00:02:47.460However, this is still one of the only topics that I have been a little bit worried about diving into because I know folks have really strong opinions about it.
00:02:57.720So, to help me talk through today's topic, I am joined by, there are no girls on the internet, producer and chief science officer, Mike.
00:03:05.680Producer Mike, thank you so much for being here.
00:03:07.980Thank you for having me. I'm glad I can be here to help make this episode.
00:03:14.080Me too. Me too. Did you do anything fun for Fourth of July?
00:03:17.460nothing too exciting just hanging out in my apartment listening to the constant fireworks
00:03:26.740outside i feel it's like a new thing the past couple of years that fireworks just start around
00:03:34.460noon and then go until midnight and uh and i'm here for it it's pretty exciting
00:03:41.100Yeah, pretty exciting. Not the best conditions for recording a podcast, but we'll make it work.
00:03:48.540So I know that you are a fan of podcasts where the hosts kind of revisit a story about a public
00:03:55.540figure, usually a woman like Monica Lewinsky or Courtney Love, and point out all of the unfair
00:04:01.220ways that this person has been maligned by society and the media. And we all kind of have
00:04:05.980this public reckoning about the ways that the media can be unfair or sexist or all around
00:04:11.560harmful. I love podcasts like that. And Mike, I know that you do as well.
00:04:16.840It's true. I think it's a great format. I think it really works well with the classic
00:04:24.020podcast dynamic of like one person explaining, one person listening. And I also think that it's
00:04:30.900a format for which there's many great examples because society just loves to smear and besmirch0.68
00:04:42.020a woman. So I love podcasts like that as well, but I want to be very clear, this episode is not
00:04:49.220going to be one of those podcast episodes, even though I am the person who did all the research
00:04:53.800and I will be explaining the situation to you, Mike. So it's a little bit like those, but today
00:04:59.520we are not trying to sort of demonstrate the way that the media unfairly maligned somebody.
00:05:05.120We are zeroing in on one specific misleading claim about none other than Lena Dunham.
00:05:12.340I am in no way making a larger point about the way that the media and society has portrayed her
00:05:17.780broadly, but I do want to zero in on this one specific claim and analyze how it became to be
00:05:23.900this very sticky, persistent lie that still endures online today and what that lie says about our
00:05:29.700culture. Yeah. So why Lena Dunham? Why this one specific thing? Great question. So a little bit
00:05:36.120of background about how I came to be making this episode. I used to work on the social media team
00:05:41.300at msnbc.com. And one of our kind of tried and true digital engagement tricks was to post about
00:05:47.500someone, a public figure that we knew our audience would engage with, positive or negative. This is
00:05:53.580back in 2015 and our audience used to love to hate on Putin. And so whenever we posted something
00:05:59.380about Putin that cast him in a negative light, we could always expect that people would really
00:06:05.100engage with it a lot. They'd be leaving like mean comments like, yeah, we hate him. They love to
00:06:09.200hate on Putin. But hands down, no question, the public figure that got the most hate on all of
00:06:16.980our social media pages was Lena Dunham. I think if I'm recalling correctly, I think people
00:06:21.960disliked Lena Dunham more than they disliked Putin, which is really saying something.
00:06:27.000And I worked on this podcast project where Lena Dunham was one of our guests. And again,
00:06:31.740you know, we had posted episodes with all different types of public figures and celebrities.
00:06:36.120But when we posted our Lena Dunham episode, it was instant, unanimous, negative feedback.
00:06:42.860And so I noticed whenever we would publish about her or post about her or feature her online,
00:06:49.420commenters would always repeat like a laundry list of reasons they don't like her.
00:06:53.240You know, sometimes it would be the garden variety things that you would expect,1.00
00:06:56.660like, oh, she's a spoiled brat, I hate her.1.00
00:06:58.860Or, you know, oh, she's gross, which is pretty much just kind of fat phobia.0.99
00:07:03.580But by far, the most common thing I would see commenters say about Lena Dunham online1.00
00:07:08.840was this particularly persistent claim that she's a, quote,1.00
00:07:12.840sexual predator who admitted to molesting her younger sibling.
00:07:16.540And, 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.0.56
00:07:30.340You know, I'm very interested in why these things stick and to what end and what their stickiness tells us about our culture.
