On Tuesday morning, audio from a podcast interview between Kara Swisher and Lenny Letter co-founders Lena Dunham and Jenni Konner arrived online, wherein Dunham confirmed that she’s stopped using Twitter. Dunham said she’d left the social-media platform because of the verbal abuse she’s received. We’ve all been there, sure.
But the Girls creator went on to say that this logic accounts for her decision to stop reading media outlets like Gawker. “It’s literally if I read it, it’s like going back to a husband who beat me in the face,” she elaborated. “It just doesn’t make any sense.” Perhaps, though, it was not the wisest thing to compare reading a blog on the internet to being physically abused.
Later that night, Dunham took to Instagram to apologize for her uncomfortable comments, saying that she “wasn’t making a joke about domestic violence” but instead was attempting to “capture how damaging the Internet can be (not just to celebrities).” Dunham said she “regrets that earlier comparison” and that it isn’t her style to “make light of domestic violence.”