Cancelled by both the Left and Right, Lena Dunham was one of the most hated women on the internet

Telegraph

12-07-2025

On October 29 2014, 'voice of her generation' Lena Dunham, creator and star of era-defining show Girls, became a white-hot pawn in the emerging culture wars. She remains one, over a decade later, with her first new TV show in seven years, having also become one of the most controversial and divisive figures in the pop culture canon.
The politicisation of the now 39-year-old Dunham began with a caustic profile in the conservative magazine The National Review, interrogating passages from her best-selling memoir, Not That Kind of Girl, published the month prior following a reported $3.7 million advance. Girls, which followed the chaotic lives of aspiring writer Hannah (Dunham) and her three friends in New York City across six seasons and was praised as the more relatable follow-up to Sex and the City, had earned a slew of awards since its 2012 premiere, and had made Dunham one of America's most famous and influential women by the tender age of 25.
The National Review, which put a picture of Lena Dunham on the cover, ran with the headline: 'Pathetic privilege: the coming of age of Lena Dunham.' Throughout the piece, writer Kevin D Williamson criticises Dunham's libertarian, middle-class parents for indulging her as a child (her mother is famed photographer Laurie Simmons and her father is the artist Carroll Dunham, who paints nudes) while accusing her, and her hit show, of entitlement and privilege.
It was this liberal entitlement, suggests Williamson, that emboldened Dunham to breezily write about an interaction with her younger sister that Williamson deems 'sexual abuse'. In said memoir, Dunham writes that, aged seven, 'curiosity got the best' of her and she opened her then-one-year-old sister's vagina to see if it looked like hers. Later, she recalls bribing her sister with sweets for kisses, touching herself while the duo shared a bed, and likening her own behaviour to that of a 'sexual predator'.
Williamson judged the incident to be 'the sort of thing that gets children taken away from non-millionaire families without Andover pedigrees and Manhattanite social connections.' His argument was crystal clear: Dunham was a deluded, arrogant, entitled brat and a product of hyper-privileged, Left-wing feminism.
A few hours after the profile's publication, another Right-wing (now defunct) media outlet, Truth Revolt, helmed by Ben Shapiro, published a piece headlined: 'Lena Dunham Describes Sexually Abusing Her Little Sister.' The piece contained a crucial typo: referring to seven-year-old Dunham as 17, shading the interaction with her sister a violently different hue. The story exploded, with thousands of think-pieces and social media posts across the political spectrum questioning whether Dunham had, or had not, molested her sister.
A few days later, Dunham attempted to put out the flames with a statement in Time magazine, in which she expressed 'dismay' for the 'interpretation' of her memoir, while also apologising for trivialising sexual abuse with the mocking use of the words 'sexual predator'. There were reports of her lawyers threatening action against Truth Revolt for defamation.
I told a story about being a weird 7 year old. I bet you have some too, old men, that I'd rather not hear. And yes, this is a rage spiral.
— Lena Dunham (@lenadunham) November 1, 2014
However, it wasn't long before Dunham was tending to an altogether different fire, also kindled by Williamson's profile in the National Review, which took issue with the claim in Dunham's memoir of rape. Dunham wrote of having been raped at an Oberlin College party by a 'mustachioed campus Republican' named Barry – she had drunkenly consented to sex, but the sex turned 'very rough', and Dunham realised 'Barry' was not wearing a condom; the sex became unconsensual.
Williamson sympathised with Republican Barry as someone 'whose life is no doubt being turned upside down by a New York Times No. 1 best-seller containing half-articulated accusations that he raped a woman in college, accusations that are easily connected to him… She wouldn't face him in a court of law, but she'll lynch him in print'. By December, Breitbart.com had published a 4,400-word piece arguing that, not only had identifiable details in the memoir falsely pointed the finger at an innocent man, actually there was no 'Barry' at Oberlin who fitted her description, claiming Dunham's story to be fabricated. A few months later, Dunham's publisher Penguin Random House had agreed to amend future copies of the memoir to make it clear that 'Barry' was a pseudonym.
