Former NBC News “Today” host Matt Lauer is sporting some interesting new ink. 

Days after firing back at journalist Ronan Farrow for making rape allegations against him in his best-selling book “Catch and Kill,” Lauer unveiled a quote tattooed on his right forearm while running errands around Noyack, New York Wednesday.

Lauer’s cursive tattoo reads, “Hatred corrodes the container it is carried in,” according to paparazzi pictures obtained by the New York Post and Us Weekly. In the photo, Lauer is behind the wheel in a baseball cap, sunglasses and a white button-down shirt that reveals the new ink. 

USA TODAY reached out to Lauer’s rep to verify the tattoo’s authenticity.

Matt Lauer:Unloads on Ronan Farrow’s ‘shoddy’ journalism in new defense stirred by NYT takedown

The mantra inked on Lauer’s arm was part of Sen. Alan Simpson’s eulogy for President George H.W. Bush at his funeral in 2018:  

“So the punch line for George Herbert Walker Bush is this. You would have wanted him on your side. He never lost his sense of humor. Humor is the universal solvent against the abrasive elements of life. That’s what humor is. He never hated anyone. He knew what his mother and my mother always knew. Hatred corrodes the container it’s carried on.”

Although it’s not clear when Lauer got the ink, it was spotted just days after he made headlines defending himself against Farrow.

In a column in Mediaite Tuesday, Lauer unloaded on Farrow’s allegedly “shoddy” journalism in “Catch and Kill,” which among other bombshells highlighted an allegation that Lauer had raped a NBC colleague, Brooke Nevils.  

Lauer, 62, has firmly denied that allegation. He was fired by NBC in 2017 after admitting to a consensual but inappropriate relationship with the colleague. 

He accused the Pulitzer Prize-winning Farrow of being a sloppy and “manipulative” journalist, failing to fact-check his sources, failing to provide evidence for accusations against Lauer, using “misleading language to manipulate readers into believing things that could easily be false,” and shaping his reporting to “suit his activist goals” instead of adhering to journalistic standards.

Farrow fired back shortly after. “We called dozens of corroborators around the Lauer allegations described in the book, and more than a dozen around Brooke Nevils specifically,” he said to USA TODAY in a statement.

Contributing: Maria Puente

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