Back on 'Today' to slap Matt
Katie rips ‘disgusting’ ex-colleague
Katie Couric made an awkward return to the “Today’’ show Tuesday — where she ripped her disgraced former cohost Matt Lauer as “disgusting” and “abusive.”
Couric, 64, who used to host the NBC morning show with Lauer, smiled nervously as cohost Savannah Guthrie quizzed her about her new book’s “snark” and “brutally honest” put-downs, including those targeting former network colleagues.
Couric, who was a co-host on the show for 15 years, insisted the attacks had “been wildly misrepresented” — except those against Lauer, who was her TV partner there for nine years.
She fully ripped into him after earlier being accused of being too soft and defensive when her then-beloved pal started getting
accused of sexual misconduct, leading to him being fired in November 2017.
Couric admitted she initially found the accusations against Lauer too difficult to believe.
“It took me a long time to process what was going on, because the side of Matt I knew was the man I think you all knew: He was kind and generous and considerate, a good colleague,” she said.
“As I got more information and learned what was going on behind the scenes, it was really upsetting and disturbing.”
She said she “did some of my own reporting” and “really tried to excavate what had been going on.
“And it was really devastating but also disgusting,” Couric said. “What I realized is there was the side of Matt I never really knew.”
Now the two “have no relationship,” Couric said.
Meanwhile, she admitted during another interview on the show that landing her groundbreaking role as America’s first solo female nightly news anchor after “Today’’ went to her head.
Couric claimed she eventually failed at the job because sexist viewers worked against her.
She ended up leaving her news-anchor gig at CBS when her five-year, $15 million-a-year contract expired after reports that she wasn’t anything near the ratings bonanza the network was expecting, given her hefty price tag.
She said Tuesday that she felt sabotaged by sexist viewers.
“I thought America was really ready for a female anchor of the evening news, and I think we were just not as far along as I naively thought,” she said.
“Maybe they weren’t just ready for me as a female anchor because of their perceptions of me,’’ she admitted.
Couric also claimed that she was “brave” to admit in her book that she had bitter rivalries with female colleagues.
She added that she’s sending a copy of her soon-to-be-released book “Going There’’ to former co-worker Deborah Norville, whom Couric in her book criticized, to show it was nothing personal.
In the book Couric hammered her former colleague over what she called Norville’s “relentless perfectionism.”
Norville, 63, has told The Post she was “too stunned and, frankly, hurt to comment.”
“I think I’m gonna send her a book and say, ‘I’m so happy for you to read the whole book and put my observations into context,’ ” Couric said.
Despite Norville’s clear “hurt” about what was written about her, Couric dismissed the negative headlines as “clickbait.”