But Breitbart argued in a follow-up piece that 'by falsely identifying her rapist as a Republican, Dunham used the horror of sexual assault as a political gotcha game'. Over the next few years, with the rise of cancel culture, Dunham's name bounced between the political Left and Right like a hot potato. In 2017, when HBO's Girls came to an end, she was both the 'voice of a generation' and a 'mouthpiece of posh Left-wing millennials'. But the show had also begun to divide the Left: some praised its relatability, humour, and insight into the millennial female experience; others derided it for being out of touch, tawdry, and embarrassingly monoethnic.
It actually wasn't a dialogue - it was just me agreeing that the Hollywood system is rigged in favor of white people and that my career took off at a young age with relative ease, ease I wasn't able to recognize because I also didn't know what privilege was.
— Lena Dunham (@lenadunham) June 29, 2020
Everything about Dunham seemed to be up for dissection: from her upbringing to her pay cheque, famous friends including Taylor Swift and, most frequently, her body. Her bare curves were almost always on display in Girls's purposefully unvarnished sex scenes, bringing a verisimilitude to full-frontal nudity that felt a long way from Hollywood's long-held conventional beauty standards. To some, this felt transgressive, or simply 'wrong'. In 2019, Howard Stern viciously described Dunham as 'a little fat girl who looks like Jonah Hill' and Girls's sex scenes as feeling 'like rape'. In that 2014 profile in the National Review, Williamson spends a few paragraphs picking apart Dunham's weight.
Despite being the clear victim of cruel fatphobia and misogyny, Dunham's tendency to haul herself over the coals, before posting an inevitable Twitter apology, started to tire even her most fervent supporters. In 2017, Dunham found herself at the centre of another sexual abuse scandal, except this time, the alleged perpetrator was one of her colleagues, Murray Miller, a writer for Girls who was accused of raping actress Aurora Perrineau when she was 17-years-old.
After the allegations emerged, Dunham issued a joint statement with her Girls co-creator Jenni Konner to The Hollywood Reporter, decrying Perrineau's claim as one of 'the three per cent of assault cases that are misreported every year'. The statement provoked a major backlash from those on the Left, with many quoting one of Dunham's old tweets, in which she'd written: 'Things women do lie about: what they ate for lunch. Things women don't lie about: rape.' Dunham and Konner apologised, writing that they regretted their decision to defend Murray 'with every fiber of [their] being'. Miller, who denied the claims at the time, was not charged.
pic.twitter.com/yhC2mvRn1V
— Lena Dunham (@lenadunham) November 19, 2017
In fact, so frequent were Dunham's public apologies that a Twitter bot, @lenadunhamapols, began posting satirical versions of them. The New York Times once described her as an 'actor, writer, director, controversy creator'. She was even accused of cruelty to animals after she returned her pet dog, Lamby, to a pet shelter after four years of ownership, after claiming he had behavioural issues and a history of abuse, which the shelter disputed. Dunham hired security guards to combat the litany of death threats.
No wonder, then, that Dunham has spent the last seven years keeping a low profile. Following the breakup of her five-year relationship with music producer Jack Antonoff (famous for his work with Taylor Swift) in 2018, she largely abandoned social media and shifted her focus to film, with credits including the middlingly reviewed Sharp Stick, and a medieval comedy, Catherine Called Birdy.
She went to rehab for an addiction to benzodiazepines and treated a number of chronic health issues, including Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, a group of disorders that affect connective tissues, and endometriosis, which eventually led to a hysterectomy. Then came love: in 2021, Dunham married the musician Luis Felber and moved to the UK. Her new home is the inspiration for her new Netflix show, Too Much, airing 13 years after Girls's pilot.
Set in London, the 10-part, semi-autobiographical Netflix series follows Jessica (Hacks's Megan Stalter), an ad exec in her mid-30s reeling from a brutal breakup. After leaving New York on a somewhat ill-advised whim, she takes a stab at making a fresh start on British soil, and finds herself caught up in a dizzying romance with enigmatic and fickle musician Felix (Will Sharpe).
Judging by the fevered anticipation and its ludicrously starry cast (Richard E Grant, Stephen Fry, Andrew Scott, Rita Wilson), Too Much is likely to thrust Dunham back into the limelight. But getting to this point has been a long, and perpetually winding, road for the generational talent who started therapy aged nine.
