Her best friend accused Matt Lauer of sexual assault. Now, she’s set to be Baltimore County’s top prosecutor.

On the first day of freshman year in 2003, an aspiring lawyer from Pikesville and a Midwesterner who dreamed of a journalism career found themselves in an all-women’s dorm at Johns Hopkins University that neither wanted to be in.

They became weekly obsessives of “The West Wing,” the NBC series about life in the White House; classmates in a science course called “Conversations with the Earth”; and eventually best friends. Now, one has been elected the top prosecutor in Maryland’s third-largest county. The other published a book about how she says former NBC Today Show anchor Matt Lauer abused her and his power.

The friendship between incoming Baltimore County State’s Attorney Sarah David and former NBC producer Brooke Nevils has withstood decades, distance, marriages and four kids between them. It has endured through what Nevils describes as the most traumatic time in her life — the night she said Lauer raped her at the 2014 Sochi Olympics — and the aftermath.

Both women say that Nevils’ experience has shaped the way they understand the dynamics between sexual assault and power.

“The amount of women who say they are raped are a tiny fraction of the amount of women who will say that they have experienced the definition of rape,” David said.

A 21st century state’s attorney’s office prosecutes sexual assault cases with vigor, David said, and proactively partners with local schools and community groups to educate students about consent in relationships. Under her tenure, David said the office will define what a healthy relationship looks like, what consent means and connect survivors to advocates.

The 41-year-old ousted 19-year incumbent Scott Shellenberger, who spent the majority of his legal career in the office. David said she wants to “modernize” the state’s attorney’s office, which doesn’t publish data about the number and types of cases it prosecutes.

Over the past two decades, the state’s attorney’s office has been accused of mishandling sexual assault cases and survivors. David highlighted those accusations throughout her campaign.

Nevils, who lives in Baltimore, said she initially did not think what happened with Lauer was assault. She blamed herself for going upstairs to his hotel room and for being drunk. Only later, in a post-#MeToo landscape, did she consider how his influence at the network and reputation as “America’s Dad” created power differential that meant she couldn’t say no to his invitation.

Lauer has not held a job since NBC fired him in November 2017. After Nevils’ complaint, several other women came forward with stories of inappropriate sexual relationships with the former Today show anchor. Lauer acknowledges the “embarrassing” infidelities but has denied his relationship with Nevils was nonconsensual. Lauer did not respond to multiple attempts to reach him.

Nevils explains in the book how, even when she did say no, Lauer ignored her.

Although a prosecutor cannot always hold an offender criminally responsible for their actions, David said, her office will be accessible to survivors. It will also train attorneys to be informed about trauma, how survivors respond to it and how to work with them.

It’s the kind of approach Nevils, also 41, said she wished was more widely adopted years ago. And it’s an approach that David says has been informed by her experiences as a prosecutor, a county resident and also a close friend of someone who experienced a public humiliation.

A ‘philosophical change’

David wants to model the Baltimore County State’s Attorney’s Office’s approach to sex crimes after Montgomery County’s special victims chief Debbie Feinstein.

Feinstein, an assistant state’s attorney, has partnered with nonprofits, law enforcement and other organizations to talk to students — from elementary school through college — about what constitutes a healthy relationship and how to define consent, David said.

That foundation builds trust between the survivors and law enforcement, David said, which she thinks has eroded in Baltimore County.

Shellenberger has said that sex crime cases are hard to win. Survivors have said he didn’t try hard enough. In 2021 he told a former Randallstown woman that he believed she was raped, but could not prosecute because a jury wouldn’t believe her. That woman is now trying to get a special prosecutor to reopen the case.

“I’ve spoken to many women who have gone to the police, who have testified, and their experiences are devastating,” Nevils said. “The prosecution does not work for them.”

David said she wants to ease the tension between survivors and law enforcement and empower bystanders to call out bad behavior.

“When you look at Brooke’s situation, one of the things that’s most disappointing is, that should have been [Lauer’s] ... peers that were willing to say this is a problem, right?” she said. “Because you can’t expect the person in the vulnerable position, the person in the less powerful position, to have to take up that fight.”

Survivors should not have to convince law enforcement, prosecutors and legislators to listen to them, David said. And attorneys should not automatically dismiss victims, like Nevils, who have personal relationships with their abusers.

Rape, both said, is frequently not about a stranger holding a knife in the dark. Prosecutors must evolve with the changing definitions and learn how to serve survivors.

‘U Pick 2′ at Sushi Hana

Nevils and David have been eating lunch at Towson’s Sushi Hana a few times a year since 2003. The topic of conversation changes — from fraternity formals to toddler disaster tips — but the lunch special has not.

