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

Episode Date: July 29, 2023

Lena Dunham is in the news, which means a particularly sticky misleading claim about her is, too. We have no strong position on Lena Dunham, but we are solidly against misleading claims. In this best-of episode from last year, Bridget sits down with producer Mike to explain the origins of the idea that Lena Dunham abused her little sibling, why it persists, and why it matters for the rest of us. Got a burning question for Bridget and the TANGOTI team? We’ll answer it in a live AMA! Submit your questions for free at Patreon.com/tangoti    Emily in Paris to Become Polly in Pocket: https://www.vulture.com/2023/07/lily-collins-lena-dunham-polly-pocket-movie-details.html  The Lena Dunham child abuse controversy, explained: https://www.vox.com/2014/11/8/7157065/dunham-child-abuse Ben Shapiro sings WAP (you should definitely watch this):  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZYzauhOJcQ It didn't make it into the episode, but Ben Shapiro HATED the Barbie movie...a lot: https://www.them.us/story/barbie-movie-ben-shapiro  Want to support the show (thank you so much!)? Tell a friend! Or subscribe, join our patreon, leave a review, or buy some merch at There Are No Girls on the Internet’s store: TANGOTI.COM/STORE Say hello at [e-mail] See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Hey, this is Bridget. And I'm doing a live. Ask Me Anything over on Patreon in just a few weeks. And I need your help to prepare. Just go to patreon.com slash tangoty and submit your burning questions and I will do my very best to answer them. You do not need to be a paying Patreon member to submit a question. So got a burning tech or social media question. I'll do my very best to answer it or find somebody who can.

Always wanted to know something about me or my life or my work. I will answer that too. Got questions about the business of podcasting or how the sausage gets made? Let's hear it. Have a social media etiquette question? These are my favorite. Want to know which podcast? I'm secretly jealous of.

Well, if I've had a few glasses of wine, maybe I'll answer that too. So just go to patreon.com slash tangoity 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 is a production of IHeart Radio and Unbossed Creative. I'm Bridget Todd, and this is There Are No Girls on the Internet. The movie Barbie has already racked in a very impressive 100,

$55 million at the domestic box office on opening weekend alone. And based on that success, there are even 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, Polly Pocket. You know, that whole little miniature doll universe housed inside a cute little plastic compact? I loved it. And the movie Polly Pocket is set to be directed by none other than Lena Dunham of HBO girls. So, Lena Dunham was trending all this week after the Polly Pocket 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 stuck around for so long. Now, I know, 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 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 what that lie says about our culture. Yeah, so why Lena Dunham? Why this one specific thing? 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.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 2015, and our audience used to love to hate on Putin. And so whenever we posted

something about Putin that passed him in a negative light, we could always expect that people would really engage with it 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 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 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 Dunham episode, 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 brat, I hate her. Or, you know, oh, she's gross, which is pretty much 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 refer to as sticky pieces of disinformation or misinformation or lies, 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 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 we'll be 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 it's a pretty nasty thing to repeat about somebody. And I don't know that people who repeat this particularly nasty lie know that 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 would never read a right-wing blog, you know, for any legitimate reason, should probably be aware that they are repeating a lie that was really cooked up in the right-wing blogosphere. 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 as persisted for so long, should really be concerning for all of us. So let's talk about how and why that happened and what it means. So for people like me who don't really know anything about this, who is Lena Dunham? 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 artist 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-autobiographical movie about a young woman portrayed by Lena who just graduated from college and is trying to navigate adulthood. Lori 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, stages are peaches. with tiny dollhouse furniture, just like her mom does in real life. And Lena's real-life sibling, Cyrus Grace, plays Lena's character's sibling in the movie, too. So it's very semi-autobiographical. In 2012, 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 1986, 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 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 in 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, 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 gravitas 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 go to AV 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 of sexuality, gender, and female friendship. And its highly anticipated third season comes out in January 2014. 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 2012, after a big bidding war. and bidding was reported to have risen past $3.5 million. 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-20 tens. If I had the ability to clear 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. Siff, you know, some other 2010 hit to really set the scene. Mike, do you, what were some other like 2010 hits? Like hits of the 2010s? Rihanna, maybe. Rihanna was in there.