00:07:36.640And 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.
00:07:49.400And 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
00:08:01.140Let 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.
00:08:18.440But 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.
00:08:34.300But 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.
00:08:45.320Like, 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.
00:08:57.820And I think that should be really concerning.
00:09:00.180I 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.
00:09:10.300So let's talk about how and why that happened and what it means.
00:09:15.220So for people like me who don't really know anything about this, who is Lena Dunham?
00:09:23.520So if you don't know who Lena Dunham is, I will give you kind of a quick and dirty summary of her background.
00:09:28.780Lena Dunham is an actor, producer, and writer.
00:09:31.440She's the daughter of visual artist Laurie Simmons, who is a very big deal in the art world because her art is incredible.0.82
00:09:37.820Lena rose to fame after making a really strong film debut called Tiny Furniture,
00:09:42.580which is basically a semi-autobiographical movie about a young woman portrayed by Lena who just graduated from college and is trying to navigate adulthood.
00:09:51.180Laurie Simmons, her real-life mom, plays her mom in the movie.
00:09:54.300And in the movie, her mom is also a visual artist and photographer who stages her pieces with tiny dollhouse furniture, just like her mom does in real life.
00:10:04.580And Lena's real-life sibling, Cyrus Grace, plays Lena's character sibling in the movie, too.
00:10:12.660In 2012, she created and starred in HBO's Girls, which also explores kind of similar themes,
00:10:18.600young white women trying to navigate young adulthood post-college in Brooklyn, New York.1.00
00:10:23.320Lena was born in 1986, so she is what you would call a millennial.0.99
00:10:27.000And when Girls was debuting, it was kind of peak, like, what are the millennials up to content time, right?
00:10:34.000And so Girls was this huge success pretty early on.
00:10:37.780It got a lot of criticism for how white the show was because just like shows like Sex and the City and Friends before it, it's just four white people who are not really encountering a lot of diversity that I know that you would find in a city like Brooklyn, New York.
00:10:51.940But regardless, positive, negative, whatever you thought, it was the kind of show that people were talking about a lot.
00:10:59.360Like it was in the discourse, which I think creates a certain kind of gravitas around anything.
00:11:05.100And just as a side note, in case you're curious, I actually watched and enjoyed the show.
00:11:10.180I'm not going to sit here and act like I have not seen every episode, or I am not going
00:11:14.120to sit here and act like I did not immediately go to AV Club to read reviews immediately
00:11:18.800after watching episodes, because like I said, it was part of a discourse.
00:11:23.780The show created discourse, and I will never deprive myself of discourse, okay?
00:11:29.280If people are talking about something, if there's articles and reviews to be read, I'm
00:17:26.900Every week, I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable.
00:17:31.340I knew if he woke up, without a doubt, he was going to hurt me.
00:17:35.800I started feeling that there was someone at the end of my bed, and I just started screaming.
00:17:43.420They are abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced.
00:17:47.320But these aren't stories about what's taken from them.
00:17:50.760They're stories about what it takes to make it out alive.
00:17:53.880Listen to The Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:18:02.840If your bookshelf and your For You page are equally important to your personality, welcome home.
00:18:08.780This 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.
00:18:21.260I'm Eli Rallo, and every week we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and the conversations everyone can't stop having.
00:18:28.360I'm going to have to look up this story. I'm obsessed. I'm obsessed.
00:18:31.940From best-selling authors and your favorite book talk creators to the latest pop culture moments, nothing is off the table.
00:18:37.900It's like if you can hide some real messages inside compelling characters, then that is a Trojan horse.
00:18:45.360Whether you're looking for literary deep dives, smart pop culture conversations, or a community of readers who love to think a little too much, you're in the right place.
00:18:54.980Listen to Pro Society on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:19:08.440So we're talking about this war on women, but 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.0.90
00:19:30.980We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller. We say to girls, you can have ambition, but not too much.0.76
00:19:39.260And 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.
00:19:49.180You 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.
00:19:56.140But I think for a lot of people, when you were asked, like, are you a feminist? It was something you had to be a little bit wishy-washy about. And I feel like this moment with Beyonce, it felt like a cultural moment where people wanted to say it with their whole chests.
