A former NBC News correspondent told The Washington Post in a report published late Thursday that during the 1990s, former anchor Tom Brokaw made unwanted sexual advances toward her, once forcibly trying to kiss her after inviting himself into her hotel room.
Brokaw fiercely disputed claims from the woman, Linda Vester, calling her descriptions "melodramatic" and akin to a "drive-by shooting" in a letter circulated to NBC News colleagues Friday, the Los Angeles Times reports. Brokaw characterized Vester as a bitter ex-employee who wanted to attack NBC because of her "limited success" at the network.
"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 in the letter of the hotel room meeting. The letter also criticized Vester for making the allegations public in the Post rather than mentioning her discomfort to Brokaw first. "She couldn't pick up the phone and say, 'I'd like to talk. I have issues from those two meetings 20 years ago'? Instead she became a character assassin. Strip away all of the hyperbole and what has she achieved? What was her goal? Hard to believe it wasn't much more Look At Me than Me:Too."
Brokaw has additionally denied allegations from another woman, a former production assistant who asked to remain anonymous, who told the Post that Brokaw grabbed her hands and put them under his jacket and against his chest in the 1990s. Both women said they did not file a complaint for fear of retribution. Read more at the Los Angeles Times.