I feel like Tame Impala was in there. Maybe I'm getting a little late 2010s. 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-2010s. So in popular culture, the film 12 Years of Slave won best picture at the Oscars in 2014, which was hosted by openly gay Ellen DeGeneres and was the most watched Oscars since the year 2000. By 2014, 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 started in 2013 and was really picking up. You have the shooting deaths of Trayvon Martin in Florida, Mike Brown in 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, if I had a son, he would look a lot like Trayvon Martin.

Obama gave a televised speech announcing his plans to use executive action to grant citizenship to about 4.4 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-winger absolutely fucking hated this. We also get Obamacare in 2010, 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 Sandra Fluke? Boy, I've forgotten, but now it's coming back to me.

What was the deal with Sandra Fluke? Why do we know her name? So in 2012, 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 panel of clergy. And then Rush Limbaugh called Sandra Fluke, a slut basically just for advocating for birth control.

You know, 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, kind of almost seems quaint now when you look at everything else that is sort of going on. 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 2022, this is full on assault. 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? I feel like every time I look backwards to the period like five, 10, 10, 15 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. Oh my God. Tell me about it.

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That's the name. The Harvard Yard. But they're open. Do you have a name suggestion? We're open. Since you guys are middle aged. One erection Listen to humor me with Robert Smygle and Friends

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And I'm C.J. Toledano, and our podcast Point Game is about defying the odds. Like LeBron heading into the playoffs without Luca and Austin Reed. And finding ways to win no matter what. He's the smartest player to ever play the game. His IQ is at a level that we've never seen before. And he knows without Luca and Austin Reeves, I got to manipulate the game. We get a player's perspective on the challenges of the playoffs.

I think Joker's going to be exhausted this series because when they don't have Rudy in the lineup, he has to really guard guys like Nas Reid. He has to guard Julius Randall. And then he has to give us everything he gives us on the night-to-night basis on offense. And when IT's friends stop by, like Quentin Richardson, we dive into some playoff history too.

Steve Nash will get that thing. That man, hell get the flying. He running up the court, licking his fingers why he got the ball, like, after you go through a training camp with that, I said, you figure it out real quick. Get your ass up and down the court, and you're going to get the ball.

So listen to Point Game on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. So we're talking about this war on women, but back in 2014, you all, also have Beyonce performing in front of the word feminist in giant letters like decked out in light at the MTV VMAs, paired with a sample of Chimamanda Ngozio Odicey speech on feminism and expectations for women and girls. We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller.

We say to girls, you can have ambition, but not too much. 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 a, 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 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 2014 in an interview with The Guardian

where she credits her friend, none other than Lena Dunham, with her feminist awakening. And I guess my point is this. This era really feels like 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 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 2014, 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, creating work that posits 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 highlighting the sort of humor and awkwardness that can accompany exploring your sexuality when you're young. You know, what she's doing on screen, it feels a little bit daring.

After the success of girls, Lena starts Lenny Letter, a feminist newsletter, where, you know, 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, Dr. Luke. This also translates politically. Lena positions herself as a vocal feminist and a champion for feminist causes. Another familiar trip down memory lane back around 2014, Planned Parenthood was facing a lot of BS political attacks. Mike Pence was not just someone who was being threatened with hanging and agallows by his own constituents. Back then, he was the governor of Indiana, and he made attacking Planned Parenthood and threatening to defund Planned Parenthood, a big part of his whole overall thing. And we also had these deceptively edited sting videos from 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 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. Isn't it funny how Mike Pence 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, isn't that funny that you reap what you sow? You know, you live by the sword, you die by the sword. What can I say? Yeah, exactly. You live by the ginned up outrage. You die by the gala. 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 support of Planned Parenthood, and she gets other A-list celebrities like America Frera and Gabrielle Union to join in. Lena made this kind of cheeky kind of wink-wink ad for the DNC in support of Obama in 2012. 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.

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 pretty amazing. So he writes in Breitbart.