U Pick 2 is the $11 deal. They both always order spicy salmon and Alaska rolls.

After graduating from Hopkins, David and Nevils moved to New York City. David joined the New York Police Department’s counterterrorism division as an intelligence research specialist. Nevils started at NBC Universal as a page and became an assistant to Today Show co-anchor Meredith Viera. They worked insane hours, lived in cramped studio apartments they could barely afford and met at dive bars for happy hour.

When David returned to Maryland in 2010 for law school, they kept in touch over email — exchanging stories about career ambitions, families and ex-boyfriends. But after the 2014 Sochi Olympics, David noticed a change in Nevils. Her once confident, happy friend was drinking a lot, aloof and not in touch much.

“I behaved as though nothing mattered anymore because that’s how it felt, and I couldn’t stand being around old friends who still believed I was a good person when I knew I wasn’t,” Nevils said. “It made me feel like a fraud.”

It would be several more years before Nevils filed the HR complaint that ended Lauer’s career. Even after that, Nevils writes in her book, she struggled to call what happened to her an assault.

David said it was bizarre for her to see her friend, a woman who graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Hopkins, smeared in the tabloids as “Lauer’s mistress.”

“She carried something heavier, clearly,” David said. “What she was exposed to in that aftermath is something that really no person should have to go through. To compound an already traumatic experience with sort of such a public trauma is unfair in like a truly, profound way.”

Nevils worked on “Unspeakable Things: Silence, Shame, and the Stories We Choose to Believe” for six years. It’s a memoir about her assault and a deeply reported book on how the media in general misunderstands — and in some cases, blatantly ignores — consent, power, trauma and shame.

Nevils remembers sobbing in front of David during a regular lunch at Sushi Hana as she talked about the impact her book could have on her family.

“I started talking about how I was afraid I was ruining my kids’ lives, how they would be so ashamed of me, how I couldn’t forgive myself,” Nevils said. “What if Matt came after me? What if Matt came after my kids?’”

Nevils has not heard directly from Lauer since his firing; he did publicly apologize 24 hours afterward, saying in part: “to the people I have hurt, I am truly sorry.”

David held her friend’s hand and let her vent.

“Everybody around us was, like, finance bros in fleece vests, just dudes at lunch, and I really lost my s---,” Nevils said.

David, in turn, was worried about how to tell Nevils she was running for office since her friend became a fixture in the National Enquirer after Lauer was fired.

“You’re putting yourself in a space that has ... all the things you can do to make change,” David said, “but the reality is that it is also a space that invites a lot of, you know, extreme negativity.”

Nevils, she said, helped her prepare for the worst a campaign could bring by encouraging David to limit her time online, not Google herself and block out the internet trolls as much as she could.

A better future

“Unspeakable Things” explains how survivors’ responses to assault don’t always fit society’s neat expectations of victims’ behavior.

Having consensual sex with your assailant after being raped, Nevils says in the book, is a textbook trauma response for a victim desperate to regain control. In the book, Nevils outlines how she went to Lauer’s apartment after Sochi and had sex with him again. In retrospect, Nevils said, she tried to take back control of her power, but just descended deeper into a spiral.

Prosecutors are loath to take on such cases because they’re hard to prove. Even with DNA evidence, consent is the key — and how do you prove that, let alone define it?

“For a long time,” Nevils said, “it’s just been understood if it was a ‘he said/she said,’ why bother?”

Katie Curran O’Malley, executive director of the Women’s Law Center of Maryland, was part of a coalition that lobbied legislators to update Maryland’s rape laws in 2024. The law no longer says that “use of force” is required to classify a sexual encounter as a crime. An imbalance of power, in addition to a lack of consent, is enough to charge.

David asked O’Malley, a former prosecutor, district court judge and first lady of Maryland, to moderate a book event for Nevils at The Ivy in April.

“She did such a great job of talking about those situations you can find in workplaces — anyone who feels like they have that superhero status, any organization where someone holds themselves out to be God,” O’Malley said.

With each generation, tolerance for what’s acceptable changes, Nevils said. She and David, who each have a son and a daughter, think that’s encouraging.

“What we would want for all of our children,” David said, “is to experience a very different awareness in this space than what we were raised with.”

When they met at Sushi Hana after the book came out, David gave her friend a copy to sign. Nevils was terrified she’d receive an earmarked copy full of “little lawyer notes.”

Instead, Nevils said David told her the book was beautiful and she’s always known she could do it.

“You never know when you move into some random building, how important certain people are going to be,” she said. “Sarah has been one of the most important people in my life.”