00:02:49.360And the movie Polly Pocket is set to be directed by none other than Lena Dunham of HBO's Girls.
00:02:56.300So Lena Dunham was trending all this week after the Polly Pocket movie was announced,
00:03:01.160which also means that a particularly sticky piece of misleading content about her did too.
00:03:06.540Now, I have to give a little bit of a heads up here.
00:03:09.120This claim is a particularly ugly one involving sexual abuse.
00:03:13.800Last year, I did a deep dive into this particular claim,
00:03:16.980where it originated, and why it stuck around for so long.
00:03:20.420Now, I know, I know, people have a lot of strong opinions and feelings about Lena Dunham.
00:03:26.720So take a listen and let me know what you think.
00:03:28.900And we'll be back with our regular Friday newscast next week.
00:03:32.680Today, we are not trying to sort of demonstrate the way that the media unfairly maligned somebody.
00:03:38.520We are zeroing in on one specific misleading claim about none other than Lena Dunham.
00:03:45.760I am in no way making a larger point about the way that the media and society has portrayed her broadly, but I do want to zero in on this one specific claim and analyze how it became to be this very sticky, persistent lie that still endures online today and what that lie says about our culture.
00:04:04.340Yeah, so why Lena Dunham? Why this one specific thing?
00:04:08.700Great question. So a little bit of background about how I came to be making this episode.
00:04:12.640I used to work on the social media team at msnbc.com, and one of our kind of tried-and-true digital engagement tricks was to post about someone, a public figure, that we knew our audience would engage with, positive or negative.
00:04:26.840This is back in 2015, and our audience used to love to hate on Putin.
00:04:31.420And so whenever we posted something about Putin that cast him in a negative light, we could always expect that people would really engage with it a lot.
00:04:39.580They'd be leaving like mean comments like, yeah, we hate him. They love to hate on Putin.
00:04:43.860But hands down, no question, the public figure that got the most hate on all of our social media pages was Lena Dunham.
00:04:53.120I think if I'm recalling correctly, I think people disliked Lena Dunham more than they disliked Putin, which is really saying something.
00:05:00.320And I worked on this podcast project where Lena Dunham was one of our guests.
00:05:04.520And again, you know, we had posted episodes with all different types of public figures and celebrities, but when we posted our Lena Dunham episode, it was instant, unanimous, negative feedback.
00:05:16.360And so I noticed whenever we would publish about her or post about her or feature her online, commenters would always repeat like a laundry list of reasons they don't like her.1.00
00:05:26.600You know, sometimes it would be the garden variety things that you would expect, like, oh, she's a spoiled brat. I hate her. Or, you know, oh, she's gross, which is pretty much just kind of fat phobia. But by far, the most common thing I would see commenters say about Lena Dunham online was this particularly persistent claim that she's a, quote, sexual predator who admitted to molesting her younger sibling.1.00
00:05:50.280And, you know, I'm always very interested in what I refer to as sticky pieces of disinformation or misinformation or lies, you know, things that really just seem to cut through and persist.
00:06:04.100You know, I'm very interested in why these things stick and to what end and what their stickiness tells us about our culture.
00:06:10.380And in that regard, you know, this misleading claim about Lena Dunham is fascinating to me because I think it tells us a lot about the ways that our political and social climates intersect, which is particularly important in today's climate.
00:06:23.140And I just want to make it super, super clear because I can already hear people who are listening thinking, why are you defending Lena Dunham? She's awful. You know, what are you doing?0.99
00:06:34.880Let me be very clear. There are plenty of valid reasons to not rock with Lena Dunham, some of which we'll be talking about in this episode. So this is not me trying to get anyone to think that Lena Dunham is good, or it is not me saying that every single claim about her is unfair or untrue.
00:06:52.180But the claim that she sexually abused her sibling, I believe, is a pretty nasty thing to repeat about somebody. And I don't know that people who repeat this particularly nasty lie know that it initially started as a right-wing attack on a prominent liberal voice.
00:07:08.060But because of Lena Dunham's overall, I guess we'll say, vibe, this claim has really taken root, not just in right-wing circles, but more generally, too.
00:07:19.060Like, people who I believe probably would never read a right-wing blog, you know, for any legitimate reason, should probably be aware that they are repeating a lie that was really cooked up in the right-wing blogosphere.
00:07:31.580And I think that should be really concerning.
00:07:33.920I think the ways that this claim has sort of become true, that's scare quotes around that, and has persisted for so long should really be concerning for all of us.
00:07:44.340So let's talk about how and why that happened and what it means.
00:07:48.960So for people like me who don't really know anything about this, who is Lena Dunham?
00:07:57.360So if you don't know who Lena Dunham is, I will give you kind of a quick and dirty summary of her background.
00:08:02.540Lena Dunham is an actor, producer, and writer.
00:08:05.180She's the daughter of visual artist Laurie Simmons, who is a very big deal in the art
00:08:11.580Lena rose to fame after making a really strong film debut called Tiny Furniture, which is
00:08:17.000basically a semi-autobiographical movie about a young woman portrayed by Lena who just graduated
00:08:22.060from college and is trying to navigate adulthood.
00:08:24.940Laurie Simmons, her real-life mom, plays her mom in the movie, and in the movie her mom
00:08:29.140is also a visual artist and photographer who stages her pieces with tiny dollhouse furniture,
00:08:36.580just like her mom does in real life. And Lena's real-life sibling, Cyrus Grace,
00:08:41.460plays Lena's character sibling in the movie, too. So it's very semi-autobiographical.
00:08:46.520In 2012, she created and starred in HBO's Girls, which also explores kind of similar themes,
00:08:52.340young white women trying to navigate young adulthood post-college in Brooklyn, New York.1.00
00:08:56.580Lena was born in 1986, so she is what you would call a millennial. And when Girls was debuting,0.99
00:09:03.060it was kind of peak, like, what are the millennials up to content time, right? And so
00:09:08.020Girls was this huge success pretty early on. It got a lot of criticism for how white the show was
00:09:14.540because just like shows like Sex and the City and Friends before it, it's just for white people who
00:09:20.460are not really encountering a lot of diversity that I know that you would find in a city like
00:09:24.580Brooklyn, New York. But regardless, positive, negative, whatever you thought, it was the kind
00:09:30.260of show that people were talking about a lot. It was in the discourse, which I think creates a
00:09:36.200certain kind of gravitas around anything. And just as a side note, in case you're curious,
00:09:40.980I actually watched and enjoyed the show. I'm not going to sit here and act like I have not seen
00:09:45.820every episode, or I am not going to sit here and act like I did not immediately go to AV Club to
00:09:51.260read reviews immediately after watching episodes because, like I said, it was part of a discourse.
00:09:57.820You know, the show created discourse, and I will never deprive myself of discourse, okay? If people
00:10:03.380are talking about something, if there's articles and reviews to be read, I'm reading them. I'm
00:10:07.840engaging. So Girls Explores themes of sexuality, gender, and female friendship, and its highly
00:10:13.800anticipated third season comes out in January 2014. Now, in September of that same year, Lena
00:10:19.840releases a memoir essay collection called Not That Kind of Girl. Lena was having a really hot0.50
00:10:25.660moment, and so the book was a highly anticipated one. Random House purchased the rights in October
00:10:30.5602012 after a big bidding war, and bidding was reported to have risen past $3.5 million.