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 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 Marr and star Bill Clinton. Oh, wait, that's Obama's actual 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 going to need a microscope to find him. It's so over the top. I just need a minute to choke down this vomit. It comes up anytime Ben Shapiro's words appear. You mentioned that he's going to be important. later, when is that? Like 20, 25, 2030? When will he be important? 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 Lena's Obama ad in 2012. And actually, I find it so interesting how Shapiro uses Lena'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 of Obama to align himself with. 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 it? 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, you know, which one? That's such a good observation. I never 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 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. Yeah, it's almost like some of these folks are not genuine actors. It sounds like some of them are completely disingenuous. Yeah, it does seem almost like that.

I mean, that can't be it. There's got to be something more. I'll keep thinking about it. 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 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 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, 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 young woman will become corrupted by a tattooed feminist with green hair and will be pulled in to identifying as a liberal feminist. So, you know, say what you will about Lena Dunham. That is a certain type of cultural power and home girl knows how to use it. And, you know, when it comes to the culture, it was people like Lena Dunham who had the relevance. And I can see how this would be really threatening to right

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 Dunham sexually abused her sibling and where it comes from, we have to first start by talking about truth revolt. 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? Truth Revolt is a right-wing website that was launched on October 7, 2013.

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 David Horowitz Freedom Center as a counterpoint to the politically progressive media matters for America. Yes, Ben Shapiro is the same person who wrote that breathless piece about Lena's 2012 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 38 now. He's pretty famous for being this right-wing media figure and he's been at it since he was 17. I personally just find him awful. Like, the 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, he's the person who's always. 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 him with trying to lead a moral crusade against Megan the Stalion 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 talk 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, which is just hysterical. I think about it all the time and laugh. 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 very very 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 he said. His wife, who apparently is a medical doctor saying that the only reason it might happen is because of an infection. It was sad and shocking, and I almost feel like he was setting us up, but, like, it's just too much humility.

I think it just truly is that embarrassing for him. Yeah, if folks have not seen, so the video that you're talking about, I definitely watched it a 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. But then somebody puts it to a beat. Somebody puts it to the WAP beat, and it kind of slaps. I'm not going to lie. It's hilarious. Like, look it up. I'll link it in the show notes because I watch it.

It's given me great joy. I'll put it that way. Yeah. And I think it's the best way to really understand Ben Shapiro as a person and as 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, unmask leftists in the media for who they are, destroy their credibility with the American public, and devastate their funding bases. So essentially, Truth Revolt was created, per the co-creator David Horowitz's own mission statement, to manipulate media for political means. Here's what he wrote on the site.

The media win elections for the left. It's not the left's competence in office. Leftists have demonstrated none. It's not the left's ideas. Leftist's ideas have failed everywhere they've been tried. The left wins for one simple reason. Leptus control the information distribution system in the United States. And they use that system to pillory conservatives, heartless bigots, intent on harming the poor and targeting minorities. The media must be destroyed where they stand. That is our mission at Truth Revolt. The goal of Truth Revolt is simple. Unmask Leptus 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 steaks to stop the left dead in its tracks when it comes to training the next generation on our college campuses. 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, Truthful Revolt specifically is looking to, quote, unmask leftists and target specific leftist public figures in the media to make them toxic for brands 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 I think it goes without 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 axe to grind. They are out for vengeance. They are out to dismantle people, take them down by their own admission. This idea of this, like leftists are supported by this great funding apparatus. I know so many broke-ass leftists, like, separating to me, separating from their funding is like not even a thing.

Like, so many of them are broke. You know, like, what is this like big leftist funding in the media that they're talking about? I mean, nothing that they say is accurate. You know, they say that like, oh, the media is. is a tool, like, the media, like, the idea that, that, that mainstream media is a tool propping up leftist agendas. It's just, I mean, it's such an unsurious claim. I don't find it worthy of a retort. It's just, it's just like, 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 such an unsurious claim that it's not even worthy of. of a response. Yeah, it's like ludicrous. It's like, who owns the media? We've got, you know, NBC, you know, Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post. Like, these are not leftist people. No, it's horseshit. Okay, so you might be wondering, this website sounds sketchy as hell, but what is it

to do with Lena Dunham? Well, the claim that Lena Dunham admitting to molesting her younger sibling was initially started on truth revolt. 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. 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 manipulative. or taken out of context. And that is definitely what's happening here. So let's look at the facts. In September 2014, Lena Dunham released her 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, Lena's sibling is called Cyrus Grace Dunham and uses they-them pronouns.

