Kathie Lee Made Today Staffers Sign a Note Saying Matt Lauer Is Nice

The thing about Kathie Lee Gifford doing “something nice” for you is that it’s the worst possible thing that could ever happen to you. It’s like a person with bright red paint on their shoes breaking in through a plate glass window to sweep your kitchen floor. It’s like a monster truck giving you a surprise haircut while you sleep.

Recently, Kathie Lee Gifford decided to do something nice for Matt Lauer.

Her idea: write an open letter about how Matt Lauer is nice. Force Tell Ask every cast and crewmember of The Today Show to sign it. Run it as a full-paged ad in USA Today.

Matt Lauer is a good guy, he never hurt no one excep’ a bad person who deserve it MAYBE ok

Love,

[The complete cast and crew of Today]

Gifford told the New York Daily News that she found the media portrayal of Lauer (as a godless narcissist who stabbed Ann Curry in the aorta one morning on live television because he didn’t like the cut of her jib) "frustrating."

“No one seemed to be interested in the truth, and that was really frustrating for me because I have a deep sense of injustice about things….I certainly don’t like somebody taking blame for something that they’re not responsible for….So unbeknownst to anyone higher up at NBC, I just started this thing.”

The Daily News reports that Gifford spent three weeks collecting the signatures from staffers. Everyone, from the lowliest 4^th hour Today Show wine slave to the mighty Al Roker signed the open letter. One line read, “No one has coerced us to sign this,” which is incredible because it’s the first time in her life Kathie Lee Gifford has ever referred to herself as “No one.”

Gifford showed Lauer the letter this past Monday. He thanked her but, perhaps realizing that it would come off like a full paged ad purchased by a serpent in support of Satan, “asked her to keep it ‘in the family’" and not publish it in USA Today. Though she was disappointed that no one but the people who had signed the letter would know how helpful she was, Kathie Lee agreed. Then she told the Daily News all about it, because we’re all family here!

All of us except Ann Curry. Ann Curry never signed the letter because Kathie Lee Gifford never asked her to and also because Matt Lauer chopped off her hands on her last day of work and keeps them in a gold box in his study. Gifford said she’d wanted to ask Curry to sign the letter, but unfortunately hasn’t seen her since she left her post at Today almost one year ago.

Also, fuck Ann.

“This wasn’t about Ann,” said Kathie Lee, of the open letter she wrote defending Matt from people who say he was cruel to Ann. “This is about our love and support for a different member of our family.”

But, of course, without Curry’s signature, the letter reads less like a “statement of support for Matt Lauer from those at the center of the controversy” than a “list of people who are currently employed by The Today Show.”

It’s a good thing they never went public with it.

Thanks for your help, Kathie Lee.

[NYDN // Image via AP]

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