Disgraced former NBC Today anchor Matt Lauer made a rare public appearance over the weekend to celebrate his pal Jeff Zucker’s 54th birthday, according to Page Six. The bash was held at the posh Speakeasy Magick hotel, hosted somewhat appropriately by a “master deceptionist.”
Page Six, quoting party goers, reports that Lauer, who attended the party without a date, had a “great time” and enjoyed “a lot of laughs.” Several current NBC personalities attended the birthday party.
Zucker was Lauer’s former executive producer at NBC before climbing the network hierarchy and eventually joining CNN as the chief.
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Lauer was fired from his $25 million a year job at NBC in 2018 after a number of women accused him of sexual harassment.
Lauer has been keeping to himself and spending time with his three children in the Hamptons since his fall from grace. He is currently going through a divorce with his second wife, reportedly as a result of the accusations that he sexually harassed women at NBC. Most famously, the Today Show star allegedly had a button under his desk that he could use to lock his door without getting up.
Page Six reports that the woman who outed the anchor is now “shopping around a tell-all book.”
Several women have come forward since Lauer was fired from the network to bolster claims against him. One woman has accused the anchor of giving her a sex toy as a gift with the implied intention of using it on her, according to Variety. Another woman said that Lauer once dropped his pants with a full erection and then “reprimanded her for not engaging in a sexual act.”
Lauer has repeatedly said that the any sexual contact with women was consensual, but he has apologized for the pain caused to his family. “I have made no public comments on the many false stories from anonymous or biased sources that have been reported about me over these past several months,” he said last year in a statement to the Washington Post in late 2018. “I remained silent in an attempt to protect my family from further embarrassment and to restore a small degree of the privacy they have lost.”
“But defending my family now requires me to speak up. I fully acknowledge that I acted inappropriately as a husband, father, and principal at NBC. However I want to make it perfectly clear that any allegations or reports of coercive, aggressive, or abusive actions on my part, at any time, are absolutely false.”
