Lena Dunham and the cruel lie that just won’t die — BEST OF TANGOTI - There Are No Girls on the Internet

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, this is Bridget and I'm doing a live Ask
Me Anything over on Patreon in just a few weeks,
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(00:20):
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(00:43):
answer that too. So just go to patreon dot com
slash tangoty and ask your burning question, and keep a
lookout for the official date announcement of my very first
ever live Patreon Ask Me Anything. I can't wait. There
are no girls on the Internet. As a production of

(01:03):
iHeartRadio and Unbossed Creative, I'm bridgeitat and this is there
are no girls on the Internet. The movie Barbie has
already racked in a very impressive one hundred and fifty
five million dollars at the domestic box office on opening
weekend alone, and based on that success, there are even

(01:26):
more toy franchises being turned into live action films, one
of which is a live action movie version of my
personal favorite toy growing up, Polypocket. You know that whole
little miniature doll universe housed inside a cute little plastic compact.
I loved it, and the movie Polypocket is set to
be directed by none other than Lena Dunham of HBO's Girls.

(01:49):
So Lena Dunham was trending all this week after the
Polypocket movie was announced, which also means that a particularly
sticky piece of misleading content about her did too. Now
I have to give a little bit of a heads
up here. This claim is a particularly ugly one involving
sexual abuse. Last year, I did a deep dive into
this particular claim, where it originated and why it's stuck

(02:12):
around for so long. Now, I know people have a
lot of strong opinions and feelings about Lena Dunham, so
take a listen and let me know what you think,
and we'll be back with our regular Friday newscast next week. Today,
we are not trying to sort of demonstrate the way
that the media unfairly maligned somebody. We are zeroing in

(02:34):
on one specific misleading claim about none other than Lena Dunham.
I 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

(02:55):
what that lies has about our culture.

Speaker 2 (02:57):
Yeah, so why why this one specific thing?

Speaker 1 (03:02):
Great question. So a little bit of background about how
I came to be making this episode. I used to
work on the social media team at MSNBC dot 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.
This is back in twenty fifteen, and our audience used

(03:22):
to love to hate on Putin, and so whenever we
posted something about Putin that posted that cast him in
a negative light, we could always expect that people would
really engage with that a lot. They'd be leaving like
mean comments like yeah, we hate him. They love to
hate on Putin. But hands down, no question, the public
figure that got the most hate on all of our

(03:44):
social media pages was Lena Dunham. I think, if I'm
recalling correctly, I think people disliked Lena Dunham more than
they disliked Putin, which is really saying something. And I
used to I worked on this podcast project where Lena
Dunham was one of our guests. And again, you know,
we had posted episodes with all different types of public
figures and celebrities, but when we posted our Lena Dunnam episode,

(04:06):
it was instant unanimous negative feedback. And 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. You know.
Sometimes it would be the garden variety things that you
would expect, like oh, she's a spoiled brad, I hate her,
or you know, oh she's gross, which is pretty much

(04:29):
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. And
you know, I'm always very interested in what I referred
to as sticky pieces of disinformation or misinformation or lies,

(04:53):
you know, things that really just seem to cut through
and persist. You know, I'm very interested in why these
things stick and to what end, and what their stickiness
tells us about our culture. And 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

(05:14):
particularly important in today's climate. And 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? Let me
be very clear, there are plenty of valid reasons to
not rock with Lena Dunham, some of which will be

(05:35):
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, but 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

(05:57):
it initially started as a right wing attack on a
prominent liberal voice, But 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.
Like people who I believe probably have would never read
a right wing blog, you know, for any legitimate reason,

(06:18):
should probably be aware that they are repeating a lie
that was really cooked up in the right wing blog
a sphere. And I think that should be really concerning.
I 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.
So let's talk about how and why that happened and

(06:40):
what it means.

Speaker 2 (06:42):
So for people like me who don't really know anything
about this, who is Lena Dunham?

Speaker 1 (06:51):
So if you don't know who Lena Dunham is, I
will give you kind of a quick and dirty summary
of her background. Lena Dunham is an actor, producer, and writer.
She's the daughter of visual art Lori Simmons, who is
a very big deal in the art world because her
art is incredible. Lena rose to fame after making a
really strong film debut called Tiny Furniture, which is basically
a semi auto biographical movie about a young woman portrayed

(07:14):
by Lena, who disgraduated from college and is trying to
navigate adulthood. Laurie Simmons, her real life mom, plays her
mom in the movie, and in the movie, her mom
is also a visual artist and photographer who stages these
stages or pieces with tiny dollhouse furniture, just like her
mom does in real life. And Lena's real life sibling,
Cyrus Grace, plays Lena's character sibling in the movie too,

(07:37):
so it's very semi auto biographical. In twenty twelve, she
created and starred in HBO's Girls, which also explores kind
of similar themes young white women trying to navigate young
adulthood post college in Brooklyn, New York. Lena was born
in nineteen eighty six, so she is what you would
call a millennial and when Girls was debuting, it was
kind of peak like what are the millennials up to

(08:00):
content time? Right? And so Girls was this huge success.
Pretty early on, it 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
for 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. But regardless, positive, negative,

(08:22):
whatever you thought, it was the kind of show that
people were talking about a lot like it was in
the discourse, which I think creates a certain kind of
gravy toss around anything. And just as a side note,
in case you're curious, I actually watched and enjoyed the show.
I'm not going to sit here and act like I
have not seen every episode or I am not going
to sit here and act like I did not immediately

(08:43):
go to a V club to read reviews immediately after
watching episodes, because, like I said, it was part of
a discourse. You know, the show created discourse, and I
will never deprive myself of discourse. Okay, if people are
talking about something, if there's articles and reviews to be
read I'm reading them, I'm engaging. So Girls explores themes

(09:03):
of sexuality, gender, and female friendship, and its highly anticipated
third season comes out in January twenty fourteen. Now, in
September of that same year, Lena releases a memoir essay
collection calls not that kind of girl. Lena was having
a really hot moment, and so the book was a
highly anticipated one. Random House purchased the rights in October

(09:24):
twenty twelve after a big bidding war, and bidding was
reported to have risen past three point five million dollars.
So it's one of those very hot, very big deal
book publishing projects. This was all happening against the backdrop
of a particular climate politically, culturally, and socially in the
mid twenty tens. If I had the ability to clear

(09:45):
music rights on this podcast, which my producer Tari can
tell you I bug her about pretty much every day,
this is where we'd be playing like maybe Katie Perry's
Roar or Shake It Off by Taylor Swift. You know,
some other twenty ten hit to really set the scene, Mikey,
what were some other like twenty ten hits, like hits
of the twenty tens, Oh, Rihanna.

Speaker 2 (10:06):
Maybe Rihanna was in there. I feel like Tam and
Paula was in there. Maybe I'm getting a little like
late twenty tens.

