’t the same thing as sexual harassment, and we’re doing his actual victims a disservice when we say “well, yeah, he basically slapped a coworker in the face with his dick, but the real problem is he said Sandra Bullock did a nude scene in a movie.”