Lena Dunham is addressing the fallout from years-old claims that she sexually abused her younger sister, who is now identifying as “transmasculine nonbinary.”
The “Girls” creator is currently on the interview circuit promoting her new memoir, “Famesick,” which is a follow-up to her first memoir, “Not That Kind of Girl.”
Dunham delivered a slightly different outlook when she addressed the controversy spawned by the first book in the pages of the second.
“I was shocked when a conservative media site analyzed the book carefully, pulling choice passages and coming to the conclusion that I had engaged in sexually inappropriate childhood behavior with my sibling,” Dunham wrote in the new book, referring specifically to the media watchdog site Truth Revolt, the site where Daily Wire Editor Emeritus Ben Shapiro served as Editor-in-Chief.
Dunham wrote that she wasn’t too worried about the backlash at first because she assumed “any logical person” would interpret the negative reaction as being “an attempt to cherrypick sections to create a narrative that spoke to the idea that I — and by extension, the majority of feminists — were not crusaders for justice but, in fact, wanton perverts.”
“I didn’t consider what I’d written to be particularly salacious,” the actress and writer went on, per Entertainment Weekly. “And anyway, what about the things I hadn’t included? I’d decided against describing the time, age four, I announced to a group of near-strangers that my punishment at home for misbehavior was having ‘a fork stuck up my vagina.’ (It was not.) I don’t know where I came up with that, but I’ve always been confused by anyone who doesn’t recognize that children are inherently innocent, and yet their imaginations are endless and deranged.”
Now, Dunham is especially sympathetic about putting the experience in print, not because she thinks it was wrong, but because it negatively impacted her sister’s journey to coming out as trans.
She noted how this situation happened just as her little sister was “sprouting wings, getting out from under the type-A straight-girl drag he’d [sic] worn for all of high school.”
“What I had been guilty of on the page, what the internet should have charged me with and given me a short sentence for, was poor phrasing — maybe a second count for TMI,” Dunham wrote in “Famesick.”
“What I was now guilty of seemed to be a laissez-faire attitude about what was mine to confess, which had derailed the life of the person I had felt most tasked with protecting.”
Dunham defended her actions as being a response to her sister being a “mystery.”
“It was ironic that as a 6-year-old, I’d wondered if he had a vagina, when what I didn’t understand for the entirety of our shared childhood was that he wasn’t my sister,” she wrote. “Eight years ago, around the time Cyrus came out as trans, he and I were still working to mend our relationship. It wasn’t just the incident around the book — since the moment I’d begun to have a public life, it had gobbled up the space around his private one, however unintentionally.”
“It didn’t help that the champagne fizz of new fame makes even the most generous people temporarily narcissistic, obsessed with their own image and its success or failure,” she admitted. “But the book had been a clear turning point, after which he seemed to feel safer being as far away as possible from the ricocheting bullets of my public persona.”
In the first book, which was released in 2014, Dunham described masturbating while lying next to her very young sister and inspecting her vagina. “My mother didn’t bother asking why I had opened Grace’s vagina,” Dunham wrote in the original book. “This was within the spectrum of things that I did.”
In another passage, she discussed trying to get her sister to “kiss her on the lips for five seconds” by offering gifts. “Basically, anything a sexual predator might do to woo a small suburban girl, I was trying,” Dunham wrote.
The backlash to these revelations put her on the defensive, with her going on a self-described “rage spiral.”
“The right-wing news story that I molested my little sister isn’t just LOL – it’s really f***ing upsetting and disgusting. And by the way, if you were a little kid and never looked at another little kid’s vagina, well, congrats to you,” she posted on X in 2014.
