OPINION: Lena Dunham’s garbage ‘apology’ for lying to discredit Black rape accuser is her typical, flimsy, whites-only ‘feminism’
In a surprise to exactly zero people, Lena Dunham has once again stirred up controversary with her latest admission that she lied to discredit a woman who accused a Girls writer of rape.
Just when we thought we were done talking about Lena Dunham, the universe apparently had other ideas.
The alabaster-complected white-feminist flag-waving actress/writer is making headlines again, this time for writing a “guest editor” op-ed in The Hollywood Reporter’s Women in Entertainment issue. Dunham couched an apology to actress Aurora Perrineau amid a bunch of rambling text in which she championed the gains of the #MeToo movement and provided more details about her own history with sexual assault.
Dunham stepped into some shit last year when she defended Murray Miller, a writer on Dunham’s Girls show, when Perrineau accused Miller of raping her. Dunham and Girls show-runner Jenni Konner wrote: “While our first instinct is to listen to every woman’s story, our insider knowledge of Murray’s situation makes us confident that sadly this accusation is one of the 3 percent of assault cases that are misreported every year.”
The whole not-listening-to-women thing stands in diametric opposition to the movement Dunham purports to care so much about – she was rightfully dragged for it and quickly apologized. But in her new THR op-ed, we learn more: “I didn’t have the ‘insider information’ I claimed but rather blind faith in a story that kept slipping and changing and revealed itself to mean nothing at all.”
F— everything else she wrote. That’s the only sentence that matters.
Dunham embodied the essence of rape culture by not only publicly defending the accused, but lying about having proof that refutes Perrineau’s story. That she frequently inculcates the masses with messages of feminism and encouraging us to always believe the victim, only to turn around and essentially give rape culture a steroid shot in the ass, reserves her a special throne in Snow Bunny Hell.
Things women do lie about: what they ate for lunch. Things women don’t lie about: rape.
— Lena Dunham (@lenadunham) August 4, 2017
BEVERLY HILLS, CA – JANUARY 13: Actor Harold Perrineau and daughter Aurora Perrineau attend HBO’s Post 2013 Golden Globe Awards Party (Photo by Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images)
Habitual Linestepper
That Dunham attempted to discredit a Black woman (Perrineau’s dad is journeyman actor Harold Perrineau) is impossible to overlook. Black women have struggled to have a seat at the table in the discussion of feminism, perhaps most notable in the case of Tarana Burke being all but erased from the mainstream discussion of the #MeToo movement she founded when it experienced a resurgence during the fall of Harvey Weinstein.
When taken in concert with other racially insensitive statements she’s made, one can’t be blamed for feeling that Dunham’s original dismissal of Perrineau made her the poster child for exclusionary white feminism. Following that backlash, Black writer Zinzi Clemmons announced she would stop writing for Dunham’s Lenny Letter blog and asked people of color to divest from her altogether.
Lena Dunham says publicly discrediting a rape survivor has “become my greatest moment of evolution and education.” ?
She does realize that WOC are not here on Earth to suffer for the sake of her edification, right? https://t.co/WijZS1f44c
— Soraya Nadia McDonald (@SorayaMcDonald) December 6, 2018
She lied to smear a black woman who was assaulted by her friend. And now she’s turned her “apology” into another career milestone.
If Lena Dunham doesn’t make you physically sick, unfollow me now. https://t.co/o7qsNzpAls
— Adria Johnson (@itsmeadria) December 6, 2018
At this juncture, Dunham is now so infamous for her fatuous parade of mea culpas that they’ve literally devolved into parody: the Twitter account Lena Dunham Apologizes has more than 41,000 followers as of press time. She even brought Perrineau’s (white) mom on stage to apologize during THR’s Women in Entertainment event, which reeks of being performative in nature. If you kick me in the nuts, are you going to take my dad out to dinner to apologize?
I’d say I was surprised that The Hollywood Reporter didn’t have the foresight to realize that they were giving a platform to a trash receptacle of a human being and to predict the backlash, but a quick scan of the directorial staff of the magazine reveals that it’s whiter than the audience of a Friends marathon in Eau Claire, Wis. If anything, they should’ve given Perrineau the space to tell her story.
The fact that her apology is the *editor’s letter* for a special issue about women in entertainment *that she is guest editing* is BONKERS https://t.co/FG3hZhzXJi
— andi zeisler (@andizeisler) December 6, 2018
If there is a god above interested in our well-being, Dunham will no longer be given a platform for any reason. Not to apologize, not to ramble on about how much she claims to care about feminism, not her body, not anything. Change the channel on Lena Dunham, cancel the cable service, delete the Wikipedia page…just disappear her.
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Dustin J. Seibert is a native Detroiter living in Chicago. Miraculously, people have paid him to be aggressively light-skinned via a computer keyboard for nearly two decades. He loves his own mama slightly more than he loves music and exercises every day only so his French fry intake doesn’t catch up to him. Find him at his own site, wafflecolored.com.