00:20:10.180country pop sensation Taylor Swift famously came out as a feminist in 2014 in an interview with
00:20:18.400The Guardian where she credits her friend none other than Lena Dunham with her feminist awakening.
00:20:24.540And I guess my point is this. This era really feels like a time where things like progressivism
00:20:30.280and diversity and feminism are becoming increasingly mainstream and that they're
00:20:35.420becoming attached with a kind of social currency. You know, it's not cool to be aligned with old
00:20:40.360men dragging their feet and blocking marriage equality or calling college girls sluts for0.64
00:20:46.020wanting to be on birth control. None of that is cool. But what is cool is being a feminist. It's0.53
00:20:50.880cool to be a feminist. It's cool to be an ally. And in 2014, Lena Dunham was a huge part of this1.00
00:20:57.240climate. So culturally, Lena Dunham's hit show Girls and her writing explores, you know, themes
00:21:03.500of sexuality and gender in these really frank ways. So that alone, you know, creating work
00:21:08.300deposits that young women have an interiority that is worthy of serious exploration and respect
00:21:13.540is a thing that is really taking off in the culture. You know, Lena Dunham is not a size
00:21:18.120four, and yet she is nude on screen and has these sex scenes. She does a really great job of1.00
00:21:23.240highlighting the sort of humor and awkwardness that can accompany exploring your sexuality when
00:21:27.480you're young. You know, what she's doing on screen, it feels a little bit daring.
00:21:31.640After 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.
00:21:41.360You 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.
00:21:51.780Lena positions herself as a vocal feminist and a champion for feminist causes.0.50
00:21:55.540Another 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.
00:22:19.960And we also had these deceptively edited Sting videos from anti-abortion extremists.
00:22:25.340You 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.
00:22:32.920Basically, 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.
00:22:42.140They were really trying to brand that as something toxic that nobody would want to be affiliated with.
00:22:47.200only it wasn't really working isn't it funny how mike pence built his whole career on like
00:22:54.660attacking people and making people seem like evil villains and then he arguably rode out his career
00:23:05.020with members of his own party chanting to hang him uh you know isn't that funny that uh you
00:23:20.020You live by the ginned up outrage, you die by the gallows.
00:23:32.200So in the wake of all these attacks on Planned Parenthood,0.99
00:23:35.540Lena becomes the face of a campaign to fight back called Women Are Watching.
00:23:39.140She 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.
00:23:50.480Lena made this kind of cheeky, kind of wink-wink ad for the DNC in support of Obama in 2012.
00:23:58.160Your first time shouldn't be with just anybody. You want to do it with a great guy.
00:24:02.600It should be with a guy with beautiful, someone who really cares about and understands women.
00:24:08.980A guy who cares whether you get health insurance, and specifically whether you get birth control.
00:30:51.940Anyway, so at this point, Lena is really proving herself to be somebody with a certain kind of cultural cachet with millennial young women and somebody who seems to really know how to leverage it for, you know, big D democratic causes in a way that actually cuts through.
00:31:09.840Like, even though right-wingers did not like that ad, people talked about it.
00:31:15.500So, lover or hater, Lena Dunham knows how to wield her own specific kind of political, social, and cultural power.1.00
00:31:23.200And the vibe around that is that it's cool to care about politics and it's cool to care about feminism.1.00
00:31:29.400Importantly, this is actually largely a phenomenon on the left.0.98
00:31:33.120There aren't really a lot of cool, young, culturally relevant political celebrities on the right in the same kind of way.
00:31:41.160Not to go on too much of a tangent, but for a long time, people, myself included, assumed that Taylor Swift was a silent right-winger because she pretty much never spoke up about politics.
00:31:52.300In interviews when she was asked if she was a feminist, she would say things like, oh, I don't call myself a feminist because I never believed in men versus women.
00:32:01.040But her friendship with Lena Dunham gets tailored to be this loud and proud feminist who actually speaks up about politics after a decade of staying quiet.
