Lena Dunham Stopped herself from drinking and going to parties after she was raped, whilst studying at Oberlin college in Ohio.
She admits the aftermath of the traumatic experience made her “remove herself from the social world” in efforts to stay safe.
“I didn’t really go to anymore parties. I basically didn’t have a drink for the rest of college... I really removed myself from that world.
“I don’t know if I would’ve told you at the time, ‘Oh, I’m doing this to keep myself safe,’ but obviously in hindsight... I basically removed myself from the social world as I’d known it.”
Struggling to speak openly about the time, she did use the “lens of humour” to play down the ordeal.
Speaking to NPR’s Terry Gross she explained: “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. I was able to share pieces, but I sort of used the lens of humour, which has always been my default mode, to try to talk around it.”
Sharing her story with a close friend who bluntly told her she had been raped helped “lift” her and allow her to make moves to get past what had happened.
“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. I think that a lot of times when I felt at my lowest about it, those words in some way actually lifted me up because I felt that somebody was justifying the pain of my experience.”
