All about Matt Lauer's office sexcapade with staff, Addie Zinone

Former Today Show staff member spilled the beans about her secret office affair with Matt Lauer(former chief anchor of Today Show.)

She let us into the details of what is the most blockbusting behind the scenes series this year. Their rendezvous according to Zinone occurred frequently in the older anchor’s dressing room. The first few times that Lauer made advances on Addie, he totally caught her off guard with no clue what was about to get down. Zinone tells that he first pressured her for sex in his office after he used a secret button on his desk to lock the office after she was safely inside. 

In a piece published Thursday in Variety, Addie Zinone said her relationship with Lauer occurred 16 years ago when she was a 24-year-old production assistant and he was in his early 40s and newly married! 

The affair lasted several weeks, around the time she was leaving the Today Show to pursue her dream job of anchoring the news at a local TV station in her West Virginia hometown.

Last month, NBC News fired Lauer from the Today Show after another staffer complained about his inappropriate conduct starting at the 2014 Sochi Olympics. 

Sadly, the list of Lauer's gratification tools keeping surging in as dozens of former and current NBC News employees told Variety during a two-month investigation that Lauer had a history of inviting colleagues into his office for sexual encounters, and that he’d use a secret button under his desk that allowed him to lock the door without standing up. Sound familiar? 

The circumstances described in Zinone’s first-person account in Variety are in line with what other women have told to Variety and the New York Times.

“He went after the most vulnerable and the least powerful — and those were the production assistants and the interns,” wrote Zinone. “He understood that we were going to be so flattered and so enthralled by the idea that the most powerful man at NBC News is taking any interest in us.”

Zinone said the flirtation started in June 2000 when he sent a message to her, saying “you look fantastic.”
She says she thanked him and asked if she could “get a little advice,” prior to her departure from the network. Lauer agreed and continued to send messages — printouts of which Zinone shared with Variety.

One message said, “NOW YOU’RE KILLING ME…YOU LOOK GREAT TODAY! A BIT TOUGH TO CONCENTRATE.” They set up a lunch date, which Zinone expected to be “purely professional.” Instead, Lauer used the lunch meeting to hit on her.

When they arrived back at the office, Zinone said she “couldn’t concentrate” and sent a message to Lauer, who allegedly proposed they meet in his studio dressing room and it was fume fume and more fume. 

“It happened in his dressing room above Studio 1A, which was empty in the afternoons,” Zinone says. “He got in his car and I had to go back to work, and now my life had completely changed.”

There were several more dressing room encounters. Lauer also invited her into his office one afternoon. Zinone claims she thought he finally wanted to talk about her career and encourage her professionally. Instead, as she sat across from him, he pushed a button on his desk and the door shut.

“It was embarrassing, because his secretary was sitting outside,” she said. “He wanted to do stuff. I was like, ‘No. I’m so in over my head.’ ”
Their last encounter occurred in a bathroom at the Staples Center in Los Angeles while they were covering the Democratic National Convention.

Zinone described how Lauer’s behavior had a devastating and lasting effect on her personal and professional life. Soon after she returned to her hometown and began anchoring the local news, a reporter from the National Enquirer ambushed her in her driveway. When she reached out to Lauer, she asked “Who did you tell?” And then he “completely ghosted me,” she said.

Zinone said his rejection eroded her confidence and left her depressed. She couldn’t do her job, so she quit.

“This man who I’d held on a pedestal had made me feel like my looks and my body were my true assets,” she said. “He made it clear that he wasn’t interested in my skills or my talent. It just shattered everything.”

After Zinone quit her anchoring job in West Virginia, she joined the Army and became a journalist in the Army Reserve. She also moved to Hollywood and got a job at “Access Hollywood” but was deployed to Iraq for a year where she was able to file stories for the show because of the number of celebrities supporting the military.

But in 2008, she said she learned that the “Today Show” had rejected Maria Menounos’ idea about doing a story about her, how she was a former “Today Show” staffer going off on her second deployment to Iraq.
When Zinone heard that a “Today Show” producer had said, “We’re not going to cover her,” she was in complete disbelief. But she realized, “That’s when I knew I could never get rid of this thing.”

That’s one of the many reasons Zinone said she decided to come forward, but she also wanted to tell a story about how sexual harassment causes lasting hurt. Zinone is now married, has children and runs a women’s apparel company, according to her social media posts.

The Zinone family

“The things that Matt Lauer did to me, there are men doing to other women. Although it wasn’t a crime in my case, it’s still not right,” Zinone said. “Matt took advantage of his power. It’s sickening. It breaks my heart that he did this for so long.”