00:32:11.380And it's basically almost like a right-wing boogeyman come to life.0.53
00:32:15.580You know, your sweet, blonde, conservative, country-loving young woman will become corrupted by a tattooed feminist with green hair and will be pulled into identifying as a liberal feminist.0.98
00:32:26.820So, you know, say what you will about Lena Dunham.1.00
00:32:29.360that is a certain type of cultural power and homegirl knows how to use it.0.83
00:32:34.660And, you know, when it comes to the culture, it was people like Lena Dunham who had the relevance.1.00
00:32:41.000And I can see how this would be really threatening to right-wing types who historically have had a lot of political power,1.00
00:32:46.980but they aren't cool, they're not young or hip, and that is a problem for them.
00:32:51.420So all of this is the backdrop on which a website called Truth Revolt comes to exist.
00:32:57.760And 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.
00:33:07.800Wait, 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?
00:33:15.800Truth Revolt is a right-wing website that was launched on October 7, 2013.
00:33:19.780According 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.
00:33:36.560Yes, Ben Shapiro is the same person who wrote that breathless piece about Lena's 2012 ad for Obama.
00:33:43.180And side note, a lot of y'all probably know Ben Shapiro.
00:33:47.440He is pretty famous for being, you know, he's young.
00:40:36.460Okay, so you might be wondering, this website sounds sketchy as hell, but what does it have to do with Lena Dunham?0.96
00:40:43.080Well, the claim that Lena Dunham admitting to molesting her younger sibling was initially started on Truth Revolt.0.99
00:40:51.820Oh, shit. So that's the connection here. This Truth Revolt started this claim about Lena Dunham.0.98
00:40:59.920I should have seen it coming, but somehow they snuck it in on me.
00:41:05.880It's true. And I should probably say that something that we know about disinformation and the way that it spreads, oftentimes it contains some element or nugget of truth that can be easily manipulated or taken out of context. And that is definitely what's happening here. So let's look at the facts.
00:41:23.880In September 2014, Lena Dunham released her memoir, Not That Kind of Girl.
00:41:28.340Now, I have read the memoir a couple of times, so I'm pretty well-versed on what it says and what it doesn't say.
00:41:33.900And it does include passages of Lena describing sexual situations around her younger sibling.
00:41:41.140I should say right now, Lena's sibling is called Cyrus Grace Dunham and uses they-them pronouns.
00:41:48.140But that was not the case when this memoir was published.
00:41:50.820but as I read some quotes from the memoir, I'm going to amend the quotes to reflect that.
00:41:55.820So Lena writes about trying to get her younger sibling to kiss her on the mouth and lay on top
00:42:00.820of her. As Cyrus Grace grew, I took to bribing them for time and affection. One dollar and
00:42:06.220quarters if I could do their makeup like a motorcycle chick. Three pieces of candy if I1.00
00:42:10.080could kiss them on the lips for five seconds. Whatever they wanted to watch on TV if they
00:42:14.240would just relax on me. Basically, anything a sexual predator might do to woo a small suburban
00:42:19.940girl, I was trying. The memoir also includes this passage. Do we all have uteruses? I asked my mother
00:42:26.180when I was seven. Yes, she told me. We're born with them and with all of our eggs, but they start out
00:42:32.060very small and they aren't ready to make babies until we're older. I look at my Cyrus Grace,
00:42:38.020now a slim, tough one-year-old, and at their tiny belly. I imagine eggs inside of them, like the sack
00:42:43.820of spider eggs in Charlotte's Web, and their uterus, the size of a thimble. Does their vagina look like1.00
00:42:49.340mine? I guess so, my mother said, just smaller. One day, as I sat out in our driveway in Long1.00
00:42:54.920Island, playing with blocks and buckets, my curiosity got the best of me. Cyrus Grace was
00:43:00.340sitting up, babbling and smiling, and I leaned down between their legs and carefully spread1.00
00:43:06.480open their vagina. They didn't resist, and when I saw what was inside, I shrieked. My mother came1.00
00:43:12.280running, Mama, Mama, Cyrus Grace has something in there. My mother didn't bother asking why I had
00:43:18.380open Cyrus Grace's vagina. This was within the spectrum of things that I did. She just got on1.00
00:43:23.980her knees and looked for herself. It quickly became apparent that Cyrus Grace had stuffed
00:43:28.460six or seven pebbles in there. My mother removed them patiently while Cyrus Grace cackled,
00:43:33.920thrilled that their prank had been a success. So the book actually does contain content that
00:43:40.860involves her describing these sexual situations with her sibling. That is true. But she writes0.82
00:43:48.020about doing this at age seven with her sibling, who was age one. On October 29th, 2014, about a
00:43:55.400month after her book had come out, Truth Revolt published the passage that I just read about the0.94
00:44:00.580pebbles and the vagina under the headline, Lena Dunham Describes Sexually Abusing Her Little0.99
00:44:06.560Sibling. Now, as Vox points out, Truth Revolt did two very misleading things in their post0.96
00:44:12.660calling Dunham a sexual abuser. One, they really keyed in on this phrase, they didn't resist,
00:44:19.280which obviously becomes a lot more loaded when paired with the headline about sexually abusing
00:44:24.380her sibling. Two, and this is really important, Truth Revolt's article originally stated that
00:44:30.660Dunham was 17 at the time, when Dunham, in actuality, said that she was seven. So obviously,
00:44:37.560if you have a 17-year-old describing these kinds of interactions with a one-year-old,
00:44:41.900It is a very different situation than if you have a seven-year-old, which she actually says was her age, doing them with someone who is one.
