Brokaw slams allegations of sexual misconduct made by ex-coworker
Longtime NBC News journalist Tom Brokaw is pushing back hard at allegations by Linda Vester, a former network correspondent who said he sexually harassed her in the mid1990s.
Brokaw sent a lengthy letter to colleagues Friday that disputes the accounts of Vester, 54, who told Variety and the Washington Post in stories published Thursday night that the former “NBC Nightly News” anchor made unwanted sexual advances toward her when they worked together at NBC in the 1990s.
In his letter, obtained by the Los Angeles Times, Brokaw described the stories as a “drive by shooting” by Vester, who had a grudge against NBC News because her career stalled at the division.
Vester alleged that Brokaw forcefully tried to kiss her in 1994 when she was staying at the Essex House Hotel in New York, where he showed up uninvited. A similar incident occurred in May 1995, she alleged, when Brokaw appeared unannounced at her flat in London when she was assigned to the network’s bureau there.
Vester alleged that in both instances, Brokaw pressured her to have a sexual relationship with him. She said she feared that reporting the incidents would hurt her career.
Brokaw issued a brief statement Thursday saying the incidents Vester described in her accounts did not happen, and on Friday, he issued a lengthy letter to colleagues that slammed her account — and her career at NBC.
“Linda Vester was given the run of the Washington Post and Variety to vent her grievances, to complain that I tickled her without permission (you read that right) that I invaded her hotel room, accepted an invitation to her apartment under false pretenses and in general was given a free hand to try to destroy all that I have achieved with my family, my NBC career, my writing and my citizenship,” Brokaw wrote. “My family and friends are stunned and supportive. My NBC colleagues are bewildered that Vester, who had limited success at NBC News, a modest career at Fox and a reputation as a colleague who had trouble with the truth was suddenly the keeper of the flame of journalistic integrity.”
Brokaw maintains that Vester initiated the New York hotel room meeting she described in the Post and Variety interviews.
“I should not have gone but I emphatically did not verbally and physically attack her and suggest an affair in language right out of pulp fiction,” Brokaw said. “She was coy, not frightened, filled with office gossip, including a recent rumor of an affair. As that discussion advanced she often reminded me she was a Catholic and that she was uncomfortable with my presence. So I left, 23 years later to be stunned by her melodramatic description of the meeting.”
Brokaw said it was Vester’s suggestion to meet at her London flat late at night in 1995 after they ran into each other at the network’s London bureau.
“Again, her hospitality was straight forward with lots of pride in her reporting in the Congo and more questions about NY opportunities,” Brokaw said. “As I remember, she was at one end of a sofa, I was at the other. It was late and I had been up for 24 hours. As I got up to leave I may have leaned over for a perfunctory goodnight kiss but my memory is that it happened at the door — on the cheek. No clenching her neck. That move she so vividly describes is NOT WHO I AM. Not in high school, college or thereafter.”
Brokaw said after Vester’s contract was not renewed at NBC News in 1999, he made a call on her behalf to then-Fox News Chief Executive Roger Ailes, who hired her as an anchor.
Vester worked at Fox News until 2005 and was known to have a happy working relationship with Ailes, who in 2016 became embroiled in his own sexual harassment scandal at the network that led to his downfall.
Brokaw expresses anguish in the letter that Vester did not contact him to discuss the events of 23 years ago before going to the press.