Lena Dunham Opens Up About a College Date Rape Experience

Lena Dunham leaves the SiriusXM radio studios with a smile on her face on Wednesday (October 1) in New York City.

The 28-year-old Girls actress, who has been promoting her book “Not That Kind of Girl,” bravely opened up about a terrifying date rape experience she had in college.

“There were a few things in this book that I was terrified to put into the world,” she told NPR’s Terry Gross on Fresh Air. “The chapter about date rape in the book was a really, really terrifying thing for me to put into the world.”

“It was a painful experience physically and emotionally, and one I spent a long time trying to reconcile. At the time that it happened, it wasn’t something that I was able to be honest about,” Lena explained. “I was able to share pieces, but I sort of used the lens of humor, which has always been my default mode, to try to talk around it.”

“I had felt that something had happened and I remember thinking ‘Can I ever be the same?’… I was at a party, drunk, waiting for attention – and somehow that felt like such a shameful starting-off point that I didn’t know how to reconcile what had come after. But I knew that it wasn’t right and I knew in some way that this experience had been forced on me,” Lena said. “When I shared it with my best friend and she used the term ‘you were raped’ at the time, I sort of laughed at her and thought like, you know, what an ambulance-chasing drama queen. [I] later felt this incredible gratitude for her for giving me that, giving me that gift of that kind of certainty that she had.”