A former manager of the swanky hotel where Brian Williams stayed during Hurricane Katrina demolished his claims that he saw a body float by — and laughed off his assertion that gangs were roaming the hallways.
Myra deGersdorff, who ran The Ritz-Carlton New Orleans when Williams was there in 2005, told The Post on Monday that the hotel was “right on the edge of the flooding,” with not enough water on Canal Street for the horrific scene Williams has described.
“I know I didn’t see a dead body and there was no manager’s report of seeing a body ever recorded. There would have been a manager’s report,” deGersdorff told The Post. “That did not happen in the French Quarter.”
DeGersdorff also chuckled at Williams’ recollection of roving gangs marauding through the five-star hotel, saying cops were constantly coming and going because the New Orleans Police Department had set up a command post there.
“Attempts were made to breach the entrance, but they were stopped before they got in,” said deGersdorff, who unsuccessfully sued the Ritz for gender discrimination after being fired in 2008.
Williams gave his account of seeing the floating body during a 2006 interview with ex-Disney CEO Michael Eisner.
Williams was also facing heat for claiming he had a close call with Hezbollah rockets in Israel in 2006.
“There were Katyusha rockets passing just underneath the helicopter I was riding in,” he told Fairfield University student reporter Emily Fitzmaurice, according to The Washington Post. But he never mentioned the incident in a post on the NBC News blog that year.
Meanwhile, preliminary Nielsen ratings revealed that Williams lost 36 percent of his viewers in the 25-to-54 age demographic on Friday, compared with his Monday-to-Thursday average last week, according to the TVNewser Web site.
Two days later, a crisis meeting was held at the Central Park West apartment of NBCUniversal CEO Steve Burke, sources said.
It was announced over the weekend that Williams would step aside for a few days, with Lester Holt filling in for him.
“In a career spent covering the news, Brian told us it’s clear he’s become too much a part of the news,” Holt said on Monday night’s broadcast. “He’ll be off while this issue is dealt with.”
The newspaper Stars and Stripes, which last week broke the story about Williams falsely claiming to have been in a helicopter that was shot down during the Iraq War, on Monday released recordings of a Feb. 4 interview it conducted with him about the scandal.
“I would not have chosen to make this mistake,” Williams says in the recording. “I don’t know what screwed up in my mind that caused me to conflate one aircraft from the other.”
Also Monday, Williams plunged on the Marketing Arm’s “trustworthiness scale” — from the 23rd- most-trusted person in the country to No. 835.