00:10:36.900So it's one of those very hot, very big deal book publishing projects. This was all happening
00:10:42.560against the backdrop of a particular climate politically, culturally, and socially in the
00:10:47.960mid 2010s uh if i had the ability to clear music rights on this podcast which my producer tari can
00:10:54.900tell you i bug her about pretty much every day this is where we'd be playing like maybe katie
00:10:59.840perry's roar or shake it off by taylor swift you know some other 2010 hit to really set the scene
00:11:07.020mike do you what were some other like 2010 hits like hits of the 2010s oh rihanna maybe rihanna
00:11:14.220was in there i feel like tame impala was in there maybe i'm getting a little like late 2010s
00:11:20.880so just imagine that some some kind of music from that era is playing as i paint a portrait
00:11:29.340of what it was like in the mid 2010s so in popular culture the film 12 years a slave
00:11:35.840won best picture at the oscars in 2014 which was hosted by openly gay ellen degeneres and
00:11:42.680was the most-watched Oscars since the year 2000.
00:11:47.160By 2014, waves of states are passing marriage equality legislation.
00:11:51.720The Supreme Court decides not to hear cases on marriage equality appeals,
00:11:55.280thus immediately legalizing marriage equality in Virginia, Utah, Indiana, Oklahoma, and Wisconsin,
00:12:01.120before it sent back to the courts and ultimately legalized nationwide a year later.
00:12:06.340The Black Lives Matter movement started in 2013 and was really picking up.
00:12:10.240You have the shooting deaths of Trayvon Martin in Florida, Mike Brown in Missouri, and Eric Garner in New York.
00:12:15.560And the subsequent uprisings all over the country shows that this movement has real momentum and really it creates a national conversation that is basically impossible to ignore.
00:12:26.120You'll remember that when President Obama was asked about Trayvon Martin, he answered, if I had a son, he would look a lot like Trayvon Martin.
00:12:32.640Obama gave a televised speech announcing his plans to use executive action to grant citizenship to about 4.4 million immigrants.0.97
00:12:39.240So I have my own feelings about Obama's immigration policies, which is a podcast for another day, but the point is Republicans and right-wingers absolutely fucking hated this.
00:12:51.600We also get Obamacare in 2010, and for the next few years, Republicans were fighting it tooth and nail, including Obamacare's birth control coverage mandate.
00:13:00.420Mike, do you remember that Georgetown law student and feminist activist Sandra Fluke?
00:13:04.340Boy, I've forgotten, but now it's coming back to me. What was the deal with Sandra Fluke? Why do we know her name?0.99
00:13:11.680So in 2012, Sandra Fluke was barred from testifying about birth control during a hearing.
00:13:17.700And instead, the only people who testified about birth control was an all-male panel of clergy.0.96
00:13:23.980And then Rush Limbaugh called Sandra Fluke a slut, basically just for advocating for birth control.0.92
00:13:31.180You know, these were the times where the phrase, we were using the phrase, quote, war on women a lot. Like, that was a phrase that we were using, which I think captured something about what it was like to live through that era. But in a way, it kind of almost seems quaint now when you look at everything else that is sort of going on.0.95
00:13:48.240it does seem quaint now i remember that war on women phrase and boy if uh we thought that was
00:13:58.180a war on women buckle up for 2022 this is full on assault it's funny because i wanted to do this
00:14:06.460episode because i thought it was like a little bit of a departure from everything happening in
00:14:11.240the news but it's so funny how it all it always comes back to this you know i feel like every time
00:14:17.020I look backwards to the period like 5, 10, 15 years ago, I'm confronted with how quaint my
00:14:24.780concerns felt and how the things I was alarmed about seem so much smaller than the things that0.97
00:14:31.740are just like normal shit in the news today. Oh, my God. Tell me about it.0.99
00:16:38.340So we're talking about this war on women.
00:16:40.540But back in 2014, you also have Beyonce performing in front of the word feminist in giant letters like decked out in lights at the MTV VMAs, paired with a sample of Chimamanda Ngozio-Odichie's speech on feminism and expectations for women and girls.0.97
00:16:59.940We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller.0.53
00:17:03.480We say to girls, you can have ambition, but not too much.1.00
00:17:07.380And this, I remember this. I remember coming into work the next day after this aired, and it felt like a big cultural moment for women and feminism.
00:17:17.460You know, I think I've been a, I've identified like vocally as a feminist for most of my life since I was a child.
00:17:24.860But I think for a lot of people, when you were asked, like, are you a feminist?
00:17:29.080It was something you had to be a little bit wishy-washy about.
00:17:31.740And I feel like this moment with Beyonce, it felt like a cultural moment where people wanted to say it with their whole chests.
00:17:39.460Country pop sensation Taylor Swift famously came out as a feminist in 2014 in an interview with The Guardian where she credits her friend none other than Lena Dunham with her feminist awakening.
00:17:52.460And I guess my point is this. This era really feels like a time where things like progressivism and diversity and feminism are becoming increasingly mainstream and that they're becoming attached with a kind of social currency.
00:18:06.560You know, it's not cool to be aligned with old men dragging their feet and blocking marriage equality or calling college girls sluts for wanting to be on birth control. None of that is cool.
00:18:16.980But what is cool is being a feminist. It's cool to be a feminist. It's cool to be an ally. And in 2014, Lena Dunham was a huge part of this climate. So culturally, Lena Dunham's hit show Girls and her writing explores, you know, themes of sexuality and gender in these really frank ways.1.00
00:18:34.680So that alone, you know, creating work deposits that young women have an interiority that is worthy of serious exploration and respect is a thing that is really taking off in the culture.
00:18:45.240You know, Lena Dunham is not a size four, and yet she is nude on screen and has these sex scenes.
00:18:50.720She does a really great job of highlighting the sort of humor and awkwardness that can accompany exploring your sexuality when you're young.
00:18:56.860You know, what she's doing on screen, it feels a little bit daring.
00:19:00.220After the success of Girls, Lena starts Lenny Letter, a feminist newsletter where, you know, you have celebrities getting really, really raw, but also talking about feminist issues.
00:19:09.960You know, you have Jennifer Lawrence writing about the gender pay gap in Hollywood and Kesha writing about her abuse at the hands of her producer, Dr. Luke.
00:19:20.380Lena positions herself as a vocal feminist and a champion for feminist causes.0.50
00:19:24.140Another familiar trip down memory lane, back around 2014, Planned Parenthood was facing a lot of BS political attacks. Mike Pence was not just someone who was being threatened with hanging and a gallows by his own constituents. Back then, he was the governor of Indiana, and he made attacking Planned Parenthood and threatening to defund Planned Parenthood a big part of his whole overall thing.
00:19:48.560And we also had these deceptively edited Sting videos from anti-abortion extremists.
00:19:53.940You know, they would do things like have somebody dress up like a pimp and then go in with women to a Planned Parenthood and try to get services.
00:20:01.520Basically, right-wing types were really trying to make Planned Parenthood and abortion and the kinds of exploration of sexuality and gender that Lena really does in her work.
00:20:10.740They were really trying to brand that as something toxic that nobody would want to be affiliated with.