Speaker 1 (10:16):
So just imagine that some kind of music from that
era is playing as I paint a portrait of what
it was like in the mid twenty tens. So in
popular culture, the film Twelve Years of Slave won Best
Picture at the Oscars in twenty fourteen, which was hosted
by openly gay Ellen DeGeneres and was the most watched

(10:37):
Oscars since the year two thousand. By twenty fourteen, waves
of states are passing marriage equality legislation. The Supreme Court
decides not to hear cases on marriage equality appeals, thus
immediately legalizing marriage equality in Virginia, Utah, Indiana, Oklahoma, and
Wisconsin before it sent back to the courts and ultimately
legalized nationwide a year later. The Black Lives Matter movement

(11:01):
started in twenty thirteen and was really picking up. You
have the shooting deaths of Trayvon Martin and Florida, Mike
Brown and Missouri, and Eric Garner in New York and
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. You'll remember that
when President Obama was asked about trayvon Martin, he answered,

(11:23):
if I had a son, he would look a lot
like treyvon Martin. Obama gave a televised speech announcing his
plans to use executive action to grant citizenship to about
four point four million immigrants. So 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. We also get Obamacare in twenty ten,

(11:46):
and for the next few years, Republicans were fighting it
tooth and nail, including Obamacare's birth control coverage mandate. Mike,
do you remember that Georgetown law student and feminist activist
Sondra Fluke?

Speaker 2 (11:58):
Boy, I'd forgotten, but now it's coming back to me.
What was the deal with Sandra Fluke? Why do we
know her name?

Speaker 1 (12:05):
So in twenty twelve, Sandra Fluke was barred from testifying
about birth control during a hearing, and instead the only
people who testified about birth control was an all male
planel of clergy and then Rush Limbaugh called Sandra Fluke
a slut basically just per advocating for birth control. You know,

(12:25):
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 would have going on.

Speaker 2 (12:42):
It does seem quaint now. I remember that war on
women phrase, and boy, if we thought that was a
war on women, buckle up for twenty twenty two.

Speaker 1 (12:55):
This is a soul. It's funny because I wanted to
do this episode because I thought it was like a
little bit of a departure from everything happening in the news.
But it's so funny how it always comes back to this,
you know.

Speaker 2 (13:09):
I feel like every time I look backwards to the
period like five, ten, fifteen years ago, I'm confronted with
how quaint my concerns felt, and how the things I
was alarmed about seems so much smaller than the things
that are just like normal shit in the news today.

Speaker 1 (13:28):
Oh my god, tell me about it.

Speaker 3 (13:33):
Let's take a quick break.

Speaker 1 (13:44):
At our back. So we're talking about this war on women.
But back in twenty fourteen, you also have Beyonce performing
in front of the word feminist in giant letters like
decked out in Life at the Empty vvma's paired with
a sample of Chimamanda ngozio Adicia speech on feminism and

(14:05):
expectations for women and girls. We'd teach girls to shrink themselves,
to make themselves smaller.

Speaker 3 (14:11):
We say to girls, you can have ambition, but not
too much.

Speaker 1 (14:15):
And 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. You know,
I think I've been I've identified like vocally as a
feminist for most of my life since I was a child.
But I think for a lot of people, when you
were asked like are you a feminist, it was something

(14:37):
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. Country pop sensation Taylor Swift famously
came out as a feminist in twenty fourteen in an
interview with The Guardian where she credits her friend none
other than Lena Dunham with her feminist awakening. And I

(15:01):
guess my point is this, this era really feels at
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. You 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

(15:22):
to be on birth control. None of that is cool.
But what is cool is being a feminist. It's cool
to be a feminist, it's cool to be an ally
and in twenty fourteen, 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. So that alone, you know,

(15:44):
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. You know,
Lena Dunham is not a size four, and yet she
is nude on screen and has these sex scenes. She
does a really great job of highlight the sort of
humor and awkwardness that kind a company exploring your sexuality
when you're young, you know what she's doing on screen.

(16:06):
It feels a little bit daring. After 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. You 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, doctor Luke.
This also translates politically. Lena positions herself as a vocal

(16:29):
feminist and a champion for feminist causes another familiar trip
down memory lane. Back around twenty fourteen, 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

(16:51):
and threatening to defund Planned Parenthood part a big part
of his whole overall thing. And we also had these
deceptively edited sting videos anti abortion extremists. You 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. Basically, right wing types
were really trying to make planned parenthood and abortion and

(17:14):
the kinds of exploration of sexuality and gender that Lena
really does in her work. They were really trying to
brand that as something toxic that nobody would want to
be affiliated with. Only it wasn't really working.

Speaker 2 (17:27):
Isn't it funny how Mike Tens built his whole career
on like attacking people and making people seem like evil villains,
and then he arguably rode out his career with members
of his own party chanting to hang him. You know,

(17:47):
isn't that funny that you reap what you sew?

Speaker 1 (17:51):
You know, you live by the sword, you die by
the sword. What can I say?

Speaker 2 (17:55):
Yeah? Exactly. You live by the jigged up outrage, you
die by the gallows.

Speaker 1 (18:09):
So, in the wake of all these attacks on planned parenthood,
Lena becomes the face of a campaign to fight back
called Women Are Watching. She designs a hot pink shirt
that says Lena loves Planned Parenthood in supportive planned parenthood,
and she gets other aless celebrities like America, Frera and
Gabrielle Union to join in. Lena made this kind of cheeky,

(18:29):
kind of wink wink ad for the DNC in supportive
Obama in twenty twelve.

Speaker 4 (18:34):
Your first time shouldn't be with just anybody you want
to do it with a great guy. It should be
with a guy with beautiful someone who really cares about
and understands women, a guy who cares whether you get
health insurance and specifically whether you get birth control.

Speaker 1 (18:50):
It was funny, yeah, so it's playful, it's kind of funny,
it's a little edgy. So probably unsurprisingly, right wing types
did not like this ad. Ben Shapiro, who remember that
name because he will be important, later said that the
ad mocked versions. His whole screed about the ad is

(19:11):
pretty amazing, so he writes in Breibert. So Lena chose
to do it for the first time with Barack Obama
since he quote cares about and understands women. In fact,
he understands them so well that he exploits them for
insane commercials, comparing losing your virginity with voting. Obama has
young daughters, but that didn't stop him from releasing this

(19:34):
commercial because This is what Obama thinks of your daughters.
This is Obama's official campaign ad, paid for with his
campaign money, distributed by his campaign. If this ad were
any more demeaning to women who apparently care only about
having sex, if you listen to Lena you want to
do it, Dunham, it should be produced by Bill Maher

(19:56):
and star Bill Clinton. Oh wait, that's Obama's actual care campaign.
According to Barack Obama, this campaign isn't about the economy
or foreign policy. It's about free birth control as advocated
by unbelievably wealthy celebrities. If Obama goes any smaller in
this campaign, we're gonna need a microscope to find him.

Speaker 2 (20:18):
Ugh, it's so over the top. I just need a
minute to choke down this vomit. It comes up at
any time Ben Shapiro's words appear. It's you mentioned that
he's going to be important later. When is that, like,
twenty twenty five, twenty thirty, When will he be important?

Speaker 1 (20:40):
We're still waiting. I'm sure he's still waiting. I'm sure
he's been waiting his whole life to feel important. So
they did not like Lina's Obama ad in twenty twelve
and it. Actually, I find it so interesting how Shapiro
uses Lina's involvement to really shrink the issue of birth
control coverage, Like it is simultaneously a small issue that
is so small that it's unbecoming Obama to align himself with,

(21:04):
and it is also an issue that the right wing
was actively exploding and melting down over, you know, holding
hearings about it and making it a huge deal. So
you know, the math isn't really mathing on that one,
Like which one is Is it so inconsequential that nobody
should ever care about it? Or is it this huge
issue that you need to hold a million hearings about,

(21:24):
you know which one?