According to a 2019 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 on top of her. As Cyrus Grace grew, I took to bribing them for time and affection. $1.5.5 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. 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 in Charlotte's Webb, and their uterus, the size of a thimble. Does their vagina look like mine?

I guess so, my mother said, just smaller. One day, as I sat out in 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. And when I saw what was inside, I shrieked. My mother came running, Mama, Marma, 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 stuffed six or seven pebbles in there. My mother removed 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 her sibling. That is true. But she writes about doing this at age seven with her sibling who was age one. On October 29th, 2014, 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 describes sexually abusing her little sibling. Now, as Vox points out, Truth Revolt did two very misleading things in their post calling Donham a sexual abuser.

One, 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's article originally stated that Dunham was 17 at the time when Dunham in actuality said that she was seven. So obviously if you have a 17-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. Yes, 17 and seven are pretty different there. Pretty different. So Truth Revolt eventually does say that it was a typo, I guess that 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 the Bill Clinton scandal involving intern Monica Lewinsky back in 1998. Once it's picked up by the Drudge Report, the story gets a ton more traction. It makes the rounds on, you know, Truth Revolts 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 Williamson, for instance, declared there is no non-horific interpretation of this episode. And The Daily Caller, another conservative outlet writes, Dunham had admitted to the, quote,

gleeful sexual abuse of her infant sibling. Now, that is initially really what seated the whole Lena Dunham sexually abused her sibling narrative. And now it's out in the wider right-wing blogosphere, infosphere, and now it is a thing. It's so salacious. It almost feels like tailor-made for these kind of right-wing outrage aggregators. 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, 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. Yeah, right. And you've mentioned that, a guest 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 like step back and evaluate like, who is writing this?

Where am I reading this? Is this something that I want to share? Exactly. 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 becoming more and more relevant. I can 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 stay in right-wing circles, it made the rounds and it still persist today. More after a quick break. Another podcast from some SNL, late-night comedy guide, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends, me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman,

help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer, Streeter Seidel, help an a cappella band with their between songs banter. There's that worst singer in the group? The worst? Yeah. Me. Is there anything to the idea that because you're from Harvard,

you only got in because your parents made a huge donation. The group. The yard birds, right? That's the name. The Harvard yard, but they're open to change. Do you have a name suggestion? We're open. Since you guys are middle aged.

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It's Isaiah Thomas. And I'm C.J. Toledano, and our podcast Point Game is about defying the odds. Like LeBron heading into the playoffs without Luca and Austin Reed. And finding ways to win no matter what. He's the smartest player to ever play the game. His IQ is at a level they would. we've never seen before. And he knows.

Without Luca and Austin Reeves, I got to manipulate the game. We get a player's perspective on the challenges of the playoffs. I think Joker's going to be exhausted this series because when they don't have Rudy in the lineup, he has to really guard guys like Nas Reed.

He has to guard Julius Randall. And then he has to give us everything he gives us on the night-to-night basis on offense. And when IT's friends stop by, like Quentin Richardson, we dive into some playoff history too. Steve Nass would get that thing.

That man, hell get the flying. He running up the court, licking his fingers, why he got the ball. Like, after you go through a training camp with that, Isaiah, you figure it out real quick. Oh, yeah. Get your ass up and down the court, and you're going to get the ball. So listen to Point Game on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Let's get right back into it. So the day the Truth Revolt published their misleading article about her memoir,

Lena responded the following day, tweeting, The Right Wing News Story that I molested my little suburb. 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 Bradford Thomas, the author of the piece, 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 the millions of dollars, punitive damages, which can be a multiple of up to 10 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 of which meets the malice requirement, her attorney Charles Harrow, 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. Lena Dunham 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 17 and not 7. 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. Yeah. And that's not. Like, I wouldn't call that a typo, even if it was unintentional, 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 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, you know, what... Oh, he didn't apologize. Oh, right. Excuse me. Yeah. So not an apology.

Actually, just like a continued attack. Yeah. Great. The kind of guy we're dealing with here. 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 going to take them at that word. You're so right that even if that was just a typo, somebody to slip to one in there, not acknowledging the way that that really charges the what you've written and like really yeah it's just 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 but we did nothing wrong it's like well can't really be both 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 and eat his sister, but left out the word not,

it would really change the meaning of the sentence. It would just be a typo, and how dare you insinuate that I apologize and say it was anything but? Yeah, right. It's just a typo, and also he's a right-wing activist anyway, so that's somehow relevant. Exactly, exactly. 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 is really important to listen to and center Lena Dunham's sibling Cyrus Grace and their voice in this conversation and really listen to what they have to say about what this experience was like for them. Lena Dunham's sibling Cyrus Grace responded on Twitter, saying, heteronormativity 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 and has not been harmful. Today, like every other day, is 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, you know, it's their experience. And I have to say, you know, I want to be clear, 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 sibling's genitals is a, quote, normal common behavior in kids ages two to six. Vox, Slate, 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 Rubenstein, 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 sexual trauma, there's really almost nothing sexual about it. The same exclamation 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 Sabin Williams, developmental psychologist and the director of the Sex and Gender Lab at Cornell University,

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. Caffaro, 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 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 kind of sound like I am absolving, 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, 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, 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 cheap political points the way that Shapiro and Truth Revolt did, because it really derails progress and our collective shared understanding. There is no conversation 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 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, 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 17. 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 disinformed derailing tactic, 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 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 really just adds this sheen of inaccuracy. I would be willing to bet that at least some people trying to engage in a conversation probably have a misunderstanding about the basic facts of what happen. 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 without that inflammatory lie preventing us from doing that. Yeah, I totally agree with you. 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 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 activist. And, you know, I don't have any strong feelings

for or against Lena Dunham and I've actually learned so much in just like making 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. 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 joky was seriously bad on Lena Dunham's part. I would have never written about my younger sibling the way that Dunham 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, I guess, like, writing about that 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 last week. And this person left an Instagram comment, and they felt very strongly that what Lena described in her book was actually childhood sexual abuse. I remember you got that comment from that listener, and it was pretty emotional and legitimate.

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. 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. Yeah, it is curious to me. You know, I, I haven't read the book, but, but you did. What do you think was her intention of writing that in the book? 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 sardomically looking at and projecting commentary onto her own experiences. And so her experiences are presented and you, and you, the reader, sort of takes them at face value. And then later in the book, many of those experiences are revisited in ways that reveal her to be an unreliable narrate. or 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 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. Kaffaro, the sibling 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. With one study finding that at least 2.3% 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 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 in a society that does not normally tell stories of girls becoming women, and it highlights quite well how uncomfortable and 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 cringy. 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. And I think 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 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 instance. in her memoir wasn't great because she apologized. She wrote, quote, if the situations 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, and quote, anything I have ever written about has been published with approval. 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, she probably shouldn't 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 17-year-old sexual pressure. editor, did not come from the alleged victim, her sibling, did not come from survivor justice advocates, but instead came from Ben Shapiro, like a vowed and an open right-wing activist, you know, like you're not going to convince me that he gives a shit about really anyone. Yeah, and a right-wing activist who explicitly says, that the intention of his media outlet was to attack prominent left-wing folks, prominent liberal

voices. Lena Dunham is a prominent liberal voice, and she certainly was when this all happened. And so I think that I also want to really lift up what you just said about these allegations not coming from Lena'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 sexually 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. And so I just really believe in centering, servitors, 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 her sibling, I just feel like we don't, 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. 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? 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 and 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 way to talk about how much we don't like Lena Dunham and how awful she is.

You know what I mean? Yeah, totally. Like, I'm no stranger to ad 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 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. Right. So, you know, that's exactly what I think is happening. 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 a question for you, Mike. 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?

