On Wednesday, Mr. Lauer was fired after several women said he had targeted them for abuse, including one woman who said he sexually assaulted her until she passed out.

There is no way to say what Mr. Lauer’s motivations were during his interview with Mrs. Clinton. He may have interrupted and questioned her extensively because she was the more experienced candidate and presumed front-runner.

But that interview reads differently to many now, as do Mr. Lauer’s other on-camera interactions with powerful women that seemed garden-variety sexist or purely boneheaded at the time. In 2014, Mr. Lauer, a father of three, asked Mary Barra, the first female chief executive of General Motors and at the time a mother of two teenagers, if she could do both jobs well. In 2012, he remarked to the actress Anne Hathaway that viewers had “seen a lot of you lately” after a photographer had crouched down to take a picture up her skirt.

Regina Lawrence, a professor at the University of Oregon who studies gender, media and elections, said people like Mr. Lauer have become stark examples of how powerful men can enforce a culture of abuse while having substantial control over what the public sees, consumes and ultimately feels.

“We still have to be cautious” about drawing absolute connections between an abuser’s behind-the-scenes behavior and public professional life, Ms. Lawrence said.

“But these are things that men have been doing in the course of their professional work: Mistreating, denigrating and objectifying women,” Ms. Lawrence said. “If they would objectify people that they work with and know, how much might they objectify women that they cover?”