Speaker 2 (21:25):
That's such a good observation. I ever thought about it
like that. But you're absolutely right. It's like so consistent
with their whole hypocrisy thing. We're on the one hand
when they're on the attack, like, oh, it's so inconsequential,
it's insulting to even bring up the concept of birth control.
And then you know, flip the screen and the only

(21:49):
thing that matters is abortion restrictions and preventing women from
having abortions. It's like two sides of the same coin,
but like one side is life or death for society,
and the other side is like trivial and brass.

Speaker 1 (22:06):
Yeah, it's almost like some of these folks are not
genuine actors. It sounds like some of them are completely disingenuous.

Speaker 2 (22:14):
Yeah, it does seem almost like that. I mean, like
that can't be it. There's got to be something more.
I'll keep thinking about it.

Speaker 1 (22:21):
Keep thinking on it. Anyway. 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. Like even though right wingers did not

(22:41):
like that ad, people talked about it, people wrote about it.
So lover or hater, Lena Dunham knows how to wield
her own specific kind of political, social, and cultural power.
And the vibe around that is that it's cool to
care about politics and it's cool to care about feminism. Importantly,
this is actually largely a phenomenon on the left. There

(23:03):
aren't really a lot of cool, young, culturally relevant political
celebrities on the right in the same kind of way.
Not 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 in interviews. When she was
asked if she was a feminist, she would say things like, oh,

(23:26):
I don't call myself a feminist because I never believed
in men versus women. But 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.
And it's basically almost like a right wing bogeyman come
to life. You know, your sweet blonde, conservative, country loving

(23:47):
young woman will become corrupted by a tattooed feminist with
green hair and will be pulled into identifying as a
liberal feminist. So you know, say what you will about
Lena Dunham. That is a certain type of cultural power,
and Homegirld knows how to use it. And you know,
when it comes to the culture, it was people like

(24:08):
Lena Dunham who had the relevance. And I can see
how this would be really threatening to write 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. So all of this is
the backdrop on which a website called Truth Revolt comes
to exist. And to understand this misleading claim that Lena

(24:30):
Dunham sexually abused her sibling and where it comes from,
we have to first start by talking about Truth Revolt.

Speaker 2 (24:37):
Wait, 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?

Speaker 1 (24:45):
Truth Revolt is a right wing website that was launched
on October seventh, twenty thirteen. According 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 d Horror Its Freedom Center as a counterpoint to
the politically progressive media Matters for America. Yes, Ben Shapiro

(25:07):
is the same person who wrote that breathless piece about
Lena's twenty twelve ad for Obama. And side note, a
lot of y'all probably know Ben Shapiro. He is pretty
famous for being you know, he's young. I think he's
thirty eight now. He's pretty famous for being this right
wing media figure, and he's been at it since he
was seventeen. I personally just find him awful. Like the

(25:29):
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, or you know,

(25:52):
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. And so he's constantly
complaining about culture. The thing that always comes to mind
when I think about Ben Shapiro, I will always associate

(26:14):
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,

(26:38):
which is just hysterical. I think about it all the
time and laugh.

Speaker 2 (26:42):
Yeah, it's the funniest thing about him. It's the only
thing I think about when I think about him. It's
like perfectly summarizes his whole culture war thing where there
was like a video I don't even think it was
really edited of him like doing spoken word of the
lyrics of that WAP song and then him like commenting about, yeah, exactly,

(27:07):
you said to his wife, who apparently is a medical doctor,
saying that the only reason it might happen is because
of an affection. It was sad and shocking, and I
almost feel like like he was setting us up. But
like it's just too much humility. I think it just
truly is that embarrassing for him?

Speaker 1 (27:28):
Yeah, I if folks have not seen so the video
that you're talking about, I definitely watched it one hundred times.
He is reading the lyrics on his show in disgust,
and so he's reading the lyrics to wet Ass Pussy.
But then somebody and I think he's trying to demonstrate
like this song is so immoral and like this is
what our girls are listening to, and YadA, YadA, YadA.

(27:48):
But then to a beat, somebody puts it to the
WAP beat and it kind of slaps lie. It's hilarious,
Like look it up. I I'll link it in the
show notes because I watch it. It's given me great joy.
I'll put it that way.

Speaker 2 (28:05):
Yeah, And I think it's the best way to really
understand Ben Shapiro as a person and as.

Speaker 1 (28:10):
A man exactly. 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, so, Truth Revolt's
mission page states that its goals are to quote unmasked

(28:32):
leftists in the media for who they are, destroy their
credibility with the American public, and devastate their funding basis.
So essentially, truth Revolt was created, per the co creator
David Horbert's own mission statement, to manipulate media for political means.
Here's what he wrote on gon say the media win
elections for the left. It's not the left's competence in office.

(28:54):
Leftists have demonstrated none. It's not the left's ideas. Leftist
ideas have failed everywhere they've been tried. The left wins
for one simple reason. Leftists control the information distribution system
in the United States, and they use that system to
pillary conservatives, heartless bigots intent on harming the poor and
targeting minorities. The media must be destroyed where they stand.

(29:16):
That is our mission at Truth Revolt. The goal of
truth Revolt is simple, unmasked leftists in the media for
who they are, destroy their credibility with the American public,
and devastate their funding basis, Truth Revolt focuses on high
profile media members and holding them accountable. Truth Revolt also
seeks to stop the left dead in its tracks when
it comes to training the next generation on our college campuses.

(29:39):
Truth Revolt works to make advertisers and funders aware of
the leftist propaganda they sponsor and bringing social consequences to
bear to create pressure on such advertisers and funders. So
pretty obviously from their own statement, Truth Revolt specifically is
looking to quote unmasked leftists and target specific leftist public
figures in them media to make them toxic for brands

(30:02):
and funders to be associated with. And they're kind of
modeling themselves after places like Media Matters for America, who
monitor disinformers and bad actors and extremists like Tucker Carlson
and Steve Bannon to pressure advertisers to drop them. They're
also specifically focused around winning over young people like college students,
who we know are Lena Dunham's biggest audience demographic. So obviously,

(30:25):
I think it goes about saying that truth Revolt is
not just some you know, run of the mill media
outlet reporting the facts from their own statement. They are
a right wing outlet with a political acts to grind.
They are out for vengeance, they are out to dismantle
people take them down by their own admission.

Speaker 2 (30:47):
This idea that like leftists are supported by this great
funding appreatus. I know so many broke ass leftists she.

Speaker 1 (30:58):
Checking out of me.

Speaker 2 (31:00):
Separating from their funding is like not even the thing,
like so many of them are broke, you know, Like
where what is this like big leftist funding in the
media that they're talking about.

Speaker 1 (31:12):
Like, I mean, nothing that they say is accurate. You know,
they say that like, oh, the media is a tool.
Like the media, like the idea that that that that
mainstream media is a tool propping up leftist agendas. It's
just I gets such an unseerious claim. I don't find
it worthy of a retort. It's just it's just like

(31:33):
you can just read the newspaper in the wake of
the fall of Row, read the newspaper in the New
York Times today they I mean, I don't even want
to get into it, but yes, it's it's such an
unseerious claim that it's not even worthy of a response.