00:20:15.800only it wasn't really working isn't it funny how mike pence built his whole career on like
00:20:23.260attacking people and making people seem like evil villains and then he arguably rode out his career
00:20:33.620with members of his own party chanting to hang him uh you know isn't that funny that uh you
00:20:48.320You live by the ginned up outrage, you die by the gallows.
00:21:00.740So in the wake of all these attacks on Planned Parenthood,0.99
00:21:04.140Lena becomes the face of a campaign to fight back called Women Are Watching.
00:21:07.740She designs a hot pink shirt that says Lena loves Planned Parenthood in support of Planned Parenthood, and she gets other A-list celebrities like America Ferrera and Gabrielle Union to join in.
00:21:19.080Lena made this kind of cheeky, kind of wink-wink ad for the DNC in support of Obama in 2012.
00:21:26.740Your first time shouldn't be with just anybody. You want to do it with a great guy.
00:21:31.220It should be with a guy with beautiful, someone who really cares about and understands women.
00:21:37.580A guy who cares whether you get health insurance and specifically whether you get birth control.
00:26:56.120And, you know, when it comes to the culture,
00:26:59.040it was people like Lena Dunham who had the relevance.1.00
00:27:01.940And I can see how this would be really threatening to right-wing types who historically have had a lot of political power, but they aren't cool, they're not young or hip, and that is a problem for them.
00:27:12.920So all of this is the backdrop on which a website called Truth Revolt comes to exist.
00:27:20.140And to understand this misleading claim that Lena Dunham sexually abused her sibling and where it comes from, we have to first start by talking about Truth Revolt.
00:27:29.060Wait, so I was following along the whole way, but all of a sudden, now we're talking about a website called Truth Revolt? What is Truth Revolt?
00:27:37.320Truth Revolt is a right-wing website that was launched on October 7th, 2013.
00:27:41.940According to C-SPAN, Truth Revolt is a politically conservative media watchdog and activist group founded by conservative commentators Ben Shapiro and David Horowitz of the David Horowitz Freedom Center as a counterpoint to the politically progressive Media Matters for America.
00:27:58.080Yes, Ben Shapiro is the same person who wrote that breathless piece about Lena's 2012 ad for Obama.
00:28:04.700And side note, a lot of y'all probably know Ben Shapiro.
00:28:08.960He is pretty famous for being, you know, he's young.
00:28:21.400Like the fact that I'm even talking about him on this show is slightly annoying to me because I just like don't like talking about him. You know, I think one of the reasons why I dislike him so much is because his whole thing is culture war stuff. Right. And so he's the guy with a huge platform complaining about Disney making a woke remake or something like that.
00:28:42.680Or, you know, he's the person who's always complaining about culture because culture tends to be a space where, you know, people who are traditionally marginalized can have a little power and have a little bit of a voice.
00:28:58.420And so he's constantly complaining about culture.0.98
00:29:00.620The thing that always comes to mind when I think about Ben Shapiro, I will always associate him with trying to lead a moral crusade against Megan Thee Stallion and Cardi B's Song of the Summer, Wet Ass Pussy, and kind of self-owning himself by saying that the only reason—so he says, oh, I'm married to a doctor, I talked to my doctor wife, and she assures me that the only reason that a woman would have a WAP is if she had a vaginal infection.0.98
00:29:29.520which is just hysterical i think about it all the time and laugh yeah it's the funniest thing0.97
00:29:35.760about him it's the only thing i think about when i think about him it's like perfectly
00:29:39.460summarizes his whole culture war thing where uh there was like a video i don't even think it was
00:29:47.460really edited of him like doing spoken word of the lyrics of that wap song uh and then
00:29:56.280him like commenting about yeah exactly he said his wife who apparently is a medical doctor saying
00:30:04.020that the only reason it might happen is because of an infection it was sad and shocking and i
00:30:10.400almost feel like like he was setting us up but like it's just too much humility i think it just
00:30:17.260truly is that embarrassing for him yeah i if folks have not seen so the video that you're
00:30:23.300talking about i definitely watched it a hundred times he is reading the lyrics on his show in0.99
00:30:29.120disgust and so he's reading the lyrics to wet ass pussy but then somebody and i think he's trying1.00
00:30:34.920to demonstrate like this song is so immoral and like this is what our girls are listening to and1.00
00:30:40.000yada yada yada but then somebody to a beat somebody puts it to the wap beat and it kind of slaps
00:30:47.020I'm not going to lie. It's hilarious. Look it up. I'll link it in the show notes because I watch it. It's given me great joy. I'll put it that way.0.89
00:30:57.500Yeah. And I think it's the best way to really understand Ben Shapiro as a person and as a man.
00:31:02.620Exactly. And obviously this is it sounds so silly and it is silly, but it's also really important to this particular story because turning culture into a political battleground is a big part of how we got here with this one persistent claim about Lena Dunham.
00:31:20.280So Truth Revolt's mission page states that its goals are to, quote, unmask leftists in the media for who they are, destroy their credibility with the American public, and devastate their funding bases.
00:31:31.700So essentially, Truth Revolt was created, per the co-creator David Horowitz's own mission statement, to manipulate media for political means.
00:31:49.300leftist ideas have failed everywhere they've been tried. The left wins for one simple reason.
00:31:54.720Leftists control the information distribution system in the United States, and they use that
00:31:59.460system to pillory conservatives, heartless bigots intent on harming the poor and targeting minorities.
00:32:06.520The media must be destroyed where they stand. That is our mission at Truth Revolt. The goal of Truth
00:32:11.580Revolt is simple. Unmask leftists in the media for who they are, destroy their credibility with
00:32:16.700the American public and devastate their funding basis. Truth Revolt focuses on high-profile media
00:32:22.060members and holding them accountable. Truth Revolt also seeks to stop the left dead in its tracks
00:32:27.660when it comes to training the next generation on our college campuses. Truth Revolt works to make
00:32:33.260advertisers and funders aware of the leftist propaganda they sponsor and bringing social
00:32:38.540consequences to bear to create pressure on such advertisers and funders. So pretty obviously from
00:32:44.260their own statement, Truth Revolt specifically is looking to, quote, unmask leftists and target
00:32:49.820specific leftist public figures in the media to make them toxic for brands and funders to be
00:32:55.500associated with. And they're kind of modeling themselves after places like Media Matters for
00:32:59.660America, who monitor disinformers and bad actors and extremists like Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon
00:33:05.720to pressure advertisers to drop them. They're also specifically focused around winning over
00:33:11.880young people like college students who we know are Lena Dunham's biggest audience demographic.
00:33:16.840So obviously, I think it goes without saying that Truth Revolt is not just some, you know,
00:33:22.860run-of-the-mill media outlet reporting the facts. From their own statement, they are a right-wing
00:33:28.280outlet with a political axe to grind. They are out for vengeance. They are out to
00:33:33.240dismantle people, take them down by their own admission.
