Skip to content

Lena Dunham talks about fighting the shame she felt after being date raped

Lena Dunham admits she “spent so much time ashamed” after being date raped at university, but found it therapeutic to write about it in her new memoir, Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She’s Learned.

The 28-year-old actress told NPR’s [National Public Radio] Fresh Air host Terry Gross: “It was a painful experience physically and emotionally and one I spent a long time trying to reconcile.”

Lena – who studied creative writing at Oberlin College in Ohio – kept the assault a secret from friends at the time. The ‘Girls’ creator was sexually attacked while at college and admits the aftermath saw her “remove herself from the social world” in a bid to stay safe.

She said: “I actually [have] been thinking about it a lot this week because I sent an email to somebody who I had known at that time who knew the guy who had perpetrated the act…I wanted to make it clear to this old friend what I felt had happened before he potentially…read about it. I said to this old friend in an email: ‘I spent so much time scared; I spent so much time ashamed.’ ”

The Golden Globe winner believes sharing her story has helped her to recover.

She said: “I don’t feel that way [ashamed] anymore and it’s not because of my job, it’s not because of my boyfriend, it’s not because of feminism, though all those things helped. It’s because I told the story. And I’m still here, and my identity hasn’t shifted in some way that I can’t repair. And I still feel like myself and I feel less alone.”

She said: “he emotional trauma she suffered from the incident deeply affected her emotionally and dramatically altered her remaining college years. “I didn’t really go to anymore parties. I basically didn’t have a drink for the rest of college… I really removed myself from that world.

“I don’t know if I would’ve told you at the time, ‘Oh, I’m doing this to keep myself safe,’ but obviously in hindsight… I basically removed myself from the social world as I’d known it.”

The 28-year-old star – who is in a relationship with Fun. musician Jack Antonoff – struggled to speak openly about what had happened to her, using the “lens of humour” to play down her ordeal.

She told NPR’s Terry Gross: “It was a painful experience physically and emotionally, and one I spent a long time trying to reconcile.

“At the time that it happened, it wasn’t something that I was able to be honest about. I was able to share pieces, but I sort of used the lens of humour, which has always been my default mode, to try to talk around it.”

And Lena admits sharing her story with her best friend, who bluntly told her she had been raped, helped “lift” her and get over the shocking attack.

She said: “When I shared it with my best friend and she used the term ‘you were raped’ at the time, I sort of laughed at her and thought like, you know, what an ambulance-chasing drama queen.

“[I] later felt this incredible gratitude for her for giving me that, giving me that gift of that kind of certainty that she had. I think that a lot of times when I felt at my lowest about it, those words in some way actually lifted me up because I felt that somebody was justifying the pain of my experience.”

Share this article: