Lena apologises again
The ‘Girls’ creator is sorry she called Aurora Perrineau a liar, but claims it wasn’t her fault
Lena Dunham seems to be on a bizarre PR offensive. Over the past few weeks, the Girls creator and incorrigible controversialist has become ever more difficult to ignore. First, New York magazine published a long interview with Dunham, inspiring a gazillion hot takes. Now Dunham has catalysed a new wave of headlines for doing what she seems to do worst: apologising. On Wednesday, she caused an uproar by publishing a guest editor letter in the Hollywood Reporter’s Women in Entertainment issue, in which she said she felt terrible for discrediting the actor Aurora Perrineau.
Some background: last year Perrineau accused Murray Miller, a writer on Girls, of raping her when she was 17. Dunham, alongside the Girls producer Jenni Konner, immediately defended Miller. The pair published a statement proclaiming that: “Our insider knowledge of Murray’s situation makes us confident that sadly this accusation is one of the 3 per cent of assault cases that are misreported each year.” In other words: Perrineau was a liar.
The statement was not well received and Dunham, who had previously tweeted that women don’t lie about rape, was accused of hypocrisy. After the backlash Dunham issued an apology. Then the news cycle churned forward; public attention moved on.
You don’t have to be a PR genius to know you should let sleeping scandals lie. Dunham, however, decided to breathe vigorous new life into this one. In her piece for the Hollywood Reporter she apologised again to Perrineau and confessed: “I didn’t have the ‘insider information’ [regarding Miller] I claimed but rather blind faith in a story that kept slipping and changing.”
In other words: Dunham was a liar. But don’t judge her too harshly — the patriarchy made her do it. Dunham explains: “I had actually internalised the dominant male agenda that asks us to defend it no matter what, protect it no matter what.”