00:33:37.240this idea that like leftists are supported by this great funding apparatus i know so many
00:33:47.580broke-ass leftists like separating me separating from their funding is like not even a thing like
00:33:55.760so many of them are broke you know like what is this like big leftist funding in the media that0.96
00:34:02.220they're talking about like i mean nothing that they say is accurate you know they say that like
00:34:08.880oh the media is a tool like the media like the idea that that the that mainstream media
00:34:16.120is a tool propping up leftist agendas it's just i mean it's such an unserious claim i don't find
00:34:23.840it worthy of a retort it's just it's just like you can just read the newspaper in the wake of
00:34:30.060the fall of Roe, read the newspaper, and the New York Times today, they, I mean, I don't even want
00:34:35.500to get into it, but yes, it's such an unserious claim that it's not even worthy of a response.0.91
00:34:42.060Yeah, it's like ludicrous. It's like, who owns the media? We've got, you know, NBC,0.63
00:34:49.660you know, Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post. Like, these are not leftist people.
00:34:54.800no it's it's horseshit okay so you might be wondering this website sounds sketchy as hell0.91
00:35:02.040but what does it have to do with lena dunham well the claim that lena dunham admitting to0.98
00:35:07.320molesting her younger sibling was initially started on truth revolt oh shit so that's the
00:35:15.240connection here this truth revolt started this claim about lena dunham i should have seen it0.96
00:35:23.080coming, but somehow they snuck it in on me. It's true. And I should probably say that
00:35:30.000something that we know about disinformation and the way that it spreads, oftentimes it contains
00:35:35.980some element or nugget of truth that can be easily manipulated or taken out of context. And that is
00:35:41.940definitely what's happening here. So let's look at the facts. In September 2014, Lena Dunham released
00:35:47.900her memoir, Not That Kind of Girl. Now, I have read the memoir a couple of times, so I'm pretty
00:35:52.900well-versed on what it says and what it doesn't say. And it does include passages of Lena describing
00:35:59.420sexual situations around her younger sibling. I should say right now, Lena's sibling is called
00:36:05.660Cyrus Grace Dunham and uses they, them pronouns. According to a 2019 Atlantic profile of Cyrus,
00:36:12.900Cyrus uses they, them pronouns in professional contexts and he, him pronouns with friends.
00:36:18.400But that was not the case when this memoir was published. But as I read some quotes from the
00:36:22.820memoir, I'm going to amend the quotes to reflect that. So Lena writes about trying to get her
00:36:28.040younger sibling to kiss her on the mouth and lay on top of her. As Cyrus Grace grew, I took to
00:36:33.420bribing them for time and affection. One dollar and quarters if I could do their makeup like a
00:36:37.980motorcycle chick. Three pieces of candy if I could kiss them on the lips for five seconds.1.00
00:36:42.540Whatever they wanted to watch on TV if they would just relax on me. Basically, anything a sexual
00:36:47.880predator might do to woo a small suburban girl, I was trying. The memoir also includes this passage.
00:36:54.360Do we all have uteruses? I asked my mother when I was seven. Yes, she told me. We're born with them
00:36:59.920and with all of our eggs, but they start out very small and they aren't ready to make babies until
00:37:04.680we're older. I look at my Cyrus Grace, now a slim, tough one-year-old, and at their tiny belly.
00:37:11.560I imagine eggs inside of them, like the sack of spider eggs in Charlotte's Web, and their uterus,
00:37:16.780the size of a thimble. Does their vagina look like mine? I guess so, my mother said,1.00
00:37:22.020just smaller. One day, as I sat out in our driveway in Long Island, playing with blocks
00:37:26.380and buckets, my curiosity got the best of me. Cyrus Grace was sitting up, babbling and smiling,
00:37:32.460and I leaned down between their legs and carefully spread open their vagina.1.00
00:37:37.880They didn't resist, and when I saw what was inside, I shrieked. My mother came running,1.00
00:37:42.900Mama, Mama, Cyrus Grace has something in there.1.00
00:37:46.420My mother didn't bother asking why I had opened Cyrus Grace's vagina.1.00
00:37:50.720This was within the spectrum of things that I did.1.00
00:37:53.540She just got on her knees and looked for herself.0.99
00:37:55.960It quickly became apparent that Cyrus Grace had stuffed six or seven pebbles in there.
00:38:00.760My mother removed them patiently while Cyrus Grace cackled,
00:38:04.180thrilled that their prank had been a success.
00:38:06.660So the book actually does contain content that involves her describing these sexual situations with her sibling. That is true. But she writes about doing this at age seven with her sibling, who was age one.
00:38:23.280On October 29th, 2014, about a month after her book had come out, Truth Revolt published
00:38:28.720the passage that I just read about the pebbles and the vagina under the headline, Lena Dunham0.97
00:38:34.700Describes Sexually Abusing Her Little Sibling.
00:38:38.020Now, as Vox points out, Truth Revolt did two very misleading things in their post calling0.65
00:38:45.060One, they really keyed in on this phrase, they didn't resist, which obviously becomes0.98
00:38:50.960a lot more loaded when paired with the headline about sexually abusing her sibling. Two, and this
00:38:57.040is really important, Truth Revolt's article originally stated that Dunham was 17 at the time
00:39:03.220when Dunham, in actuality, said that she was seven. So obviously, if you have a 17-year-old
00:39:09.520describing these kinds of interactions with a one-year-old, it is a very different situation
00:39:14.420than if you have a seven-year-old, which she actually says was her age, doing them with
00:39:19.960someone who is one. Yes, 17 and 7 are pretty different there. Pretty different. So Truth
00:39:26.800Revolt eventually does say that it was a typo. I guess that that's fine. The story is then linked
00:39:35.400to by the Drudge Report, which if you don't know what that is because you're not older like myself,
00:39:40.100it's basically a right-wing news aggregator that can really blow up stories. It was the first place
00:39:45.840to publish the Bill Clinton scandal involving intern Monica Lewinsky back in 1998.
00:39:50.760Once it's picked up by the Drudge Report, the story gets a ton more traction.
00:39:55.040It makes the rounds on, you know, Truth For Both is kind of a niche site.
00:39:58.920It makes the rounds on the wider right-wing blog and infosphere.
00:40:03.080And much bigger right-wing outlets begin to pick it up.
00:40:05.840The National Review's Kevin Williamson, for instance, declared,
00:40:09.320there is no non-horrific interpretation of this episode.
00:40:12.920And The Daily Caller, another conservative outlet, writes,
00:40:15.840Dunham had admitted to the, quote, gleeful sexual abuse of her infant sibling.
00:40:20.600Now, that is initially really what seeded the whole Lena Dunham sexually abused her sibling narrative.
00:40:29.300And now it's out in the wider right-wing blogosphere, infosphere, and now it is a thing.
00:40:36.960It's so salacious. It almost feels like tailor-made for these kind of right-wing outrage aggregators.
00:40:47.280I mean, that is such a commonality of disinformation, and it's something that I have to remember myself quite a bit. It's not just folks on the right. I'm speaking about everybody, myself very much included, that when you have these stories that seem almost tailor-made to trigger certain things inside you or outrage you in a certain kind of way, those are always stories that you should be a little bit wary of because it's not a coincidence that they are hitting you in this particular way.
00:41:15.820Yeah, right. And you've mentioned that, guests have mentioned that on the show, talking about ways to combat disinformation. Like when you're feeling that emotional reaction, that should almost be a signal to like step back and evaluate like, who is writing this? Where am I reading this? Is this something that I want to share?