Speaker 2 (31:49):
Yeah, it's it's like ludicrous. It's like who who owns
the media? We've got you know, NBC, you know, Jeff
Bezos owns the Washington Post. Like, these are not leftist people.

Speaker 1 (32:04):
No, it's it's horseshit. Okay, So you might be wondering,
this website sounds sketchy as hell, But what does it
have to do with Lena Dunham. Well, the claim that
Lena Dunham admitting to molesting her younger sibling was initially
started on Truth Revolt.

Speaker 2 (32:21):
Oh shit, so that's the connection here. This Truth Revolt
started this claim about Lena Dunham. I should have seen
it coming, but somehow they snuck it in on me.

Speaker 1 (32:35):
It'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. In September twenty fourteen, Lena Dunham released her

(32:56):
memoir Not That Kind of Girl. Now. I have read
the memoir a couple of times, so like I'm pretty
well versed on what it says and what it doesn't say.
And it does include passages of Lena describing sexual situations
around her younger sibling. I should say right now, Lina's
sibling is called Cyrus Grace Dunham and uses they them pronouns.

(33:17):
According to a twenty nineteen Atlantic profile of Cyrus, Cyrus
uses they them pronouns in professional contexts, and he him
pronouns with friends. But that was not the case when
this memoir was published. But as I read some quotes
from the memoir, I'm going to amend the quotes to
reflect that, so Lena writes about trying to get her
younger sibling to kiss her on the mouth and lay

(33:38):
on top of her. As Cyrus Grace grew, I took
to bribing them for time and affection. One dollar in quarters,
if I could do their makeup like a motorcycle chick,
three pieces of candy, if I could kiss them on
the lips for five seconds, whatever they wanted to watch
on TV. If they would just relax on me, basically
anything a sexual predator might do to woo a small
suburban girl I was trying. The memoir also includes this passage.

(34:02):
Do we all have uteruses? I asked my mother when
I was seven. Yes, she told me. We're born with
them and with all of our eggs, But they start
out very small, and they aren't ready to make babies
until we're older. I look at my Cyrus Grace, now
a slim, tough one year old, and at their tiny belly.
I imagine eggs inside of them, like the sack of
spider eggs and Charlotte's web, and their uterus the size

(34:25):
of a thimble. Does their vagina look like mine? I
guess so, my mother said, just smaller. One day as
I sat out on our driveway in Long Island, playing
with blocks and buckets, my curiosity got the best of me.
Cyrus Grace was sitting up, babbling and smiling, and I
leaned down between them and I leaned down between their
legs and carefully spread open their vagina. They didn't resist,

(34:46):
and when I saw what was inside, I shrieked. My
mother came running, Mama, Mama, Cyrus Grace has something in there.
My mother didn't bother asking why I had opened cyrus
Grace's vagina. This was within the spectrum of things that
I did. She just got on her knees and looked
for herself. It quickly became apparent that Cyrus Grace had
stuck six or seven pebbles in there. My mother removed

(35:09):
them patiently, while Cyrus Grace cackled thrilled that their prank
had been a success. So the book actually does contain
content that involves her describing these sexual situations with their sibling.
That is true, but she writes about doing this at
age seven with her sibling who was age one. On

(35:31):
October twenty ninth, twenty fourteen, about a month after her
book had come out, Truth Revolt published the passage that
I just read about the pebbles and the vagina under
the headline Lena Dunham described sexually abusing her little sibling. Now,
as Box points out, truth Revolt did two very misleading
things in their post, calling Donham a sexual abuser. One,

(35:53):
they really keyed in on this phrase they didn't resist,
which obviously becomes a lot more loaded when paired with
the headline about sexually abusing her sibling. Two, and this
is really important. Truth Revolt article originally stated that Dunham
was seventeen at the time, when Dunham in actuality said
that she was seven. So obviously, if you have a

(36:16):
seventeen year old describing these kinds of interactions with a
one year old, it 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.

Speaker 2 (36:29):
Yes, seventeen and seven are pretty different there.

Speaker 1 (36:33):
Pretty different. So truth Revolt eventually does say that it
was a typo. I guess that's fine. The 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,
it's basically a right wing news aggregator that can really
blow up stories. It was the first place to publish

(36:54):
the Bill Clinton scandal involving interna Monica Lewinsky back in
nineteen ninety eight. Once it's picked up by the drudge
the story gets a ton more traction. It makes the
rounds on you know, Truth for Both is kind of
a niche site. It makes the rounds on the wider
right wing blog and infosphere, and much bigger right wing
outlets begin to pick it up. The National Reviews Kevin Williamston,

(37:15):
for instance, declared there is no non horrific interpretation of
this episode, and The Daily Caller, another conservative outlet, rights
Dunham had admitted to the quote gleeful sexual abuse of
her infant sibling. Now that is initially really what seeded
the whole Lena Dunham sexually abused her sibling narrative. And

(37:37):
now it's out in the wider right wing blogosphere infosphere,
and now it is a thing.

Speaker 2 (37:45):
It's so salacious it almost feels like Taylor made for
these kind of right wing outrage aggregators.

Speaker 1 (37:55):
I 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,

(38:16):
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.

Speaker 4 (38:24):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (38:24):
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 step back and evaluate, like who is writing this?
Where am I reading this? Is this something that I

(38:45):
want to share exactly?

Speaker 1 (38:46):
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

(39:08):
becoming more and more relevant. I could see why that
would prime somebody who is a right winger who feels
kind of threatened by this. I could see how that
would prime them to believe and amplify and spread this
particularly damaging lie about Lena Dunham. However, what I find
so fascinating about this is the way that didn't just

(39:29):
stay in right wing circles. It made the rounds, and
it still persists today.

Speaker 3 (39:37):
More after a quick break.

Speaker 1 (39:49):
Let's get right back into it. So the day that
Truth published their misleading article about her memoir, Lena responded
the following day, tweeting the right wing news story that
I molested my little sibling isn't just laugh out loud,
it's really fucking upsetting and disgusting. Her legal team sent
a letter that was obtained by The Hollywood Reporter to

(40:10):
Bradford Thomas, the author of the Peace and a Truth Revolt,
threatening to take legal action if certain statements were not removed.
The letter said, the story is false, fabricated, and has
the obvious tendency to subject my client to ridicule and
to injure her occupation. Now, the letter goes on to
say that the piece caused quote actual damage to Lena's
personal and professional reputation, which likely would be calculated in

(40:33):
the millions of dollars, punitive damages which can be a
multiple of up to ten times the actual damages, and
injunctive relief. The letter also says that the Truth Revolt
story contains quote outright falsified statements that are attributed to
Lena and her book. The statements do not appear anywhere
in the book, thus showing intent to harm, knowing falsity
as well as reckless disregard for the truth, any one

(40:54):
of which meets the malice requirement. Her attorney, Charles Harder
wrote in his letter to Truth Revolt Now. Ben Shapiro,
on behalf of Truth Revolt responded, he said, we refuse
to withdraw our story and apologize for running it, because
quoting a woman's book does not constitute a false story,
even if she is a prominent actress and left wing activist.

(41:15):
Lena Dunna might not like our interpretation of her book,
but unfortunately for her and her attorneys, she wrote that
book and the First Amendment covers a good deal of
material which she may not like. And I don't know.
I just find Ben Shapiro and Truth Revolt's response to
be so wild because Truth Revolt itself admitted that it
was a typo, saying that she was seventeen and not seven.

