NBC Fires Matt Lauer

I married a co-worker.

We kept it our relationship secret for three or four months. Then approached the city editor (her boss) and the SE (my boss). They took it to the managing editor and publisher. All of them signed off on it - otherwise I was going to find a new gig to keep the relationship. That was nearly 20 years ago.

 

See, this, I'm used to. I married a co-worker. So did several other co-workers. I get it.

Not once did any of us walk around the office in underpants or randomly start grabbing asses.

That's for-real caveman shit.

 

re: Megyn Kelly, I imagine they'll use her more during the 7 and 8 a.m. hours just because she's there, but yikes, her 9 a.m. show is pretty brutal. She just struggles to conduct any sort of softball interview and seems really uncomfortable doing it, which is usually most of what you're doing at that hour. She managed to be awkward with Steve from Stranger Things today, which I previously thought impossible.

They have a decent set of correspondents that I think are fine - Dylan Dreyer, Sheinelle Jones, Jo Ling Kent - and Hoda is surprisingly good when she's not in the Fourth Hour Wine Drinking with Kathie Lee. However, none of them have the name value of Lauer, obviously.

 

People having a relationship is normal.

But, every woman hired to work at the Today Show —or wherever —shouldn’t be faced with the decision of whether she needs to sleep with Matt Lauer, or whoever her boss is.

 

I can't help but wonder about some quiet conversations going on, with women who are still with a company but were discarded talking to their former abusers with the power dynamic now completely flipped. That could run from "seems fair" to outright blackmail, and yet in some of these cases either would feel like justice. This entire process is so fucked up.

 

NBC has, what, thousands and thousands of employees, right? Every interaction? Might be higher than the post office, certainly, but I'd wager 95 percent of NBC employees or whatever network you'd choose are not hooking up or in inappropriate relationships with co-workers.

 

All Josh Elliott - who, before Michael Strahan put on a lav mic, was the luckiest person in TV - had to go was either stay at CBS or NBC and he would be the host. However, who knows if he would have survived the climate, either.

 

Almost all of my relationships were started at work, including the one with my wife. I think of the scene in -- stay with me here -- "Silence of the Lambs." Do we go out looking for things to covet? No. We covet the things we see every day, and that's a simple explanation why coworkers get together.

 

I can't think of a single female co-worker I've ever had who would have stayed silent for more than 15 seconds if I walked up and gave them an unsolicited ass pinch.

 

I do harassment training and investigations as part of my job (a lot more of it the past few weeks!)

You spend more of your life with your co-workers than anyone else, so there are bound to be attractions which happen. The thing which people either abuse or are unaware of is the power dynamic inherent in virtually every workplace, which can turn what one party thinks is fully consensual to something less than that for the other person.

My advice is that there are plenty of single people out there. Don't date the ones that you work with.

 

I know this stuff happens, and I have seen some very clumsy pick-up attempts at work or in social settings (I saw a scientist try to pick up Katie Couric in a way that made me super uncomfortable), but I have never seen anything like someone getting pinched. I'm having a hard time imagining the hubris it takes to think you can do that, and to think that you will get away with doing that. You have to have some serious power to destroy people.