00:41:37.760Exactly. And that's one of the elements about this that I find so fascinating is how, obviously, if you are Ben Shapiro or a right winger who has endured the last few years where it seems like progressivism and diversity and feminism and sexuality are all things that are becoming more and more salient, and you're feeling less and less in control and less and less relevant, and these things are becoming more and more relevant.
00:42:02.080I could see why that would prime somebody who is a right winger who feels kind of threatened by this.
00:42:09.580I could see how that would prime them to believe and amplify and spread this particularly damaging lie about Lena Dunham.
00:42:16.800However, what I find so fascinating about this is the way that didn't just stay in right wing circles.
00:42:23.780It made the rounds and it still persists today.
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00:43:21.560if your bookshelf and your for you page are equally important to your personality welcome home
00:43:27.740This is Prose Society, the weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for thought daughters, pop culture obsessives, and anyone who thinks Pride and Prejudice and Love Island deserve the same level of discourse.
00:43:40.200I'm Eli Rallo, and every week we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and the conversations everyone can't stop having.
00:43:47.180I'm going to have to look up this story.
00:43:50.340from best-selling authors and your favorite book talk creators to the latest pop culture moments
00:43:55.320nothing is off the table it's like if you can hide some real messages inside compelling
00:44:01.880characters and that is a trojan horse whether you're looking for literary deep dives smart
00:44:07.160pop culture conversations or a community of readers who love to think a little too much
00:44:11.900you're in the right place listen to pro society on the iheart radio app apple podcasts or wherever
00:44:18.380you get your podcasts. See you between the pages. Let's get right back into it.
00:44:30.420So the day that Truth Revolt published their misleading article about her memoir,
00:44:34.660Lena responded the following day, tweeting,
00:44:37.840The right-wing news story that I molested my little sibling isn't just laugh out loud.0.99
00:44:41.960It's really fucking upsetting and disgusting. Her legal team sent a letter that was obtained0.99
00:44:47.340by The Hollywood Reporter to Bradford Thomas, the author of the piece, and to Truth Revolt,
00:44:52.120threatening to take legal action if certain statements were not removed. The letter said,
00:44:56.600the story is false fabricated and has the obvious tendency to subject my client to ridicule and to
00:45:02.080injure her occupation. Now, the letter goes on to say that the piece caused, quote, actual damage to
00:45:07.160Lena's personal and professional reputation, which likely would be calculated in the millions of
00:45:11.320dollars, punitive damages, which can be a multiple of up to 10 times the actual damages, and injunctive
00:45:17.140relief. The letter also says that the Truth Revolt story contains, quote, outright falsified
00:45:21.920statements that are attributed to Lena and her book. The statements do not appear anywhere in
00:45:26.220the book, thus showing intent to harm, knowing falsity, as well as reckless disregard for the
00:45:31.260truth, any one of which meets the malice requirement. Her attorney, Charles Harder,
00:45:36.200wrote in his letter to Truth Revolt. Now, Ben Shapiro, on behalf of Truth Revolt, responded.
00:45:42.120He said, we refuse to withdraw our story and apologize for running it because quoting a
00:45:47.000woman's book does not constitute a false story, even if she is a prominent actress and left-wing
00:45:52.320activist. Lena Dunham might not like our interpretation of her book, but unfortunately
00:45:56.740for her and her attorneys, she wrote that book, and the First Amendment covers a good deal of
00:46:01.400material which she may not like. And I don't know, I just find Ben Shapiro and Truth Revolt's
00:46:07.840response to be so wild, because Truth Revolt itself admitted that it was a typo, saying that
00:46:14.020she was 17 and not seven, they said it was a typo. And so by definition, what they printed was not
00:46:19.520correct and was a false story. I feel like Ben Shapiro's kind of, you know, puffed up response
00:46:25.620really flies in the face of like what the website actually said, which was that they printed
00:46:30.420something that was not correct. Yeah. And that's not like I wouldn't call that a typo, even if it
00:46:36.440was unintentional, which seems pretty unlikely. But who knows? You know, maybe it was. But even
00:46:42.680so it's like so it so changes the character and the nature of the story that it's beyond a typo
00:46:51.700it's clearly creating a false impression that's absolutely true and for him to not even
00:46:58.640acknowledge that in part of his apology uh it just makes me wonder you know what oh he didn't
00:47:04.900apologize oh right excuse me yeah so not an apology uh actually just like a continued attack
00:47:09.900Yeah, that's great. The kind of guy we're dealing with here.
00:47:15.160Yeah, I mean, I agree with you. I'm not going to speculate whether this was an intentional move or not. I will say I have my suspicions, but they said it was a typo. I'm going to take them at that word.
00:47:28.140And you're so right that even if that was just a typo, somebody just slipped a one in there, not acknowledging the way that that really charges what you've written and really – yeah, it's really stunning that he won't even – on the one hand that the website admits it, but on the other hand, it's like, well, we did nothing wrong.
00:47:50.380It's like, well, it can't really be both.
00:47:51.520Yeah, like some omissions are more important than others. If, for example, hypothetically, somebody wrote, somebody meant to write Ben Shapiro did not murder and eat his sister, but left out the word not, it would really change the meaning of the sentence.
00:48:09.960It would just be a typo. And how dare you insinuate that I apologize and say it was anything but.
00:48:14.780Yeah, right. It's just it's just a typo. And also he's a right wing activist anyway. So that's somehow relevant.
00:48:20.920Exactly, exactly. So an important question that I feel like is really easy to get lost in all this is whether or not what Lena actually wrote in the book, not the way that Truth Revolt initially spun it, actually describes sexual abuse or not.
00:48:35.880So first, I believe that it is really important to listen to and center Lena Dunham's sibling, Cyrus Grace, and their voice in this conversation, and really listen to what they have to say about what this experience was like for them.
00:48:49.220Lena Dunham's sibling, Cyrus Grace, responded on Twitter, saying,
00:48:52.780And so, yeah, I think it's important to ground, you know, the conversation
00:49:18.460of like what actually happened in how Cyrus Grace interprets it because it's their experience.
00:49:24.920And I have to say, you know, I want to be clear. I am no expert here. I am not a psychologist. I
00:49:29.960am not a legal scholar. I'm a little bit out of my depth when it comes to like whether or not
00:49:34.600something could be categorized as sexual abuse. So I wanted to summarize some people who actually
00:49:39.560know what they're talking about. So first, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics,
00:49:44.160Touching and looking at a sibling's genitals is a, quote,
00:49:47.080normal common behavior in kids ages two to six.
00:49:51.420Vox, Slate, and Gawker all spoke to experts who generally seem to conclude that little children
00:49:56.440being curious about the bodies of their sibling is a normal part of childhood development.
00:50:40.060The children have been doing this stuff forever and ever and ever, and they will do it forever and ever and ever.
00:50:44.860John V. Caffero, a professor at the California School of Professional Psychology and an expert on sibling abuse, wrote in a Washington Post column, quote,
00:50:53.320To be clear, sexual curiosity in children is normal.
00:50:56.340All children explore their bodies and may engage in visual and even manual exploration of a sibling at times.
00:51:02.960This is one of the ways that children discover sexual differences between boys' and girls' anatomies.
