The denial from NBC News titan Tom Brokaw couldn’t be stronger. “I met with Linda Vester on two occasions, both at her request, 23 years ago, because she wanted advice with respect to her career at NBC. The meetings were brief, cordial and appropriate, and despite Linda’s allegations, I made no romantic overtures towards her, at that time or any other.”

That statement surfaced on Thursday via articles in The Post by Sarah Ellison and in Variety by Elizabeth Wagmeister and Ramin Setoodeh. Linda Vester was hired by NBC News in 1989 after finishing a Fulbright in the Middle East. She reported from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait on the first Gulf War and later got a spot on NBC’s “Weekend Today,” a post far removed from Brokaw’s iconic “NBC Nightly News.”

Yet Brokaw spotted her, as she attests in interviews. “I barely knew him and I didn’t work for his broadcast. But when the most powerful man at the network sends you a computer message, you answer him,” noted Vester, who did a detailed video interview with Variety. That message, she says, came in January 1994, when Vester was in New York on assignment. Though she was headed to Washington, where she was based, Brokaw attempted to alter her itinerary. The Post:

Vester said Brokaw asked her where she was staying and what she was doing that night. “I replied that I had checked out of my hotel and was going to catch the last shuttle back to D.C. before the coming snowstorm,” Vester remembered recently. Every correspondent’s travel and hotel plans were kept in a group file available to anyone on NBC News’s computer system.

Brokaw wrote back that that wasn’t a good idea, Vester said. “My gut told me his intentions were not good,” she wrote in her diary later that night, and which she supplied to The Post. So she called her best friend and mentor at the network, a producer in the Washington bureau, who has corroborated to The Post the principal aspects of Vester’s account.

After some back-and-forth over the messaging system, Brokaw presented himself at Vester’s hotel room — just walked right in and sat down on the sofa. To say that Vester was put off by these developments wouldn’t quite capture the panic that she describes in her Variety video. Though she sat down on the sofa at a distance from Brokaw, she describes a sexual assault:

He leaned over, and pressed a finger to my lips. He said, “This is our compact.”

He grabbed me behind my neck and tried to force me to kiss him. I was shocked to feel the amount of force and his full strength on me. I could smell alcohol on his breath, but he was totally sober. He spoke clearly. He was in control of his faculties.

I broke away and stood up and said, “Tom, I do not want to do this with you. If I did, I would leave for London with a loss of innocence and I don’t want to go down that road.” I had just been promoted to foreign correspondent in the London bureau.

A second incident allegedly took place in London more than a year later, according to The Post. “She saw no way to extract herself from being in Brokaw’s company because she feared alienating the anchor, she said, but again warded off his advances,” writes Ellison, who also reports an allegation from a second woman. Brokaw, again, denies it.

Behold the evidentiary wall into which Brokaw’s denial collides: Linda Vester is on the record. At 52, she is out of the industry. She has said no intention of filing a legal claim against Brokaw, so these interviews aren’t part of media blitz for a civil suit. She has diaries to support her contentions. And she has a friend and mentor who has corroborated the key pieces of her story.

The 20-plus-year anchor of “NBC Nightly News” isn’t on trial here. People can reach their own conclusions about who is credible about these events of decades ago.

NBC News, however, enjoys no such casual luxury. Brokaw remains something of a paterfamilias for the news network. He is deployed to do look-back pieces, to interview newsmakers such as John McCain in his capacity as a “special correspondent”, to provide perspective on America’s racial struggles and … to comment on MSNBC about sexual harassment. In a December 2017 appearance, he cited the Al Franken case to make this point: “We’ve got to decide as an institution of governing and an institution of justice and as a culture about where are the lines about all of this because it’s not going away. I have believed for a long time that as we move into the 21st century, it will be the century of women. Women are going to make more progress in this century than they have in the long, long history of this place on Earth.”

He continued: “What we need to do as it moves along is not to have more of a fractured … universe between men and women and what’s acceptable and what’s not. Not easy to arrive at these conclusions, because so many of them are subjective. It’s in the minds of the violator or the recipient or even the people who are on the left and the right. But I do think we need to have a healthier, well-defined dialogue, if you will, and I’m not quite sure how we launch into it.”

What’s not subjective is that the physical, sexual pursuit of an unwilling junior colleague is an outrage, no matter the century when it allegedly occurred. One of the reasons that Brokaw is right about the 21st century is a dynamic that is right now working against him: The women who have come forth to allege sexual harassment by bigwigs in media and other industries over the past couple of years — a cultural shift touched off by Gretchen Carlson’s lawsuit against late Fox News chief Roger Ailes — have collectively established an airtight credibility. Whether anonymous or on the record, the testimony from these women has checked out again and again and again and again — interrupting the careers of men such as Ailes, Harvey Weinstein, Charlie Rose, Matt Lauer, Mark Halperin, Leon Wieseltier, Bill O’Reilly, and on and on.

Their stories, their recollections, their notes, their contemporaneous texts and emails and chats — they’ve held up.

Not convinced? Spend some time with this video, from the launch of Press Forward, a group founded by several sexual-harassment victims to eradicate the scourge from newsrooms. One by one, the women speak of their experiences and their careers. Vester sounds a lot like them. “I am speaking out now because NBC has failed to hire outside counsel to investigate a genuine, long-standing problem of sexual misconduct in the news division,” she told The Post.

Tom Brokaw has spent decades building up his credibility. But, as he’s about to find out, he’s not the only one.