Unspeakable Things

Silence, Shame, and the Stories We Choose to Believe

By: Brooke Nevils

Narrated by: Jane Oppenheimer

A powerful and personal examination of our most persistent and dangerous misunderstandings, myths and stereotypes about sexual harassment and assault

In 2017, Brooke Nevils made a confidential HR complaint about one of the most powerful and familiar faces in media. Twenty-four hours later, the highest paid morning news anchor in history was fired, stunning millions of Americans in one of the MeToo era’s defining stories. Demanding answers—and the intimate details of the most personal and painful humiliation of her life—the press soon discovered her identity.

But hers was not the kind of black-and-white story the media knew how to tell. There’d been no explicit threats. She hadn’t screamed, fought, or gone to the police. Instead, she returned to her abuser again and again in a frantic attempt to “fix” an impossible situation that threatened her livelihood and the people closest to her. Yet as MeToo unfolded, Brooke learned that messy stories like hers were far from the exception, and that nearly everything she’d believed about sexual harassment and assault—and how victims react to it—was wrong. She began a yearslong effort to confront and understand her own experience, not simply as a woman reckoning with her past, but as a journalist confronting the critical questions that MeToo asked but ultimately left unanswered.

Through groundbreaking interviews with leading clinicians, forensic professionals, attorneys, and frontline researchers, Unspeakable Things challenges our understanding of consent, power, and the lingering, often misunderstood effects of trauma and shame. Despite its rarefied setting at the height of fame, power, and American media, Brooke’s story serves as a textbook example of an all-too-common scenario that continues to devastate lives and enable abusers. This book is a powerful re-examination of everything we think we know, the start to a new conversation, and—for anyone who has ever felt ashamed, hopeless, alone, and afraid—a light in the dark.

Critic reviews

“Unspeakable Things is less a bombshell than a bomb squad—it wants to carefully separate the wires, to parse and defuse the inner machinery of this kind of scandal. Just as much an investigator as a memoirist, Nevils attempts to tunnel through the lurid details and the #MeToo boilerplate and unearth something much knottier.”
—The Atlantic

“[M]ore than a personal retelling. The book employs Nevils' journalistic background to take a scalpel to toxic newsroom dynamics and who they protect.”
—USA Today

Powerful Narrative/Thorough Research

I can’t imagine Brooke Nevins left anything unsaid in this powerful narrative of her sexual assault by Matt Lauer. What makes the book well rounded is Lauer’s side of the story (using public records) and it’s thorough research on how victims are viewed by the public and myths that cause people to doubt or minimize sex assault/rape claims. Well done!

Complex, moving, and engaging

This was one of the best books I have read in a long time. So much information, complexity, and nuance. I was also deeply moved by the depth of this story.

Powerful and important

I usually don’t leave reviews, but this book is one of the best I have ever read. This book is masterfully told and written and incredibly well researched. Someone who fought and knew a lot about sexual assault, and what victims go through, her story offered me new and valuable insights. The narration was also great.

I am really challenged in rating this book

This is a very powerful book in both the balance of her personal experience, as well as all the work she put into it in terms of the legal aspects, the research, the psychology around victims and shame. BUT - In the epilogue she said she wrote the book for her daughter - to expose systems that enable powerful abusers in order to protect future victims. Yet her husband, the father of her daughter, essentially worked to put someone in our highest political office who perpetuates a system that enables powerful abusers at the largest scale possible. Is she compartmentalizing, is it cognitive dissonance, is it hypocrisy? I don’t know, but I learned this after finishing the book and feel very differently about it now.

Remarkable. Human

This book articulates ‘unspeakable’ experience(s) with directness and strength, alongside research, emotional intelligence, and…restraint.