00:51:07.600Even siblings of the same gender become curious about variations in shapes and sizes of their
00:51:12.220sex organs. Two small children exploring each other's bodies does not predestine them to a
00:51:17.320life of emotional suffering. So, you know, that might all kind of sound like I am absolving Lena
00:51:24.460of having done anything wrong in this situation, right? But I actually think that this is where
00:51:30.160things get a little bit tricky. And this trickiness is exactly what drove me to wanting to make an
00:51:35.020episode about this topic. So I should say I myself am a survivor of sexual abuse. And so I know that
00:51:41.660when something can be difficult to talk about, like most sensitive issues are, but I also know
00:51:46.460that we really, really do need to talk honestly and thoughtfully about it. And you know what
00:51:53.880doesn't help us to have conversations about tough issues in a way that's honest and thoughtful and
00:51:58.360nuanced? Adding lies to the mix. This is a deliberate tactic that bad actors and disinformer
00:52:05.000employ, seizing on hot-button issues, adding lies to the mix intentionally to derail those
00:52:10.660conversations. And honestly, this is what really kind of gets me so upset about this issue is that
00:52:17.160we should not and cannot tolerate lies being added to conversations that are as sensitive
00:52:22.620and important as childhood sexual abuse, especially not as a way to score cheap political points the
00:52:29.780way that Shapiro and Truth Revolt did because it really derails progress and our collective
00:52:34.780shared understanding. There is no conversation that is made better by the injection of lies,
00:52:40.980and people deserve the truth. That is a value that I will just scream from the rooftops over
00:52:47.880and over again. If you are adding lies to a conversation, you are doing us all a disservice.
00:52:54.060And so I also think that Truth Revolt really blowing up what Lena did write in her memoir
00:52:57.800with inaccurate information really makes it difficult to address, A, what she actually did,
00:53:03.820and B, how she actually wrote about it. And because of their lie, because of them starting
00:53:08.940off this conversation with such an inflammatory, big, you know, defining piece of inaccurate
00:53:15.240content, Lena understandably is then put in a position where she has to defend herself
00:53:20.800against a claim that was not true, that she sexually abused her sibling when she was 17.
00:53:25.440So I think it really turns the situation into a binary where she did it is on one side and no, she didn't is on the other. And that, again, is a classic disinformer derailing tactic, flattening out conversations and stripping them of any context or nuance that are required to have a thoughtful, substantive conversation about something that is sensitive or a hot button topic.
00:53:48.240And so I would actually argue that this prevents us from having a public conversation about what Lena actually did and how she wrote about it. We never really got to have that conversation because of how much oxygen Truth Revolts Lie took up in the room. And that is by design.
00:54:03.360And further, I would argue that their injection of inaccurate information into the conversation, you know, really just adds this sheen of inaccuracy. I would be willing to bet that at least some people trying to engage in a conversation probably have a misunderstanding about the basic facts of what happened.
00:54:21.580And so I guess all of this is to say, this is the conversation that I wish we would have gotten to have. Because if experts seem to suggest that what Lena described in her book is not abuse, I still don't think it was great or good. And I still want to talk about what actually happened without that inflammatory lie preventing us from doing that.
00:54:40.600Yeah, I totally agree with you. The injection of lies into any conversation degrades that conversation. It makes it that much harder to have an honest conversation about whatever it is.
00:54:53.460And, you know, usually when people are making up lies, they're doing it for some kind of agenda to, like you said, take all the oxygen out of the room to prevent discussion about something else or to discredit and smear and shame a woman who they perceive as a leptist activist.
00:55:13.260And, you know, I don't have any strong feelings for or against Lena Dunham, and I've actually learned so much in just like making these episodes with you. But it is just so familiar, a trope of right wing shitheads making things up to smear somebody who they perceive as an enemy and just injecting lies into the conversation.
00:55:39.140Exactly. So let's take a look at what she actually wrote and why, you know, it's still not good. First, I think it's definitely an issue with tone and framing. Childhood sexual abuse is not a joke. And I think dealing with it in this way that sort of jokey was seriously bad on Lena Dunham's part.
00:55:57.780I would have never written about my younger sibling the way that Dunham did in her book.
00:56:02.080And I can really see how people feel it raises some questions about boundaries.
00:56:06.380You know, did Lena see these experiences that involved her sibling as hers and hers alone to freely share in a book?
00:56:16.120You know, why would she think that having a whole section of her book dedicated to the ways that she kind of, you know, foisted herself on her baby sibling?
00:56:24.340like like i guess like writing about that and as a way that's like kind of cute and sort of like
00:56:30.660defining her as like a quirky character or like a like a jokey thing is really i think inappropriate
00:56:36.840and i think it's fair to say that that raises some legitimate questions you know was that harmful to
00:56:43.220lena's sibling i actually heard from a listener after the first part of this series aired last
00:56:48.820week. And this person left an Instagram comment, and they felt very strongly that what Lena
00:56:54.760described in her book was actually childhood sexual abuse. I remember you got that comment
00:57:00.680from that listener, and it was pretty emotional and legitimate. So I hope that they're listening
00:57:08.160to this second part to get a little bit more context for what we're trying to say.
00:57:14.560Yeah, me too. I'm really happy that they left that comment. And I think it's one of those
00:57:18.700things where it's like, I think it's a completely valid question to ask about the behavior that
00:57:24.740Lena describes in the book and the way that she wrote about and framed that behavior.
00:57:29.840Yeah, it is curious to me. You know, I haven't read the book, but you did. What do you think
00:57:37.600was her intention of writing that in the book? Oh, that's a great question. The book. So for
00:57:44.580folks who have read the book, they know that a big part of it is that Lena slowly reveals herself
00:57:50.040to be a very unreliable narrator, one who is kind of like sardonically looking at and projecting
00:57:57.800commentary onto her own experiences. And so her experiences are presented and you, the reader,
00:58:04.740sort of takes them at face value. And then later in the book, many of those experiences are
00:58:10.200revisited in ways that reveal her to be an unreliable narrator about her own experiences
00:58:15.260and in ways that sort of present her as this like, yeah, this sarcastic, sardonic person
00:58:21.020who is kind of like critiquing and commenting on the way that she described those things early on.
00:58:28.700There's this piece for Vox by Alex Abad Santos that I think perfectly summarizes what I'm trying
00:58:33.320to say. Alex writes, the way Dunham wrote the incident up in her book and the degree to which
00:58:39.520the writing style that has made her such a success may have also led her astray here.
00:58:44.320Child molestation is an extremely sensitive topic.
00:58:46.920Cafaro, the sibling abuse expert, wrote that sibling sexual abuse is far more common than
00:58:52.380most people think, quote, the most closely kept secret in the field of family violence.
00:58:57.200With one study finding that at least 2.3% of children have been sexually victimized by
00:59:01.740a sibling, Dunham's treatment of this very serious topic was not exactly sensitive, something
00:59:06.840she herself has acknowledged. To some degree, that is of a piece with Dunham's greatest strengths
00:59:11.580and weaknesses as a writer. She has a reputation for leaning into weird, awkward situations on her
00:59:16.620HBO show Girls, and she's a master at creating scenes, sexual or not, that make viewers cringe.
