What’s the matter with Lena Dunham?
For someone who is frequently touted as the voice of modern womanhood, Lena Dunham certainly does talk a lot of rubbish. In case you don’t already know her oeuvre, Dunham is the creator, writer and star of Girls, the edgy HBO sitcom that was rapidly dubbed the voice of a new generation when it first aired in 2012.
Over the last five years, she has done her best to eclipse that notable achievement by making a number of astoundingly muddle-headed public pronouncements. In the past, Dunham has compared Bill Cosby’s sexual assault allegations to the Holocaust, and blithely stated that she hasn’t had an abortion “but I wish I had”.
Last week, she waded into further controversy. Dunham chose to speak out when Murray Miller, a writer and executive on her hit show, was accused by actress Aurora Perrineau of rape. Dunham, who has previously stated confidently on Twitter that no woman ever lies about rape, issued a bizarre statement claiming that her friend Murray couldn’t be guilty.
Her evidence? Well, she knew him. He was OK. She had “insider knowledge of Miller’s situation” and was correspondingly “confident that, sadly, this accusation is one of the three per cent of assault cases that are misreported every year”.
I’m not sure what “insider knowledge” Dunham can possibly claim to possess, but unless she was privy to the most private interactions between two people and had some kind of telepathic ability to see inside both of their heads, it’s unlikely to be of much value. Sometimes seemingly good guys do bad things. Sometimes they don’t. Dunham doesn’t know either way – and later apologised for her statement.
But this “act first; retract later” policy highlights a more worrying trend. The Harvey Weinstein scandal has triggered a tsunami of allegations, in all sectors of society – from the entertainment industry all the way to the House of Commons. In many instances, victims are coming forward after several years of silence because the climate has shifted and they finally feel able to speak out and be believed. This is a good thing.
What is less positive is the instant rush to action. It’s understandable when you’re confronted with first-hand accounts of alleged rapes, gropings and sexual assaults, to want to tackle the horror, with immediate impact.
I can understand, for instance, why the director Ridley Scott wanted to edit out Kevin Spacey from a film and replace him with a different actor in the wake of allegations that the star had sexually abused a 14-year-old boy. I get why Netflix decided to axe House of Cards, the series in which Spacey stars. I can see why the BBC might feel they had to pull Agatha Christie’s Ordeal
by Innocence, even though Ed Westwick strongly denies allegations of rape.
There’s an innate human impulse when confronted with something so troubling, to push it aside altogether, to block it out and seek to erase any further reminder. It’s also probably the case that after decades of women (and it is still largely women) being tacitly encouraged to put up with inappropriate behaviour as “men just being men”, that we are long overdue a tipping of the scale in the opposite direction: from a casual dismissal of these stories to an overwhelming desire to rectify it all instantaneously with swift, dramatic action that addresses our own complicity and guilt.
But – there is a but – I worry that in the rush to make amends, we are ignoring due process. None of the allegations made against the recent rash of alleged sexual abusers has yet been independently investigated and/ or verified. That does not mean the claims aren’t true. I have no doubt that a substantial majority of them are. But that is purely my opinion, based on my own set of lived experiences. My opinion has no basis in actual fact.
I don’t know that Kevin Spacey is guilty, although I consider that I have an informed hunch that he is. Likewise, Lena Dunham can’t know that her friend didn’t do the things of which he is accused.
We live in an age of perpetual judgment, when people are encouraged to express instant, bitesized opinion in 280 characters or fewer. In this era of 24-hour news and omnipresent inter-connectedness, we expect split-second solutions to any problem. But complexity does not lend itself to the quick-fix. And there are few things more complex than an allegation of sexual assault.
A number of cases are now under investigation by police, who should be allowed to get on with their work without the pressure of unnecessary haste. To deny the authorities time to carry out due process not only runs the risk of false condemnation but, more importantly, would be to deny the victims meaningful, longlasting justice.
We’ve all seen what happens when investigations are rushed. When the Jimmy Savile scandal erupted, there was a tsunami of allegations concerning historic child sex abuse. In our well-meaning attempts to address past trauma, we jumped headlong into trying to fix it – with mixed results.
The singer Cliff Richard was recently given a payout from South Yorkshire Police after suing them for disclosing private information to the BBC naming him as a suspected child abuser in August 2014. No charges were ever brought.
The widow of Leon Brittan, the former home secretary, and a former army chief have received compensation from Scotland Yard over the heavily criticised Operation Midland, a doomed investigation into salacious allegations of child sexual abuse and murder made by a single accuser.
It is absolutely right to investigate each and every one of these claims. The victims deserve our compassion, but they also deserve our logic so that when offenders are found guilty, it is as the result of serious, considered examination. The rush to judgment helps no one, least of all those that are and have been abused.
The victims of abuse deserve our compassion, but they also deserve our logic