The wife of Matt Lauer, former NBC host accused of sexual misconduct, has left the couple’s New York home going back to her home country of the Netherlands, a source told PageSix.
Sources said Annette Roque was last seen at the Hampton home on Nov. 29, the day NBC fired Lauer, 59, from his post of 20 years as a co-host of “The Today Show.”
“Annette has taken their two younger kids out of school and is believed to have left the U.S. and gone to her family in her native country,” a Hampton source said.
Roque, a former model, is Dutch. She hasn’t spoken publicly since Lauer’s scandal broke.
She met her husband in 1997 on a blind date and married him less than a year later.
They have three children together, Jack Matthew (born in 2001), daughter Romy (born in 2004), and son Thijs (born in 2006).
While pregnant with Thijs, Roque had filed for divorce citing cruel and inhumane treatment and Lauer’s extreme anger and hostility towards her. She later reconsidered. The rumor was, according to another source, that Lauer offered her a postnuptial agreement that promised her up to $5 million for staying in the marriage.
It is not clear whether Roque left with or without her children.
Lauer was fired after a slew of gross sexual misconduct allegations first exposed in a Nov. 29 Variety report.
A telling detail, Lauer had a button installed on his desk that could lock the doors to his office, multiple sources said.
“His office was in a secluded space, and he had a button under his desk that allowed him to lock his door from the inside without getting up. This afforded him the assurance of privacy,” Variety wrote.
In a statement read aloud at the start of the following day’s broadcast of the “Today” show, Lauer apologized for what he called his “troubling flaws.”
Lauer said in his statement that some of the accusations against him were “untrue or mischaracterized,” but that “there is enough truth in these stories to make me feel embarrassed and ashamed.”
Lauer was the latest in a line of celebrities of the movie and television industry disgraced by sexual misconduct allegations, including Harvey Weinstein and Kevin Spacey.
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Tom Ozimek contributed to this report.