00:59:22.220This is a book about Lena Dunham's coming of age in a society that does not normally tell stories
00:59:26.380of girls becoming women. And it highlights quite well how uncomfortable and difficult growing up
00:59:31.520as a girl can be. And so I think that piece really summarizes it. I think that she was trying
00:59:36.300to lean into the fact, the ways that sexual experiences and physical experiences can be
00:59:41.860so cringy, so awkward, so uncomfortable. And she does that really well in other parts of her
00:59:47.940writing. But I think that that same inclination, I think, really led her astray here. And I think
00:59:55.080it opens up such valid criticisms of the way that she handled it. One of my big questions is,
01:00:02.260Did that bit of the book contribute to a culture where sexual abuse is further normalized?
01:00:08.160Again, I'm not an expert in this field, but I think they're all valid questions.
01:00:13.360When we allow disinformers to flatten out entire conversations with inaccurate information,0.97
01:00:19.100we don't really get to have the real conversation about what actually happens.
01:00:23.880And I think it creates the conditions that lead to Lena not really having to be held
01:00:29.240accountable for what she actually wrote, because the only thing anybody is really talking about
01:00:33.200is the lie about what she wrote. And I think that Lena would probably agree that, you know,
01:00:39.660how she handled this incident in her memoir wasn't great, because she apologized.
01:00:45.740She wrote, quote, if the situations described in my book have been painful or triggering for
01:00:50.260people to read, I am sorry. That was never my intention. I am also aware that my comic use
01:00:55.360of the term sexual predator was insensitive, and I'm sorry for that as well. She also went on to
01:01:00.180say that her sibling is her best friend and, quote, anything I have ever written about has
01:01:04.880been published with approval. Yeah, that's, I mean, it's hard to argue with that, that it was
01:01:11.360not very sensitive. And, you know, her apology is a reminder of how serious talking about sexual
01:01:21.920abuse is, you know? And so, yeah, you probably shouldn't have written that, but it is
01:01:28.540so notable that this whole controversy and apparently, uh, allegations that, you know,
01:01:35.980people continue to hold against her of being a 17 year old sexual predator, uh, were, did not come
01:01:43.960from the alleged victim her sibling uh did not come from survivor justice advocates uh but instead
01:01:53.480came from ben shapiro like a vowed and an open right-wing activist you know like you you're not0.74
01:02:01.060gonna convince me that he gives a shit about uh really anyone yeah and a right-wing activist who0.92
01:02:10.080explicitly said that the intention of his media outlet was to attack prominent left-wing folks,0.98
01:02:19.000prominent liberal voices. Lena Dunham is a prominent liberal voice, and she certainly was
01:02:23.420when this all happened. And so I think that I also want to really lift up what you just said
01:02:28.700about these allegations not coming from Lena's sibling. I think the thing that really sticks
01:02:35.820with me about this whole situation is the way that Lena Dunham's sibling, their voice is almost
01:02:42.480universally ignored. You know, people often repeat this claim, Lena Dunham sexually abused her0.99
01:02:49.000sibling. And when they do so, they often misgender Cyrus. And Cyrus has their own memoir called A
01:02:55.080Year Without a Name, where they talk about this specific claim and how hurtful it is to them,
01:02:59.180yet it never goes away. So I have a hard time believing that these people online
01:03:04.520actually care about centering or listening to Cyrus's experience or meaningfully amplifying
01:03:10.600the experiences of survivors. And so I just really believe in centering survivors, centering,
01:03:18.660giving people space to be the experts of their own experiences. And so, yeah, the thing that really
01:03:23.160just really bums me out is that Cyrus Grace's voice is almost entirely erased when people talk
01:03:30.000about this when people repeat you know oh lena dunham did this to their to her sibling i just
01:03:35.720feel like we just don't it's so easy to not make space for cyrus's voice and i think what you said
01:03:42.400really helps us see how problematic that is yeah like having this conversation i'm sort of wondering
01:03:48.480is this a conversation about childhood sexual abuse or is it a conversation about a celebrity
01:03:54.200Well, I would argue that like, I think for a lot of people, because they don't like Lena Dunham for whatever reason, and some of those reasons are valid, but the actual meat of the conversation, caring about and believing and uplifting survivors of sexual abuse, that kind of gets pushed to the sideline because the real thing is finding a way to talk about how much we don't like Lena Dunham and how awful she is. You know what I mean?
01:04:18.480Yeah, totally. Like, I'm no stranger to ad hominem attacks, you know, like, if there's somebody I don't like, I'll happily, you know, sign up for piling on for something shitty or stupid that they did.0.99
01:04:35.040But it does feel very different when that piling on involves allegations of sexual abuse about some third person who's not even part of the conversation and is built on lies.0.95
01:04:50.460And, you know, like you said earlier, just sucking the air out of valid conversations in the space.
01:04:57.300Not valid. I don't mean valid. I mean, truthful, you know.
01:05:01.200Right. So, you know, that's exactly what I think is happening here. So now that you know what actually happened versus the lie that Truth Revolt amplified about it, let's talk about exactly that. Like, what is it that made this such a sticky narrative? And that's the thing that really, I don't know, it fascinates me about this claim because it has had real staying power.
01:05:21.540So question for you, Mike, have you seen that meme where it's a black hand and a white hand, like grasping hands and a gesture of unity and something that they agree about, like a shared commonality is written on the middle of their hands?
01:05:35.060Yeah, of course. It's a beautiful meme about coming together.
01:05:37.500So that meme pretty much explains what I think is going on here. Basically, on the black hand, you have, you know, feminists, people of color, just like just general people. On the white hand, maybe I got right wing folks. And the thing that they're uniting over is that they all agree they hate Lena Dunham.0.97
01:05:59.400That's kind of what I think is going on here.
01:06:01.040Because even though the claim that Lena Dunham sexually abused her one-year-old sibling when she was 17, we know started in the right-wing blogosphere, it has really traveled out of those bases and become a fairly widely accepted claim.
01:06:13.980And that's because Lena Dunham is just like a controversial figure.0.99
01:06:25.520To put it bluntly, a lot of people just don't like Lena Dunham. And so in that way, I think it was really easy for folks to project an inaccurate claim against her and have it really stick.
01:06:36.160And this also tells us something kind of interesting about the way that inaccurate information works online. It can often speak to something that is already inside of us. And so if you're already primed to really hate Lena Dunham, when somebody comes along and tells you something that really squares with your already held belief, it can really stick because our brains love information, even inaccurate information or false information, that validates opinions or values that we already hold.
01:07:03.420So if your opinion is that Lena Dunham sucks, it sort of doesn't matter if she actually did joke about abusing her one-year-old sibling when she was 17 or not. It will stick because it squares with our already held belief. That's just how our brains as humans work.
01:07:17.740And another truism about disinformation is that it often seizes on legitimate existing tensions and pressure points and fractures that already exist, particularly within marginalized communities.
01:07:30.680If you listen to the episode that we did about End Father's Day or Vanessa Guillen, this will probably sound familiar to you.
01:07:38.000It pits Black women against white women or the Latino community against the Black community.
01:07:43.140And I think Lena Dunham is a really interesting case study for this, because people, especially people of color, really do have some valid reasons to dislike Lena Dunham. And these reasons are often reflected in the kinds of tensions that I was just naming above. You know, a lot of the tensions occur along racial lines.
01:08:02.220Yeah. So I want to talk about some of the valid reasons that folks have to sort of be predisposed to not like Lena Dunham and thus have this, you know, inaccurate claim really have a little bit of staying power.
