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One Year After Savannah Guthrie and Hoda Kotb Were Named the First-ever Female Coanchors of Nbc’s Today, the Duo Takes Marie Claire Behind the Scenes of a Day on Set

- Anna Peele

It was Savannah Guthrie’s job to tell us. After more than 20 years of hosting Today, Matt Lauer was out.

On November 29, 2017, Guthrie appeared to be struggling to reconcile the alleged abusive actions of her friend and coanchor, the upheaval of her workplace, and the fallout from the #MeToo movement, televised in real time. In NBC News chairman Andy Lack’s words, which Guthrie read live on air moments after she heard the news herself, “We received a detailed complaint from a colleague about inappropriate sexual behavior in the workplace by Matt Lauer.…While it is the first complaint about his behavior in the over 20 years he’s been at NBC News, we were also presented with reason to believe this may not have been an isolated incident.”

Guthrie’s voice wavers in the footage. She had to break one of the most difficult stories of her career, about the guy who’d been sitting next to her for over five years. The guy her children knew. The guy America loved. “I was terrified,” she tells me nine months later, in her office at the famed 30 Rock building in Midtown Manhattan. “Terrified to think of who would possibly sit next to me [in Lauer’s place], and could I hold this show? I didn’t think so. In fact, I knew I couldn’t.”

But in video of that moment, Guthrie looks to her left and Hoda Kotb is there; she grabs Kotb’s hand, and it’s like she’s clinging onto a railing. She seems steadier. “When it was Hoda,” Guthrie says, “I was so happy. Like, ‘Oh, I have this partner. I don’t feel scared anymore. We can do this together.’”