In her new memoir Famesick, released 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 experiment with glassblowing.
She was between 2 and 4 years old. She writes: “A babysitter my mother had hired. A green-tiled bathtub. Fingers inside me. One, maybe two. Maybe three.”
She told her mother. The babysitter was fired. Nobody brought it up again. Years later, as a teenager, Dunham asked her mother directly: “Why do I feel like I was molested?” Her mother said she still wasn’t sure.
The second disclosure is about an insurance doctor during the production of Girls. Dunham had a known ovarian cyst. The production’s insurance company required a sign-off from a company-appointed doctor before approving her sick days. Her producer Ilene Landress accompanied her to the appointment in Midtown Manhattan.
The doctor had no ultrasound machine available. He decided to locate the cyst manually. Dunham writes: “What I remember is one, then two, then three fingers probing me, clawing deeper and deeper, and then a pain so sharp that my legs shook like a current was being run through them.”
When she cried out, he said: “I have to find this so you can get what you want, now don’t I? So let’s shush up.”
She begged him to stop. He didn’t. “He only stopped when he was finished.”
She went home. She called her then-partner Jack Antonoff home from dinner because she couldn’t get out of the bathtub. He took her to the hospital. Her cyst had ruptured. Her abdomen was filling with blood. She was hospitalized for almost a week. Her ovaries were surgically stitched to her upper abdominal wall to prevent adhesion. She never reported the doctor. She never named him publicly. The only person she told at the time was her surgeon.
Neither incident had been publicly disclosed before Famesick. Dunham writes them in the same passage because her body connects them. Earlier in the memoir, she describes a childhood ER visit in Paris where a doctor examined her genitals to diagnose a case of hives. That experience became what she called as a child “hospital feeling,” which she now recognizes as dissociation. The babysitter’s fingers in Italy. The insurance doctor’s fingers in Midtown. Her closing line ties all three together: “All of this, the flashlight, the fingers, the green tiles, were coming back in sickly waves.”
The disclosure arrives with 12 years of baggage. In 2014, Dunham’s first memoir Not That Kind of Girl generated a national controversy when conservative commentator Kevin D. Williamson characterized passages about childhood play with her younger sibling Cyrus as sexual abuse. Multiple child psychologists and sexual abuse experts rejected that characterization, calling the behavior within the norms of childhood sexual development. Dunham, Cyrus, and their family disputed it. Dunham later apologized for jokingly calling herself a “sexual predator” in the book, calling the phrasing insensitive.
For over a decade, the loudest public narrative about Lena Dunham and childhood sexual abuse was that she was the perpetrator. Today she is revealing that she was a victim. The two have nothing to do with each other. But the reader who remembers 2014 will understand why it took her 12 years to say this out loud.
First photograph by Elena Ternovaja, released under CC BY-SA 3.0. Second photograph: Lena Dunham on Instagram,
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