(41:37):
They said it was a typo, and so by definition
what they printed was not correct and was a false story.
I feel like Ben Shapiro's kind of, you know, puffed
up response really flies in the face of like what
the website actually said, which was that they printed something
that was not correct.

Speaker 2 (41:54):
Yeah, and that's not like I wouldn't call that a
typo even if it was uninten which seems pretty unlikely,
but who knows, you know, maybe it was. But even so,
it's like, so it so changes the character and the
nature of the story that it's beyond a typo. It's

(42:14):
clearly creating a false impression that's absolutely true, and for
him to not even acknowledge that in part of his apology,
it just makes me wonder.

Speaker 1 (42:25):
You know what, Oh, he didn't apologize, Oh right.

Speaker 2 (42:27):
Excuse me. Yeah, so not an apology actually, just like
a continued attack. Yeah, that's great, the kind of kind
of guy we're dealing with.

Speaker 1 (42:36):
Your Yeah, 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 gonna take them at that word.
You're so right that even if that was just a typo,
somebody to slip the one in there, not acknowledging the

(42:58):
way that that really charges the what you've written, and like, really, yeah,
it's it's really stunning that he won't even like on
the one hand that the website admits it, but on
the other hand it's like, well, we did nothing wrong.
It's like, well, can't really be both.

Speaker 2 (43:13):
Yeah, 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.

Speaker 1 (43:32):
It would just be a typo. And how dare you
insinuate that I apologize and say it with anything?

Speaker 2 (43:36):
But yeah, right, it's just it's just a typo. And
also he's a right wing activist anyway, so that's somehow
relevant exactly exactly.

Speaker 1 (43:45):
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. So first, I believe that it's really
important to listen to and center Lena Dunham's siblings Cybris
Grace and their voice in this conversation and really listen

(44:07):
to what they have to say about what this experience
was like for them. Lena Dunham's siblings Cybris Grace responded
on Twitter saying heateronormativity deem certain behaviors harmful and others normal.
The state and media are always invested in maintaining that.
As a queer person, I'm committed to people narrating their
own experiences determining for themselves what has it has not

(44:28):
been harmful. Today, like every other day, it's a good
day to think about how we police the sexualities of
young women, queer and trans people. And so yeah, I
think it's important to ground, you know, the conversation of
like what actually happened in how Cyrus Grace interprets it,
because it's their it's you know, it's their experience, and
I have to say, you know, I want to be clear,

(44:49):
I am no expert here. I am not a psychologist,
I am not a legal scholar. I'm a little bit
out of my depth when it comes to like whether
or not something could be categorized as sexual abuse. So
I wanted to summarize some people who actually know what
they're talking about. So first, according to the American Academy
of Pediatrics, touching and looking at a siblings genitals is
a quote normal common behavior in kids ages two to six. Vox, Slate,

(45:14):
and Gawker all spoke to experts who generally seem to
conclude that little children being curious about the bodies of
their sibling is a normal part of childhood development. Here's
a couple of those experts. Gawker spoke to Sam Rubinstein,
a psychotherapist who specializes in childhood abuse, who said, I
think you have to take into consideration her age, her history,
and the idea that age, unless you've gone through severe

(45:36):
sexual trauma, there's really almost nothing sexual about it. The
same explanation could be used for grabbing a dog's tail.
It's the same type of coercion. Just because it's in
the sexual venue, people want to attach something to it,
but it's almost totally different. It's an innocent type thing.
Slate spoke to Rich Savin Williams developmental psychologist and the
director of the Sex and Gender Lab at Cornell University,

(45:58):
who said, quote, this is clearly not a case of abuse.
Children have been doing this stuff forever and ever and ever,
and they will do it forever and ever and ever.
John V. Cafero, a professor at the California School of
Professional Psychology and an expert on sibling abuse, wrote in
a Washington Post column quote, to be clear, sexual curiosity
in children is normal. All children explore their bodies and

(46:20):
may engage in visual and even manual exploration of a
sibling at times. This is one of the ways that
children discover sexual differences between boys and girls, anatomies. Even
siblings of the same gender become curious about variations in
shapes and sizes of their sex organs. Two small children
exploring each other's bodies does not predestine them to a
life of emotional suffering. So you know, that might all

(46:44):
kind of sound like I am abssolving Lena of having
done anything wrong in this situation, right, But I actually
think that this is where things get a little bit tricky,
and this trickiness is exactly what drove me to wanting
to make an episode about this topic. So I should say,
I myself am a survivor of sexual abuse, and so
I know that when something can be difficult to talk about,

(47:06):
like most sensitive issues are, but I also know that
we really really do need to talk honestly and thoughtfully
about it. And you know what doesn't help us to
have conversations about tough issues in a way that's honest
and thoughtful and nuanced adding lies to the mix. This
is a deliberate tactic that bad actors and disinformers employ,

(47:28):
seizing on hot button issues, adding lies to the mix,
intentionally to derail those conversations. And honestly, this is what
really kind of gets me so upset about this issue,
is that we should not and cannot tolerate lies being
added to conversations that are as sensitive and important as
childhood sexual abuse, especially not as a way to score

(47:50):
cheap political points the way that Shapiro and Truth Revolt did,
because it really derails progress and are collective shared understanding.
There is no converse that is made better by the
injection of lies, and people deserve the truth like that
is a value that I will just like scream from
the rooftops over and over again. If you are adding

(48:12):
lies to a conversation, you are doing us all a disservice.
And so I also think that truth revolt really blowing
up what Lena did write on her memoir with inaccurate
information really makes it difficult to address a what she
actually did and b how she actually wrote about it.
And because of their lie, because of them starting off
this conversation with such an inflammatory, big, you know, you know,

(48:36):
defining piece of inaccurate content, Lena understandably is then put
in a position where she has to defend herself against
a claim that was not true that she sexually abused
her sibling when she was seventeen. So 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

(48:59):
derailing tech, 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. And 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

(49:21):
oxygen truth revolts lie took up in the room, and
that is by design. And further, I would argue that
their injection of inaccurate information into the conversation, you know,
really just adds this this sine of inaccuracy. I would
be willing to bet that at least some people trying
to engage in a conversation probably have a misunderstanding about

(49:42):
the basic facts of what happened. And so I guess
all of this is to say, like, 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 with out that inflammatory lie
preventing us from doing that.

Speaker 2 (50:03):
Yeah, I totally agree with you. Then, you know, 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. And 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

(50:24):
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 activists. And you know, I
don't have any strong feelings for or against Lena Dunham,
and I've actually learned so much and just like making

(50:45):
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 exactly.

Speaker 1 (51:02):
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. I would have never
written about my younger sibling the way that that Dunham

(51:23):
did in her book, and I can really see how
people feel it raises some questions about boundaries. You know,
did Lena see these experiences that involved her sibling as
hers and hers alone to freely share in a book
you 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, Like, like,

(51:48):
I guess like writing about that and as a way,
that's a kind of cute and sort of like defining
her as like a quirky character or like a jokey
thing is really I think inappropriate, and I think it's
fair to say that that raises some legitimate questions, you know,
was that harmful to Lena's sibling. I actually heard from
a listener after the first part of this series aired

(52:10):
last week, and this person left an Instagram comment and
they felt very strongly that what Lena described in her
book was actually child like childhood sexual abuse.

