During the initial fallout of the October 2017 accusations that befell Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein, many, many, many people in the entertainment industry were being targeted thanks to the #MeToo movement, allowing people to finally feel confident enough to speak up about sexual harassment and assault. One of those people was Aurora Perrineau, who accused “Girls” writer Michael Murray of sexual assault. She even went so far as to file a police report. But the story took a strange, sad turn when outspoken feminist and #MeToo celebrator, Lena Dunham decided to take a stand against the victim and defend the accused.
Needless to say, Dunham’s defense (in a joint statement with “Girls” co-creator Jenni Konner) of Murray was shocking, considering her stance that all women should be heard and believed. In a statement to THR she said in November 2017, “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 percent 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’ll be saying about this issue.”
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Well, actually that wasn’t all she was going to say about the issue. You see, now a full year later, Dunham has written a piece over at THR apologizing to the victim and explaining why she was wrong to defend Murray.
“And so I made a terrible mistake. When someone I knew, someone I had loved as a brother, was accused, I did something inexcusable: I publicly spoke up in his defense,” says Dunham.
She continues, “There are few acts I could ever regret more in this life. I didn’t have the ‘insider information’ I claimed but rather blind faith in a story that kept slipping and changing and revealed itself to mean nothing at all. I wanted to feel my workplace and my world were safe, untouched by the outside world (a privilege in and of itself, the privilege of ignoring what hasn’t hurt you) and I claimed that safety at cost to someone else, someone very special.”
This apology comes about halfway down a new piece where Dunham continues to explain how she’s proud of women coming forward with their stories and how we should do everything to believe them and support them.
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She even spends the second half of the piece talking more about her own issues and how she should do better in the future. “It’s painful to realize that, while I thought I was self-aware, I had actually internalized the dominant male agenda that asks us to defend it no matter what, protect it no matter what, baby it no matter what,” Dunham writes.
You can read the entire piece over at THR.