00:44:51.600Yes, 17 and seven are pretty different there.
00:45:03.540The story is then linked to by the Drudge Report, which if you don't know what that is because you're not older like myself,
00:45:09.860It's basically a right-wing news aggregator that can really blow up stories.
00:45:14.700It was the first place to publish the Bill Clinton scandal involving intern Monica Lewinsky back in 1998.
00:45:20.500Once it's picked up by the Drudge Report, the story gets a ton more traction.
00:45:24.780It makes the rounds on, you know, Truth For Both is kind of a niche site.
00:45:28.340It makes the rounds on the wider right-wing blog and infosphere.
00:45:32.980And much bigger right-wing outlets begin to pick it up.
00:45:35.780The National Review's Kevin Williamson, for instance, declared,
00:45:38.600there is no non-horrific interpretation of this episode. And The Daily Caller,
00:45:43.700another conservative outlet, writes, Dunham had admitted to the, quote,
00:45:47.620gleeful sexual abuse of her infant sibling. Now, that is initially really what seeded the whole
00:45:55.020Lena Dunham sexually abused her sibling narrative. And now it's out in the wider
00:46:01.240right-wing blogosphere infosphere and now it is a thing it's so salacious it almost feels like
00:46:10.520tailor-made for these kind of right-wing outrage aggregators i mean that is such a commonality of
00:46:20.080disinformation and it's something that i have to remember myself quite a bit it's not just folks
00:46:24.660on the right i'm speaking about everybody myself very much included that when you have these
00:46:30.380stories that seem almost tailor-made to trigger certain things inside you or outrage you in a
00:46:37.380certain kind of way, those are always stories that you should be a little bit wary of because
00:46:41.400it's not a coincidence that they are hitting you in this particular way.
00:46:46.220Yeah, right. And you've mentioned that, guests have mentioned that on the show,
00:46:49.820talking about ways to combat disinformation, like when you're feeling that emotional reaction,
00:46:56.680That 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?
00:47:07.480Exactly. 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.
00:47:31.820I can see why that would prime somebody who is a right winger who feels kind of threatened by this.
00:47:39.320I could see how that would prime them to believe and amplify and spread this particularly damaging lie about Lena Dunham.
00:47:46.540However, what I find so fascinating about this is the way that didn't just stay in right wing circles.
00:47:53.520It made the rounds and it still persists today.
00:47:57.080And so I think, you know, this might be a good place to take a little break and we'll continue this conversation in the next episode.
00:48:04.660So next week, we'll get into Lena and her siblings' response and why this particular claim got such traction and was so sticky with so many people, not just the right-wing online spaces where it started.
00:48:20.980Got a story about an interesting thing in tech or just want to say hi?
00:48:24.520You can reach us at hello at tangodi.com.
00:48:26.480You can also find transcripts for today's episode at tangody.com.
00:48:30.240There Are No Girls on the Internet was created by me, Bridget Todd.
00:48:32.940It's a production of iHeartRadio and Unbossed Creative.
00:48:35.680Jonathan Strickland is our executive producer.
00:48:37.740Tari Harrison is our producer and sound engineer.
00:48:40.360Michael Amato is our contributing producer.