On Sunday, HBO’s Girls creator and star Lena Dunham spoke at Variety’s Power of Women luncheon, accepting an award from Girls Educational & Mentoring Services (GEMS), an organization that fights human trafficking.
During her acceptance speech, Dunham brought up her alleged rape during her university days at Oberlin College:
When I was raped, I felt powerless. I felt my value had been determined by someone else, someone who sent me the message that my body was not my own and my choices were meaningless. It took years to recognize my personal worth was not tied to my assault. The voices telling me I deserved this were phantoms, they were liars… As a feminist and as a sexual assault survivor, my ultimate goal is to use my experience, my platform, and yes, my privilege, to reverse stigma and give voice to other survivors.
Just hours earlier, Dunham tweeted about her obvious insecurities regarding men viewing her as a sexual object:
Growing up in NYC, it’s just crazy to think how many men on the street have jerked off at me!
— Lena Dunham (@lenadunham) April 26, 2015
Dunham does not make the world’s most convincing spokeswoman for the anti-rape movement. She lied about the identity of her alleged rapist in her college days, naming him as a “campus Republican” named “Barry,” then going silent as the only College Republican named Barry at Oberlin at the time saw his life virtually ruined. She labels herself an “unreliable narrator” in her book before relating the alleged rape, which she describes in great detail in the book, but has never described to police.
But most important, Dunham herself is no poster child for consensual sexual encounters. In the same book in which she describes her own alleged rape (according to her account, she took “Barry” back to her apartment after he “jams a few of his fingers inside me,” talked dirty to him during sex, and only at one point during the cocaine-and-Xanax-fueled sexual experience expressed that she wanted her alleged rapist to leave — a request with which he complied), Dunham admits to having sexually abused her own sister on multiple occasions.
First, when she was supposedly seven and her sister one, she “leaned down between her legs and carefully spread open her vagina.” She notes, “My mother didn’t bother asking why I had opened Grace’s vagina. This was within the spectrum of things I did.” Her sister, for some reason that is incoherent to anyone with a one-year-old daughter (which I do), had “stuffed six or seven pebbles in there,” presumably for Dunham to find.
Second, Dunham wrote of her sister:
As she grew, I took to bribing her for her time and affection: one dollar in quarters if I could do her makeup like a “motorcycle chick.” Three pieces of candy if I could kiss her on the lips for five seconds. Whatever she wanted to watch on TV if she would just “relax on me.” Basically, anything a sexual predator might do to woo a small suburban girl I was trying.
If the time she did her makeup like a “motorcycle chick” matches up with Dunham’s tweets of her sister dressed like a “Hell’s Angel’s sex property,” Dunham was 11 at the time, her sister five.
Third, Dunham wrote again of her sister:
I shared a bed with my sister, Grace, until I was seventeen years old. She was afraid to sleep alone and would begin asking me around 5:00 P.M. every day whether she could sleep with me. I put on a big show of saying no, taking pleasure in watching her beg and sulk, but eventually I always relented. Her sticky, muscly little body thrashed beside me every night as I read Anne Sexton, watched reruns of SNL, sometimes even as I slipped my hand into my underwear to figure some stuff out.
This would have made Dunham 17 and her sister 11 when she masturbated in bed next to her.
Dunham’s reinvention as an anti-rape warrior demonstrates once again that for the left, narrative must trump fact. Honoring Dunham for her role in fighting rape, after her own descriptions of her own activities, should horrify anyone with any real sense of the evils of sexual abuse.
Ben Shapiro is Senior Editor-At-Large of Breitbart News and author of the new book, The People vs. Barack Obama: The Criminal Case Against The Obama Administration (Threshold Editions, June 10, 2014). He is also Editor-in-Chief of TruthRevolt.org. Follow Ben Shapiro on Twitter @benshapiro.
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