01:08:17.780So one, I think that Lena Dunham has really come to represent a kind of, I guess I'll call it white girl cluelessness, that a lot of feminists of color were frankly sick of seeing Amplified as the voice of feminism.
01:08:29.460You know, when the show Girls first premiered on HBO, there was so much fanfare cementing Lena Dunham, you know, as this voice of a generation, the voice of young women.
01:08:39.420And I think there was some resentment around who we amplify and who we give lots and lots and lots of chances to.0.93
01:08:45.980I often heard Black feminists saying things like, oh, a Black woman would never get as many chances to mess up like Lena Dunham has.
01:08:53.880Side note, Lena Dunham has had to apologize for so many things that there is actually a Twitter meme account called Lena Dunham Apologizes that just creates randomly generated apologies for fictional Lena Dunham missteps.
01:09:08.300And I actually went to go look one up because I was like, oh, I should read one here on the podcast.
01:09:13.780And so I googled Lena Dunham apology Twitter, and I found the tweet, Lena Dunham issued an apology for her new HBO Max series, Generation, using real cat corpses in a classroom scene.
01:09:25.720But that apology tweet was actually real. That was actually her apologizing for something that actually happened.
01:09:31.700Wow. So we're just living in a universe where there's just, one can't tell what is true Lena Dunham apologies or disinformation Lena Dunham apologies.
01:09:42.920It's just a miasma of Lena Dunham uncertainty.
01:09:54.840So this is a little bit of a tangent, but I just have to mention it because I think it was such a weird thing that happened along the kind of race and gender intra-community tensions that I was just talking about before.
01:10:08.620And that is the whole thing that went down between Lena Dunham and Odell Beckham.
01:10:12.920It was just really weird. So if you don't remember what happened, a few years ago at the Met Gala, Lena Dunham attended and she was wearing a tuxedo. And she was seated next to the professional athlete Odell Beckham Jr. And I guess Lena felt that he was ignoring her or not paying an appropriate amount of attention to her or something.
01:10:32.840And so after the event, Lena wrote in her newsletter, Lenny Letter, I was sitting next to Odell Beckham Jr.
01:10:40.200And it was so amazing because it was like he looked at me and determined I was not the shape of a woman by his standards.
01:10:54.000The vibe was very much, do I want to fuck it?1.00
01:10:57.020Is it wearing, yup, it's wearing a tuxedo.1.00
01:11:00.160I'm going to go back to my cell phone.
01:11:01.680It was like we were forced to be together and he was literally scrolling Instagram rather than have to look at a woman in a bow tie.
01:11:09.200I was like, this should be called the Metropolitan Museum of Getting Rejected by Athletes.
01:11:15.660So, yeah, that is a lot of projecting your own negative fantasies and perhaps insecurities onto someone who sounded like was just like minding their business on their phone at dinner.0.62
01:11:28.340You know, add to the fact that Beckham is a Black man, and it kind of sounds like she is responding to this, like, perceived projection of a hyper-sexualized Black man onto her. Like, she was, like, disappointed or felt some type of way that he was not behaving in an over-sexualized manner toward her.0.57
01:11:50.320And yeah, it just feels like she like really projected a lot onto him. She eventually apologized on Instagram, but it was just a very weird thing that happened along very specific race and gender fault lines that we know sometimes can be legitimate tension points in our society.
01:12:08.820yeah yikes that kind of reminds me of what you were talking about from her book where she
01:12:13.460establishes herself as an unreliable narrator and somebody who is dwelling in negative fantasies0.98
01:12:24.000all the time uh a that has to suck and b uh yeah it does establish them as an unreliable narrator0.99
01:12:33.140who is probably going to say some shit that they regret uh yeah over and over and over again and0.99
01:12:38.280have to apologize for it endlessly to the point where it becomes a meme.0.95
01:12:41.620Yeah, those... Did the Cat Corpses accept the apology?
01:12:46.200I wasn't able to find a response from the Cat Corps community, but I will keep looking.1.00
01:12:50.520Okay, I'll check in with some necromancers that I know.0.97
01:15:38.180And coming from an old friend or somebody who's known her since college and has worked with her,
01:15:45.060That seems like a pretty damning charge with more substance to it than an out-of-context typo from her autobiography.
01:15:55.060I completely agree. And you can really see how, again, this, you know, you having a Black woman writer say this about Lena, you can see again how, like, these things really do pop up along certain pre-existing tension points, you know, that really fall along racialized lines.0.89
01:16:16.200And so another, probably the biggest, deepest example for myself personally is the way that Lena handled a sexual assault allegation made against writer and executive producer of Girls, Murray Miller, that happened on the set.
01:16:28.900Basically what happened, actress Aurora Perrineau, who is mixed race, filed a police report accusing Girls writer and executive producer Murray Miller of raping her on the set of Girls in 2012 when she was 17 years old.
01:16:41.660Now, Miller said that she was making it up to extort him and try to get money from him.
01:16:46.160And Lena and her showrunner Jenny Coner published this statement.
01:17:22.440So obviously this statement makes it seem like, you know, Lena and her team have some kind of inside information that proves that this assault never happened.
01:17:32.760But come to find out, that was all a lie.
01:24:29.900And so it's like creating the conditions where it's like, oh, well, the conversation is so
01:24:34.440muddled and difficult to follow that like, what is the truth anyway?
01:24:38.480And so I think the further we get away from that, where things that are not true can sort
01:24:42.540of become true, the worse off we all are.
01:24:45.320And I have to say, you know, this all happened back in 2014. Here we are nearly 10 years later. And just last week, AV Club published an article about Lena's new film project on June 23rd. And the top comments were all some iteration of the claim that she sexually abused her sibling. Like, it will never go away. It basically is true now. Whether or not it actually happened is just sort of a non-issue at this point.
01:25:10.480That is grim. All right. Well, so Bridget, what is the point of you telling us all of this?
01:25:19.520Oh, I'm so glad you asked. So here we are in 2022, and we have seen more and more right-wing extremists using very similar tactics, not just on public figures, but on more and more regular people.
01:25:33.000You know, look at things like libs of TikTok, that page on Twitter where people are regularly labeled as, quote, groomers or basically accused of some kind of like vague sexual impropriety against children.
01:25:46.060It's really gross and sad because we actually do have a sexual abuse problem in our society.
01:25:53.260So many of us are survivors of sexual violence or sexual abuse.0.54
01:25:56.400And bad actors and liars who spread damaging lies and inaccurate content, they know this is a trigger and a tension for so many of this. This is a pressure point in us that can be, you know, poked at and inflamed. And it creates a situation where the sexual abuse of kids is a topic that is easily exploited and inflamed and can be weaponized against political opponents.
01:26:20.480And so ultimately, I guess in conclusion, there are plenty of reasons to not like Lena Dunham, including what she wrote about her sibling in her memoir. We don't need to add lies on it to talk about it. We're not better served when we add lies into a conversation as important and as sensitive as childhood sexual violence.
01:26:38.780And when we do that, we do a disservice to issues like sexual abuse that are so important and critical that we talk about. And ultimately, it's very concerning that we have a kind of media climate and ecosystem that create the conditions for this kind of damaging lie to persist for years and essentially become true, even if it's not.