Lena Dunham was raped: ‘It was a painful experience physically and emotionally’

GIRLS star Lena Dunham has opened up about being date raped at college, saying, “It was a painful experience physically and emotionally”.

GIRLS star Lena Dunham has opened up about being date raped at college, saying, “It was a painful experience physically and emotionally, and one I spent a long time trying to reconcile”.

The 28-year-old has written about the incident in her new book, Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She’s “Learned” and she admitted in an interview with NPR’s Terry Gross that “the chapter about date rape in the book was a really, really terrifying thing for me to put into the world”.

“At the time that it happened, it wasn’t something that I was able to be honest about,” said Dunham.

Dunham’s been dating Jack Antonoff for two years.

“I was able to share pieces, but I sort of used the lens of humour, which has always been my default mode, to try to talk around it.

“I spent so much time ashamed, I don’t feel that way anymore. And it’s not because of my job, it’s not because of my boyfriend, it’s not because of feminism — though all those things helped — it’s because I told the story. And I still feel like myself and I feel less alone.”

Dunham, who attended Oberlin College, didn’t speak about the incident for a long time even though she knew “that something was very wrong”.

“I had felt that something had happened and I remember thinking ‘Can I ever be the same?’” said Dunham.

Lena Dunham’s new book.

Dunham has received eight Emmy nominations.

“I was at a party, drunk, waiting for attention — and somehow that felt like such a shameful starting-off point that I didn’t know how to reconcile what had come after. But I knew that it wasn’t right and I knew in some way that this experience had been forced on me.”

“When I shared it with my best friend and she used the term ‘you were raped’ at the time, I sort of laughed at her and thought like, you know, what an ambulance-chasing drama queen.

“I later felt this incredible gratitude for her for giving me that, giving me that gift of that kind of certainty that she had. I think that a lot of times when I felt at my lowest about it, those words in some way actually lifted me up because I felt that somebody was justifying the pain of my experience.”

She graced the cover of Vogue this year.

Her new book is out now.

After the incident, Dunham stopped going to parties, saying, “I basically didn’t have a drink for the rest of college, I really removed myself from that world”.

“I spent a lot of time, which I talk about in the book, trying to figure out what my sexual preferences were and whether they in any way aligned with this experience I had had, whether there was any part of me that had, in quotes, ‘wanted that.’

“It took me a long time of self-examination, hearing about other people’s sort of sexual evolutions and realising, oh, that’s not something that happens to everyone. And when it does happen, they’re allowed to mourn it and feel pain about it — hearing that helped me.”