Yeah, of course. It's a beautiful meme about coming together. 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 think is going on here. Because even though the claim that Lena Dunham sexually abused her one-year-old siblings, when she was 17, we know started in the right-wing blogosphere, it has really traveled out

of those bases 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, it really highlights how we can all come together to just like shit on women about shit that isn't true. 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 something 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, when somebody comes along and tells you something that really squares

with your 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 abusing her one-year-old sibling when she was 17 or not. It will stick because it squares with our 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 listen to the episode that we did about End Father's Day or Vanessa Guillen, 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 to dislike Lena Dunham. And these reasons are often refined. reflected in the kinds of tensions that I was just naming above, you know, a lot of the tensions occur along racial lines. Oh, that's interesting. 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, white girl cluelessness that a lot of feminist. 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 on HBO, there was so much fanfare cementing Lena Dunham, you know, as this voice of a generation, 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 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 is actually a Twitter meme account called Lena Dunham apologizes that just creates randomly generated apologies for fictional Lena Dunham missteps. 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, and I found the tweet, Lena Dunham issued an apology for her new HBO Mac series generation using Realty. cat corpses in a classroom scene. But that apology tweet was actually real. That was actually her apologizing for something that actually happened. 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. Exactly. Exactly. Is it is it

art imitating life or is it life imitating art? Or is it art imitating cat corpses? So this is a 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 happened, a few years ago at the Met Gala, Lena Dunham attended and she was wearing a tuxedo. And she would seat it next to the professional athlete Odell Beckham Jr. 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 Beckham Jr. And it was so amazing 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, yep, it's wearing a tuxedo. I'm going to go 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 perhaps insecurities. onto 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 hyper-sexualized black man onto her. Like she was like disappointed or felt some type of way that he was not behaving in a way,

like in 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 be legitimate tension points in our society. Yeah, yikes. That kind of reminds 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 fantasy. all the time. A, that has to suck. And B, yeah, it does establish them as an unreliable narrator who is probably going to say some shit that they regret. Yeah, over and over and over again and

have to apologize for it endlessly to the point where it becomes a meme. Yeah, those, did the catcorposes accept the apology? I wasn't able to find a response from the catcorp's community, but I will keep looking. Okay, I'll check in with some necormancers that I know. after a quick break. Another podcast from some SNL, late-night comedy guide. Not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman,

help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer, Streeter Seidel, help an a cappella band with their between songs banter. There's the worst singer in the group. The worst? Yeah. Me. Is there anything to the idea that because you're from Harvard,

you only got in because your parents made a huge donation. The yard birds, right? That's the name. The Harvard Yardt. They're open. Do you have a name suggestion? We're open. Since you guys are middle-aged.

One erection. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and Friends on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Humor me. I need some jokes. make me seem funny. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting, think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ads supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, IHearts twice as large as the next two combined.

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And I'm C.J. Toledano, and our podcast, Point Game is about defining the odds. Like LeBron heading into the playoffs without Luca and Austin Reed. And finding ways to win no matter what. He's the smartest player to ever play the game. His IQ is at a level that we've never seen before. And he knows. Without

Luca and Austin Reeves, I got to manipulate the game. We get a player's perspective on the challenges of the playoffs. I think Joker's going to be exhausted this series. because when they don't have Rudy in the lineup, he has to really guard guys like Nas Reid. He has to guard Julius Randall.

And then he has to give us everything he gives us on the night-to-night basis on offense. And when IT's friends stop by, like Quentin Richardson, we dive into some playoff history too. Steve Nash would get that thing. That man, hell get the flying. He running up the court, licking his fingers while he got the ball.

You go through a training camp with that, Isaiah. You figure it out real quick. Get your ass up and down the court, and you're going to get the bomb. So listen to Point Game on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Let's get right back into it. So I mentioned how Lena had a newsletter called Lenny Letter.

Zenzi Clemens, who was a black woman and a writer, worked with Lena on this letter, and she publicly quit citing 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, Clemens 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 cannot have our words if she cannot respect us.

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. I completely agree. And you can really see how, again, this, you know, you're having a black woman writer say this about Lena. You can see, again, how, like, these things really do pop up along certain pre-agreact.

existing tension points, you know, that really fall along racialized lines. And so another, probably the biggest, deepest example for myself personally is the way that Lena handled a sexual assault allegation made against writer and executive producer of girls, Murray Miller, that happened on the set. Basically what happened, actress Aurora Perino, whose mixed race, filed a police report accusing girls' writer and executive producer Murray Miller of raping her on the set of girls in 2012 when she was 17 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 Conner, 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, this accusation is one of the 3% 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. Jesus Christ. It's bad.