Speaker 2 (52:21):
I remember you got that comment from that listener, and
it was pretty emotional and legitimate, And so I hope
that they're listening to this second part to get a
little bit more context for what we're trying to say.

Speaker 1 (52:36):
Yeah, me too. I'm really happy that they left that comment.
And you know, I think it's one of those things
where it's like, I think it's a completely valid question
to ask about the behavior that Lena describes in the
book and the way that she wrote about and framed
that behavior.

Speaker 2 (52:52):
Yeah, it is curious to me. You know, I haven't
read the book, but you did. What do you think
was her intention of writing that in the book?

Speaker 1 (53:03):
Oh, that's a great question. The book. So for folks
who have read the book, they know that a big
part of it is that Lena slowly reveals herself to
be a very unreliable narrator, one who is kind of
like sardonically looking at and projecting commentary onto her her
own experiences. And so her experiences are presented and you

(53:26):
and you the reader sort of takes them at face value.
And then later in the book those many of those
experiences are revisited in ways that reveal her to be
an unreliable narrator about her own experiences, and in ways
that sort of present her as this like, yeah, this sarcastic,
sardonic person who is kind of like critiquing and commenting

(53:47):
on the way that she described those things. Early on.
There's this piece for Vox by Alex abad Santos that
I think perfectly summarizes what I'm trying to say. Alex
writes the way Dunham wrote the incident up in her book,
and the degree to which the writing style that has
made her such a success may have also led her astray. Here,
child molestation is an extremely sensitive topic. Kafaro, the sibling

(54:10):
abuse expert, wrote that sibling sexual abuse is far more
common than most people think, quote the most closely kept
secret in the field of family violence, but one study
finding that at least two point three percent of children
have been sexually victimized by a sibling. Dunham's treatment of
this very serious topic was not exactly sensitive, something she
herself has acknowledged to some degree. That is of a

(54:32):
piece with Dunham's greatest strengths and weaknesses as a writer.
She has a reputation for leaning into weird, awkward situations
on her HBO show Girls, and she's a master at
creating scenes, sexual or not, that make viewers cringe. This
is a book about Lena Dunham's coming of age and
a society that does not normally tell stories of girls
becoming women, and it highlights quite well how uncomfortable and

(54:52):
difficult growing up as a girl can be. And so
I think that piece really summarizes it. I think that
she was trying to lean into the fact the ways
that sexual experiences and physical experiences can be so cringey,
so awkward, so uncomfortable, And she does that really well
in other parts of her writing, but I think that
that same inclination I think really led her astray here

(55:16):
and I think it like it opens up such valid
criticisms of the way that she handled it. One of
my big questions as did that bit of the book
contribute to a culture where sexual abuse is further normalized. Again,
I'm not an expert in this field, but I think
they're all valid questions, And I think that's the bottom line.
When we allow disinformers to flatten out entire conversations with

(55:40):
inaccurate information, we don't really get to have the real
conversation about what actually happens. And I think it creates
the conditions that lead to Lena not really having to
be held accountable for what she actually wrote, because the
only thing anybody is really talking about is the lie
about what she wrote. And I think that Lena would
probably agree that, you know, how she handled this incident

(56:03):
in her memoir wasn't great because she apologized. She wrote, quote,
if the situation is described in my book have been
painful or triggering for people to read. I am sorry,
that was never my intention. I am also aware that
my comic use of the term sexual predator was insensitive,
and I'm sorry for that as well. She also went
on to say that her sibling is her best friend

(56:24):
and quote, anything I have ever written about has been
published with approval.

Speaker 2 (56:28):
Yeah, that's I mean, it's hard to argue with that
that it was not very sensitive. And you know, her
apology is a reminder of how serious talking about sexual
abuse is, you know, and so yeah, you probably shouldn't

(56:49):
have written that, But it is so notable that this
whole controversy and apparently allegations that you know, people can
continue to hold against her of being a seventeen year
old sexual predator did not come from the alleged victim
her sibling, did not come from survivor justice advocates, but

(57:15):
instead came from Ben Shapiro, like a vowed and an
open right wing activist, you know, like you're not gonna
convince me that he gives a shit about really anyone.

Speaker 1 (57:29):
Yeah, and a right wing activist who explicitly said that
the intention of his media outlet was to attack prominent
left wing folks, prominent liberal voices. Lena Dunnam is a
prominent liberal voice that she certainly was when this all happened.
And so I think that I also want to really

(57:49):
lift up what you just said about these allegations not
coming from Lina's sibling. I think the thing that really
sticks with me about this whole situation is the way
that Lena Dunham's sibling, their voice is almost universally ignored.
You know, people often repeat this claim Lena Dunham's sexually

(58:10):
abused her sibling, and when they do so, they often
misgender Cyrus. And Cyrus has their own memoir called A
Year Without a Name, where they talk about this specific
claim and how hurtful it is to them, yet it
never goes away. So I have a hard time believing
that these people online actually care about centering or listening
to Cyrus's experience or meaningfully amplifying the experiences of survivors.

(58:35):
And so I just really believe in centering survivors, centering
giving people space to be the experts of their own experiences.
And so, yeah, the thing that really just really bums
me out is that Cyrus Grace's voice is almost entirely
erased when people talk about this. When people repeat, you know, oh,
Lena Dunham did this to the to her sibling, I

(58:57):
just feel like we just don't. It's it's so easy
to not make space for Cyrus's voice, and I think
what you said really helps us see how problematic that is.

Speaker 2 (59:07):
Yeah, Like having this conversation, I'm sort of wondering, is
this a conversation about childhood sexual abuse or is it
a conversation about a celebrity.

Speaker 1 (59:16):
Well, 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. 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

(59:37):
way to talk about how much we don't like Lena
Dunnam and how awful she is, you know what I mean?

Speaker 2 (59:41):
Yeah, totally, Like I'm no stranger to add hominin 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. But it does feel
very different when that piling on involves allegations of sexual

(01:00:05):
abuse about some third person who's not even part of
the conversation and is built on lies, and you know,
like you said earlier, just sucking the air out of
valid conversations in the space. Not valid, I don't mean valid,
I mean truthful, you know.

Speaker 1 (01:00:24):
Right, 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. So question for you, Mike.

(01:00:45):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:00:57):
Yeah, of course, it's a beautiful meme about coming together.

Speaker 1 (01:01:00):
So 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 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. That's kind of what I

(01:01:22):
think is going on here, because even though the claim
that Lena Dunham sexually abused her one year old sibling
when she was seventeen, we know, started in the right
wing blogosphere, it has really traveled out of those spaces
and become a fairly widely accepted claim. And that's because
Lena Dunham is just like a controversial figure. She's a
lightning rod. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:01:41):
It really highlights how we can all come together to
just like shit on women about shit that isn't true.

