Troubled, separate lives after nups
riding clothes,” said one local.
It’s a far cry from the couple’s high-profile start, when the two were toasted by a glittering crowd at a 1998 wedding that, People magazine claimed, “put a serious dent in the fantasy lives of multitudes of early-rising American women.”
She was a Victoria’s Secret and J.Crew model with an exotic background — part-Indonesian, partDutch. He was the highly eligible, famous newsman whose romantic exploits had been tabloid fodder ever since his last marriage ended in divorce in 1988. But even though he was a playboy, he was a prude, colleagues said. “He was incredibly worried about his image” and balked at covering risqué stories, said an insider who worked with Lauer at New York’s WOR-TV in the early 1990s.
“I had to do an hour and a half on women who fake orgasm,” Lauer complained of his previous job in a 1997 interview.
“Do I look like the kind of guy who’d be comfortable doing that for half a minute, much less an hour and a half? That’s how low it got. I couldn’t wait to get off that program.”
Still, NBC brass feared Lauer’s playboy ways could hurt his reputation with the “Today” show’s largely female viewership. Execs urged him to settle down.
Less than a year after meeting Roque on a blind date in 1997, he proposed to her — in Venice, while on assignment for his regular “Where in the World is Matt Lauer?” segment.
AS the wedding neared, Roque was a shadowy presence.
“We’d say, ‘This woman is a phantom. She doesn’t exist,’ ” Lauer colleague Elizabeth Vargas told People magazine shortly after the Oct. 3, 1998, nuptials. “We teased Matt,” Vargas said, when he explained that his fiancée — who modeled under the name Jade Roque — was frequently away on photo shoots.
Only 100 guests were invited to their Bridgehampton wedding, including Katie Couric, Ann Curry, best man Bryant Gumbel and actor Peter Gallagher.
The couple set up home in an Upper East Side apartment and started a family three years later with the birth of son Jack. Daughter Romy was born in 2003.
But rumors of discord were rife, and the Lauers separated in 2006 — shortly after he returned from covering the Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy. Insiders gossiped that a furious fight erupted when Roque learned of Lauer’s alleged affair with “Today” show correspondent Natalie Morales while the two were at the Games.
Both Lauer and Morales have fiercely denied an affair, but that September, a seven-months-pregnant Roque filed for divorce, alleging “cruel and inhumane” treatment and citing Lauer’s “extremely controlling” behavior — but not on grounds of infidelity.
“Defendant has continuously and repeatedly given higher priority to . . . personal interests than his family obligations to plaintiff, causing plaintiff to feel aban- doned, isolated and alone in raising the parties’ children,” read court papers leaked in 2014.
Mysteriously, Roque withdrew her divorce suit three weeks later, and the couple claimed to have reconciled in time for the November birth of son Thijs. Page Six reported on Saturday that Lauer offered her up to a rumored $5 million deal to remain in the marriage. Page Six’s source said, “Matt needed to stay in the marriage to keep his reputation as America’s nicest dad. He is, in fact, a . . . very doting dad to his kids, but he is also a terrible husband.”
The détente held until 2010, when another Olympics assignment — the Winter Games in Vancouver — led to another blistering row after Lauer returned home. This time, the National Enquirer claimed Lauer went “wild” at local nightclubs and remained in Vancouver to continue partying after the rest of the “Today” crew returned to New York.
THE couple began living separately that March, an NBC source told the Chicago SunTimes — blaming Roque for the breakup. “For any good-looking women on the staff or who had any work-related contact with Matt, forget it! Annette would go nuts!” the Lauer ally said.
By 2011, Roque and the children were living in Sag Harbor full time — while Lauer stayed in Manhattan, heading out to join them each weekend.
“They play happy families at their Hamptons home on week- ends, and then she lets him run off to New York to do ‘Today’ — and goodness knows what else,” an East End insider snarked to Radar Online in September.
Roque is not a presence on the Hamptons social scene. The family’s only major annual appearance is at the Hampton Classic horse show, a celebrity fest in which daughter Romy competes alongside big-money equestrians like Georgina Bloomberg and Jessica Springsteen.
“My wife and daughter ride like crazy,” Lauer told Newsday as he watched the 2014 contest. “And so we love the competition. I know a lot of other people love the scene of this, but we get out of our seats and . . . we watch the jumping.”
The Lauers bought a 40-acre property near their home in 2012 and spent lavishly to convert it into a high-end horse farm, with luxe stables for 36 animals — including five owned by the Lauers — and 16 paddocks, two outdoor riding rings, cross-country trails and a climate-controlled indoor ring cushioned with a “premier low impact” surface.
“Bright Side Farm was a true labor of love and now that it’s here, I feel like the luckiest girl in the world,” Roque gushed via e-mail to a local Web site, 27East.com, in 2013. Local media portrayed Lauer as a weekend-warrior tractor operator who lived to run the heavy machinery.
But at the same time, the Hamptons horsey set was whispering about a new addition to the Lauers’ stable. “He bought Annette a $100,000 horse, and we said, ‘Well, Matt must have been caught cheating again,’ ” a media source told The Post. “Every time he’s caught, he buys her a horse.”
Locals in Sag Harbor and Manhattan on Friday confirmed the two have long lived entirely separate lives. At the Calypso St. Barth boutique, employees said Roque is the town mystery, seen as “a sad wife.” “While Matt is always out and about with his kids and very pleasant, he is never with Annette,” a local told The Post.
Students and parents at the two Hamptons public schools reportedly attended by the Lauer children said they rarely encounter their mom. Meanwhile, Upper East Siders said they frequently run into Lauer on the street or in restaurants without his wife.
Neighbors say the former “Today” host is a regular at Donahue’s Steak House, a whiskey bar across the street from Lauer’s apartment, where he stops in alone three or four nights a week in jeans and a button-down shirt.
Next door, at a restaurant called Barbaresco, an owner remembered Lauer taking his ex-wife, TV producer Nancy Alspaugh, out to dinner there once and filmmaker Spike Lee on another occasion, “but we never, ever saw the wife.”
SINCE Lauer was fired on Tuesday night, losing out on a $30 million payout from NBC News, Roque may be off the scene more than ever. While early reports suggested that she had fled to her native Netherlands, a source outside the home told The Post that Roque is still in the Hamptons. Daughter Romy, 14, was spotted leaving the family’s Sag Harbor home on Saturday morning.
Fittingly, Lauer was brought down by his actions on yet another Olympics assignment — the Sochi Winter Games in 2014 — where he allegedly harassed an NBC employee who complained to her bosses. Lauer has since expressed remorse in a statement, saying, “Some of what is being said about me is untrue or mischaracterized, but there is enough truth in these stories to make me feel embarrassed and ashamed. I regret that my shame is now shared by the people I cherish dearly.”
But this time, it’s hard to imagine Roque being appeased with an apology, a new horse or a multimillion-dollar payout — even if Lauer could afford it.