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Matt Lauer is making a rare public appearance.
The former Today cohost and his girlfriend Shamin Abas were spotted together in Sag Harbor, New York, marking the journalist's first public appearance since his accuser Brooke Nevils published a memoir last month detailing her alleged 2014 sexual assault. Matt dressed for the outing on March 23 in a gray zip-up jacket, denim jeans, white sneakers, and a navy hat. Shamin, a public relations executive, wore a forest green overcoat, navy pants, and brown boots as she looped her arm around Matt's.
The couple has kept their relationship out of the spotlight since they started dating in late 2019, shortly after Matt, 68, finalized his divorce from Annette Roque, with whom he has three children, Jack, 24, Romy, 22, and Thijs, 19. Matt and Shamin, 56, were last seen in public at a rare car event in Bridgehampton, N.Y., in September 2024, and earlier that year at Don Lemon's New York wedding. The previous year, they had a rare date night shopping in New York City's Upper East Side neighborhood.
In 2017, the anchor was fired from NBC News for what then-chairman Andy Lack described as "inappropriate sexual behavior," which the network suspected "may not have been an isolated incident." At the time, Matt apologized "to the people I have hurt," stating that while some of the
accusations leveled against him were "untrue or mischaracterized," there was "enough truth in these stories to make me feel embarrassed and ashamed."
In response to Brooke's claim in Ronan Farrow's 2019 book Catch and Kill that Matt anally raped her in his hotel room during the 2014 Sochi Olympics, Matt stated that their sexual encounter was "each act was mutual and completely consensual."In a new book, it is claimed that an extramarital, but consensual, sexual encounter I previously admitted to having was actually an assault," Matt wrote in a letter published in Variety in 2019. "It is categorically false, ignores the facts and defies common sense."