Speaker 1 (01:01:47):
Absolutely, to 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. And
this also tells us to think 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,

(01:02:10):
when somebody comes along and tells you something that really
squares what they're 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.
So if your opinion is that Lena Dunham sucks, it
sort of doesn't matter if she actually did joke about

(01:02:31):
abusing her one year old sibling when she was seventeen
or not. It will stick because it squares with our
are already held belief. That's just how our brains as
humans work. And 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. If you

(01:02:53):
listen to the episode that we did about and Father's
Day or Vanessa Gien, this will probably sound familiar to you.
It pits black women against white women, or the Latino
community against the Black community. And I think Lena Dunham
is a really interesting case study for this, because people,
especially people of color, really do have some valid reasons

(01:03:15):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:03:23):
Oh that's interesting.

Speaker 1 (01:03:24):
Yeah, 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.
So one, I think that Lena Dunham has really come
to represent a kind of I guess i'll call it

(01:03:45):
white girl cluelessness that a lot of feminists of color
were frankly sick of seeing amplified as the voice of feminism.
You know, when the show Girls first premiered at HBO,
there was so much fanfare cementing Lena Dunham, you know,
as this voice of a general, the voice of young women,
and I think there was some resentment around who we
amplify and who we give lots and lots and lots

(01:04:07):
of chances to. I often heard black feminists saying things like, oh,
a black woman would never get as many chances to
mess up like Lena Dunham has. Side note, Lena Dunham
has had to apologize for so many things that there
was actually a Twitter meme account called Lena Dunham apologizes
that just creates randomly generated apologies for fictional Lena Dunham missteps.

(01:04:30):
And I actually went to go look one up because
I was like, oh, I should read one here on
the podcast. That'll be funny, And 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. But that
apology tweet was actually real, that was actually her apologizing

(01:04:52):
for something that actually happened.

Speaker 2 (01:04:54):
Wow, 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. It's just a miasma of
Lena Dunham uncertainty.

Speaker 1 (01:05:08):
Exactly exactly is it art imitating life or is it
life imitating art, or.

Speaker 2 (01:05:13):
Is it art imitating tech corpses?

Speaker 1 (01:05:17):
So 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, and that is the whole thing
that went down between Lena Dunham and Odell Beckham. It
was just really weird. So if you don't remember what

(01:05:39):
happened a few years ago at the met Gala, Lena
Dunham attended and she was wearing a tuxedo and she
would see it next to the professional athlete Odell Beckham Junior,
and I guess Lena felt that he was ignoring her
or not paying an appropriate amount of attention to her
or something. And so after the event, Lena wrote in
her newsletter, Lenny Letter, I was sitting next to Odell

(01:06:01):
Beckham Junior and it was so amazing, and because it
was like he looked at me and determined I was
not the shape of a woman by his standards. He
was like, that's a marshmallow, that's a child, that's a dog.
It wasn't mean, he just seemed confused. The vibe was
very much do I want to fuck it? Is it
wearing yup, it's wearing a tuxedo. I'm going to go

(01:06:23):
back to my cell phone. It 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. I was like, this should be called the
Metropolitan Museum of getting rejected by athletes. So, yeah, that
is a lot of projecting your own negative fantasies and

(01:06:44):
perhaps insecurities on to someone who sounded like was just
like minding their business on their phone at dinner. You 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 hyperst sexualized black man
onto her, like she was like disappointed or felt some

(01:07:06):
type of way that he was not behaving in a
way like an over sexualized manner toward her. And 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

(01:07:28):
be legitimate tension points in our society.

Speaker 2 (01:07:31):
Yeah, yikes. That kind of remind me of what you
were talking about from her book, where she establishes herself
as an unreliable narrator and somebody who is dwelling in
negative fantasies all the time. A. That has to suck,
and B yeah, it does establish them as an unreliable

(01:07:55):
narrator who is probably going to say some shit that
they regret.

Speaker 1 (01:07:58):
Uh yeah, over and over and over again and have
to apologize for it endlessly, to the point where it
becomes a meme.

Speaker 2 (01:08:03):
Yeah, those did the cat corpses accept the apology?

Speaker 1 (01:08:08):
I wasn't able to find a response from the cat
corpse community, but I will keep looking.

Speaker 2 (01:08:12):
Okay, I'll check in with some necromancers that.

Speaker 3 (01:08:14):
I know more.

Speaker 1 (01:08:17):
After a quick break, let's get right back into it.
So I mentioned how Lena had a newsletter called Lenny Letter.
Zenzi Clemens, with a black woman and a writer, worked
with Lena on this letter and she publicly quit, citing

(01:08:40):
Lena's quote well known racism as the reason why. Clemens
said that she went to college with Dunham and her
friends and that they kind of were in the same
circles when they were in college, and that she would
call their strain of racism quote hipster racism, which usually
uses sarcasm as a cover, which, boy, do I know
a little something about that from my own days in college.

(01:09:01):
Clement's encouraged other women of color to stop working with
Lena Dunham, saying it is time for women of color,
black women in particular to divest from Lena Dunham. She
could not have our words if she cannot respect us.

Speaker 2 (01:09:12):
Ooh boy, oh boy is right, and coming from an
old friend or somebody who's known her since college and
has worked with her, that seems like a pretty damning
charge with more substance to it than out of context
typo from her autobiography.

Speaker 1 (01:09:32):
I 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. And so another,

(01:09:53):
probably the biggest, deepest example for myself personally, is the
way that Lena handled a sexual assault allegation and made
against writer and executive producer of Girls, Murray Miller that
happened on the set. Basically what happened. Actress Aurora Parrino,
whose mixed race, filed a police report accusing Girls writer
and executive producer Murray Miller of raping her on the

(01:10:14):
set of Girls in twenty twelve, when she was seventeen
years old. Now, Miller said that she was making it
up to extort him and try to get money from him,
and Lena and her showrunner Jenny Kohner published this statement quote.
While our first instinct is to listen to every woman's story,
our insider knowledge of Murray's situation makes us confident that, sadly,

(01:10:36):
this accusation is one of the three percent of assault
cases that are misreported every year. It is a true
shame to add to that number, as outside of Hollywood
women still struggle to be believed. We stand by Murray
and this is all we will be saying about this issue.

Speaker 2 (01:10:50):
Jesus Christ, it's bad, so bad. There's so many things
wrong with that.

Speaker 1 (01:10:57):
Well, it gets worse, so 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,
but come to find out that was all a lie.
She made that up because in a twenty eighteen follow
up piece called two Aurora an Apology, Dunham rights quote.

(01:11:21):
When someone I knew, someone I had loved as a brother,
was accused, I did something inexcusable. I publicly spoke up
in his defense. There are a few acts I could
ever regret more in my life. I didn't have the
insider information, I claimed, rather blind faith in a story
that kept slipping and changing and revealed itself to me

(01:11:42):
nothing at all. So Yeah, Lena basically smeared a woman
who said that she had been sexually assaulted by someone
that she met on Lena's set, the set of her
hit show. She lied about this woman for a long
time and then eventually admitted that lie in this piece. Yeah,

(01:12:05):
I just think it's really horrible and personally, this was
the time, like I, as I said in the last episode,
like I was a casual watcher of girls. I like
a lot of Len Dunham's writing. But this is when
she lost me for good because I just felt like
it was such a calculate like when you when you
call a woman of color a liar in public, you

(01:12:26):
are doing something that is like you can't take that back.
It's it's such a I don't even know how to
put it, like it's it's such a big claim that
is so because of we live in like a racist, sexist,
misogynistic society. When you say a woman of color is
lying about being abused or sexually assaulted in public, you

(01:12:49):
are just making a big claim that is going to
get a lot of attention that you can't take back.
And so for me, that was the moment that Lena
Dunham lost me forever. So Lena eventually took this with
Aurora's mom Brittany, at a women in Hobbywood event to
publicly apologize again last November.

