In his new memoir Illnessreleased April 14th by Penguin Random House, Lena Dunham describes being left with a babysitter while her family spent 3 months in Italy so her father could test glass.
He was between 2 and 4 years old. She writes: “My mother hired a babysitter. A bathtub with blue tiles. Fingers inside me. One, maybe two, maybe three.
He told his mother. The babysitter was fired. No one raised it again. Years later, as a teenager, Dunham asked her mother directly: “Why do I feel like I was molested?” His mother said she is still not sure.
The second disclosure is about an insurance doctor during the production of Girls. Dunham had a known ovarian cyst. The company’s insurance company required the approval of a company-appointed physician before approving his sick days. His producer Ilene Landress accompanied him to the appointment in Midtown Manhattan.
The doctor did not have an ultrasound machine available. He decided to find the cyst himself. Dunham writes: “All I remember is one, two, then three fingers probing me, slapping deeper, and then a sharp pain that shook my legs like a current being torn from them.”
When he cried, he said: “I have to get this to get what you want, don’t I?
He begged her to stop. He didn’t. “He only stopped when he was done.”
He went home. He called former partner Jack Antonoff home from dinner because he couldn’t get out of the tub. He took her to the hospital. Her bump had popped. His stomach was full of blood. He was hospitalized for about a week. Her ovaries were surgically sutured to the upper abdominal wall to prevent adhesions. He never reported it to the doctor. He did not name her publicly. The only person he told at the time was his surgeon.
No incident was publicly disclosed before Famesick. Dunham writes them in the same piece because her body connects them. Earlier in the memoir, she describes a childhood ER visit in Paris where a doctor examined her private parts to diagnose a chest case. That experience was what he called “the hospital feeling” as a child, which he now recognizes as isolation. Babysitter’s fingers in Italy. Fingers crossed by an insurance doctor in Midtown. His closing line ties the three together: “All this, the torch, the fingers, the green tiles, were coming back in sickening waves.”
Disclosure up to 12 years of responsibility. In 2014, Dunham’s debut memoir Not That Kind of Girl sparked a national controversy when conservative commentator Kevin D. Williamson exposed passages about childhood play with her sibling Cyrus as sexual abuse. Many child psychologists and sexual abuse experts have rejected that explanation, calling the behavior within the norms of a child’s sexual development. Dunham, Cyrus, and their family opposed it. Dunham later apologized for calling herself a “rapist” in the book, calling the remark careless.
For more than a decade, the loudest public narrative about Lena Dunham and childhood sexual abuse was that she was the perpetrator. Today he reveals that he was a victim. These two have nothing in common. But a reader who remembers 2014 will understand why it took him 12 years to say this out loud.
Original photo by Elena Ternovaja, released under CC BY-SA 3.0. Second photo: Lena Dunham on Instagram,