So bad. There's so many things wrong with that. 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 2018 follow-up piece called To Aurora an apology, Dunham writes, quote, 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 nothing at all. Um, 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, 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 Lena Dunham's writing, but this is when she lost me for good, because I just felt like it was such a, like, when you call a woman of color a liar in public, you 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 a, like,

a racist, sexist, misogynistic society, when you, 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, when you say a woman of color is lying about being abused or sexually assaulted in public, you 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 the stage with Aurora's mom, Brittany, at a women and hobbywood event to publicly apologize again. Last November, when Brittany's beautiful daughter Aurora accused a friend of mine of sexual assault, I denied her experience publicly. 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 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 a lot to learn, that's completely incorrect. And that framing is so clearly self-serving.

I'm sure you can 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. 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. 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 all. already exist in our society and always have like way before Lena Dunham. It's not like she created these things, but that tensions 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 Dunham 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 stick.

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 17. I think that is the reason why we see it being, you know, having such staying power. Yeah. And it's so sad that, you know, all those societal tensions of racism, sexism, misogy noir, just get shoved to the side. and it becomes a conversation about a single, like a specific white woman and is she good or is she bad? And like, what a useless conversation.

Exactly. 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 Dunham's sibling? 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 in our world? Those conversations are too big, too thorny, too meaty. 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 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 did this. Right. Like it just completely flattens 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 Dunham abused her sibling, do they know they're talking about incidents that happened when she was seven and not 17? Like, how much did that particular specific lie seep into people's actual consciousness and 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 about when it comes up is the lie. Damn, yeah, but I think you're right. I think we've seen time and again. That's their goal to create just a miasma of unspecific negativity and lies and

not just spread lies but reduce confidence in there being any sort of truth. Exactly, right? And 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 2014.

Here we are nearly 10 years later. And just last week, AV Club published an article about Lena's new film project on June 23rd. 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. That is grim. All right.

Well, so Bridget, what is the point of you telling us all of this? Oh, I'm so glad you asked. So here we are in 2022, and we have seen more and more right-wing expectations. extremist 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 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 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 Dunn. including what she 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 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. It's a scary sentiment to end on. Yeah, I mean, that's all I got. Yeah, well, let's all try to stick to the truth, huh?

Is that so hard? Is that going to kill us? Is that so hard, Ben Shapiro? Let's just stick to the truth, shall we? Yeah, seriously. And so I know this is a controversial topic. Like I started the series talking about 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 from me, though. I'm a baby. I don't, you know, like, be cool about it. But, like, I want to know what you think. You know, what are your thoughts on, Lena 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 I'll think. Got a story about an interesting thing in tech or just want to say hi? You can reach us at hello at tangoody.com. You can also find transcripts for today's episode at tangoody.com. There are no girls on the internet

was created by me, Bridget Todd. It's a production of IHeart Radio and unbossed creative. Jonathan Strickland is our executive producer. Tarry Harrison is our producer and sound engineer. Michael Amato is our contributing producer. I'm your host, Bridget Todd. If you want to help us grow, rate and review us on Apple Podcasts.

For more podcasts from IHeartRadio, check out the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Another podcast from some SNL, late-night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smigel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier.

This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel help an a cappella band with their between songs banter. Where does your group perform? We do some retirement homes. Those people are starving for banter. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and friends on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

What's up, fam? It's Isaiah Thomas. And I'm C.J. Toledano. It's our favorite time of the year on our podcast point game, the playoffs. We're digging into the biggest surprises of the season. And I'm looking back on some of my greatest playoff moments. If we didn't talk ever again, I was crying. You just understood. That's how personal it got. Wow. Then after that game seven, Marquis keep coming to you. He's like, you know I love you, dog. You know, it's all love. This was just playoffs. This was just.

basketball. So listen to Point Game on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. There are times when the mind becomes a difficult place to live. This is David Eagleman with the Inner Cosmos podcast. And for Mental Health Awareness Month, we'll talk with singer-songwriter Jewel about anxiety. I started living in my car and then my car got stolen. I was having panic attacks. I was agoraphobic. This is a month of deeply personal and honest conversations about what happens when the brain goes off course. Listen to Intercosmos on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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