The new show has prompted a renewed, and more measured, assessment of her provocative career, while Dunham has used her extensive press tour to acknowledge Girls's flaws, while setting the record straight on a few things. For instance she denied criticisms that Girls contained 'hipster racism', telling the Independent: 'I think one of the profound issues around Girls was that there was so little real estate for women in television that if you had a show called Girls, which is such a monolithic name, it sounds like it's describing all the girls in all the places. And so if it's not reflecting a multitude of experiences, I understand how that would be really disappointing to people.'
Yet for all its flaws, Girls paved the way for a new kind of womanhood that hadn't yet been showcased on screen. None of the four central characters – narcissistic Hannah, self-absorbed Marnie, naive Shoshanna and chaotic yet stylish Jessa – could be pigeonholed; there was no 'ditzy one', no 'sex-obsessed one', and definitely no 'sensible one'. These were unflattering portraits of women whose complexities were laid bare from the outset. And yet, even though we didn't necessarily like them, we related to them.
This grubby verisimilitude manifested in many memorable moments, from a frank depiction of abortion in season four's Close Up to the predatory novelist who comes onto Hannah in American B---h. Episodes like these are often cited by Girls's increasingly large Gen-Z fanbase. 'American B---h stands out to me,' says Evan Lazarus, co-host of the Girls Rewatch podcast. 'It told a nuanced story before the MeToo movement even began and still holds up today – emotionally honest, beautifully written, and uncomfortable in all the right ways', which might be why the show has enjoyed a new lease of life with Gen Z after trending on TikTok in 2023.
Still, few would go so far as to call Girls the feminist masterpiece it's occasionally held up as. 'Today, feminist discourses are more attuned to intersectionality, privilege, and systems of power in a way that Girls often failed to engage meaningfully, particularly around race, class, and inclusion,' says Professor Meredith Nash, co-editor of Reading Lena Dunham's Girls: Feminism, Postfeminism, Authenticity and Gendered Performance in Contemporary Television.
Today's Girls fans seem to be drawn in by a sense of nostalgia. 'Girls was made in a very specific cultural moment – pre-MeToo, pre-Roe being overturned, and during the relative optimism of the Obama era and you can feel that in the tone and freedom of the storytelling,' says Amelia Ritthaler, who co-hosts the Girls Rewatch podcast with Lazarus. 'Things like intimacy coordinators weren't standard practice yet. But rather than making it feel outdated, those elements highlight how much the show was pushing boundaries in real-time.'
Too Much is a brilliant, and carefully written, return to form. Dunham's acerbic voice is still there, providing astute social observation, but it feels softer, leading with compassion. It's ultimately a love story. And while it won't fill the void Girls left, or the one Sex and the City left before that, it is arguably impossible to capture the millennial female experience in the same way any more. We're too siloed by political upheaval, environmental angst, and social media echo chambers.
Would Girls get made today? Probably not, when you consider the ongoing struggles within the TV and film industries to promote diverse storytelling. But that doesn't undermine its value, which was rooted in its unflinching depiction of sex, women's bodies, and its highly unlikeable but relatable protagonists. Not to mention the astute lens through which it examined the nuances of female friendship.
Girls's shortcomings aside, it's unclear where the visceral opprobrium for Dunham came from. She was, at one time, one of the most hated people on the internet, spawning daily diatribes, take-downs and op-eds. There was nothing she could do right. It would be lazy to put this down to mere misogyny; famous women all face that same curse at one point or another.
Perhaps it's that Dunham didn't conform to what was expected of her. She spoke more freely, shared more openly, and laid bare her flaws and failings on a stage far more visible than most. I also suspect some people just didn't like the way she looked. It's why she didn't take on a lead role in Too Much: 'Physically, I was just not up for having my body dissected again,' she told The New Yorker.
As for whether or not Dunham is a feminist role model, well, 'if it's about embodying perfect politics, probably not,' says Nash. 'But if it's about taking creative risks, putting imperfect female stories on screen, and weathering intense public scrutiny while continuing to create, she can serve as an example of vulnerability, resilience, and the costs of public feminist leadership.' That sounds like a role model to me.