Speaker 4 (01:13:06):
When Britney's beautiful daughter Aurora accused a friend of mine
of sexual assault, I denied her experience publicly.

Speaker 1 (01:13:12):
So I remember this moment so viscerally watching it and
thinking this is a capital B, capital M bad moment
for women. Lena lied about a woman of color who
opened up about her experience of sexual violence and just
essentially publicly smeared her. Then a few years later, she

(01:13:33):
brings this woman's mom on stage and performs contrition in
this kind of like, oh gee, I'm just a kid
with a lot to learn kind of way, when in
reality she was the very powerful creator and showrunner of
a highly successful business with her HBO show. So this
idea that she was just like a kid who had

(01:13:55):
a lot to learn, that's completely incorrect, and that framing
is is so's so clearly self serving. I'm sure you
could make the argument that it was a genuine moment
of you know, apology that she wanted to happen in public.
But I just it just really made me feel weird
and I really didn't like it, and yeah, it just
lost me forever.

Speaker 2 (01:14:15):
Yeah, and why her mom? Why not the woman herself?
Like that just seems weird. I'm sure people have answers
to that, but it seems weird to me.

Speaker 1 (01:14:26):
Yeah, And you can really see how all the different
controversies with Lena Dunham that I just laid out really
do exist along pre existing political, racial, and social tensions.
You know, white women versus women of color, white women
versus black men, these tensions that really do already exist
in our society and always have, like way before Lena Dunnam.
It's not like she created these things, but that tensions

(01:14:49):
that we have already have a kind of a tough
time talking honestly about. And when those tensions are present,
it's just the textbook conditions for inaccurate or misleading information
to fester and spread. And in a lot of ways,
I feel like Lena Dunnam is like a walking embodiment
of all of these tensions. And so it's not really
surprising that a particular misleading claim about her would then sick.

(01:15:13):
And I think that is why we see this claim
have such stickiness, you know, this claim that she molested
her sibling when she was seventeen. I think that is
the reason why we see it being, you know, having
such staying power.

Speaker 2 (01:15:26):
Yeah, and it's so sad that, you know, all those
societal tensions of racism, sexism, misogyn war just gets shoved
through the side and it becomes a conversation about a
single like a specific white woman and is she good

(01:15:47):
or is she bad? And like, what a useless conversation exactly.

Speaker 1 (01:15:51):
That's exactly my point, Like, we don't have the conversation of,
like was this harmful to survivors of sexual violence? Was
this a harmful experience for Lena Dunhams sibling? Should what
does it mean that she wrote about it in this
jokey way. We don't have to get to have a
conversation of like what can we offer survivors of childhood
sexual assault? Or like how can we support them? Or
how can we create the conditions to eliminate sexual abuse

(01:16:13):
in our world? But those conversations are too big, too
thorny two meety, we don't have the conversation of like, well,
why would black feminists or black women have a bone
to pick with white womanhood or white feminism, or in
what ways have white women historically, you know, attacked black
men or you know, like projected things onto black men

(01:16:35):
that were harmful to them. Those are all the big, thorny,
systemic conversation that's hard to have and that frankly, we
are not equipped to have. We're not having it, and
so that just gets conflated into Lena Dunham bad, Lena
Dunham did this or Lena Dunham not bad Lena, Lena
Dunham not did this right, Like, it just completely flattens

(01:16:57):
the conversation so that we're not really able to have
it be a thoughtful, substantive, nuanced conversation. And some lingering
questions that I still have about this are whether or
not people who say that Lena Dunnam abused her sibling
do they know they're talking about incidents that happened when
she was seven and not seventeen, Like how much did
that particular specific lie seep into people's actual consciousness and

(01:17:19):
their understanding of what happened? And maybe the answer is
we'll never know. And I think that is ultimately the
reason why this is such a big tactic for disinformers,
liars and bad actors, just creating enough negativity around someone
or something so that it ultimately doesn't really matter what
actually happened at all, because all anybody remembers or thinks

(01:17:41):
about when it comes up is the lie.

Speaker 2 (01:17:44):
Damn. Yeah, but I think you're you're right. I think
we've seen time and again that's their goal, to create
just the miasma of unspecific negativity and lies and not
just spread lies, but reduce confidence in there being any
sort of truth exactly right.

Speaker 1 (01:18:06):
It's so it's like creating the conditions where it's like, oh, well,
the conversation is so muddled and difficult to follow that
like what is the truth anyway? And so I think
the further we get away from that where things that
are not true can sort of become true, the worse
off we all are. And I have to say, you know,
this all happened back in twenty fourteen. Here we are

(01:18:26):
nearly ten years later, and just last week. A v
club published an article about Lena's new film project on
June twenty third, 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.

Speaker 2 (01:18:47):
That is grim all right, Well, so, so bridget what
is the point of you telling us all of this?

Speaker 1 (01:18:56):
Oh, I'm so glad you asked. So here we are
in twenty twenty two, 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.
You 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

(01:19:20):
sexual impropriety against children. It's really gross and sad because
we actually do have a sexual abuse problem in our society.
So many of us are survivors of sexual violence or
sexual abuse, and bad actors and liars who spread damaging
lies and inaccurate content. They know this is a trigger
and attention for so many of this like this is

(01:19:42):
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.
And so ultimately, I guess in conclusion, there are plenty
of reasons to not like Lena Dunham, including what she

(01:20:04):
wrote about her sibling and 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. And
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

(01:20:25):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:20:35):
It's a scary sentiment to end on.

Speaker 1 (01:20:38):
Yeah, I mean, that's that's all I got.

Speaker 2 (01:20:41):
Yeah, Well, let's all try to stick to the truth.
Huh Is that so hard? Is that going to kill us?

Speaker 1 (01:20:49):
Is that so hard? Ben Shapiro, Let's just stick to
the truth, shall we? Yeah?

Speaker 2 (01:20:53):
Seriously?

Speaker 1 (01:20:55):
And so I know this is a controversial topic, I
started the series talking about out the fact that I
knew this was going to be something people had opinions, on, feelings,
on thoughts on. I welcome those thoughts. I really, really
really want to hear what people have to say. Please
don't come for me though I'm a baby. I don't know,
like be cool about it, but like, I want to

(01:21:16):
know what you think. You know, what are your thoughts
on Elina Dunham, her memoir, all the things that we
laid out today. I really want to hear your thoughts.
So please you can email me, you can find me
on social media. I want to hear what y'all think.
Got a story about an interesting thing in tech, or
just want to say hi? You can reach us at

(01:21:37):
Hello at tangody dot com. You can also find transcripts
for today's episode at tengody dot com. There Are No
Girls on the Internet was created by me bridget Toad.
It's a production of iHeartRadio, an unbossed creative Jonathan Strickland
as our executive producer. Terry Harrison is our producer and
sound engineer. Michael Almado is our contributing producer. I'm your host,
bridget Toad. If you want to help us grow, rate

(01:21:58):
and review us on Apple podcasts. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
check out the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
get your podcasts.

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Lena Dunham and the cruel lie that just won’t die — BEST OF TANGOTI