Lena Dunham is sorry, again. In an essay for The Hollywood Reporter, the writer issued a formal mea culpa to Aurora Perrineau—the actress who came forward in 2017 to accuse Girls writer Murray Miller of sexually assaulting her in 2012, when she was 17 years old (Miller denied the allegations). In the essay, which Dunham implies was published with Perrineau’s permission, she calls her decision to initially defend Miller “a terrible mistake.”
“When someone I knew, someone I had loved as a brother, was accused, I did something inexcusable: I publicly spoke up in his defense,” Dunham wrote. “There are few acts I could ever regret more in this life. I didn’t have the ‘insider information’ I claimed, but rather blind faith in a story that kept slipping and changing and revealed itself to mean nothing at all.”
She added that Perrineau has “been on my mind and in my heart every day this year. I love you. I will always love you. I will always work to right that wrong.”
When the allegation against Miller went public in 2017, Dunham and Girls co-show-runner Jenni Konner defended their writer with a statement, saying they stood by him and believed that Perrineau’s claim was “one of the 3 percent of assault cases that are misreported every year.” Dunham later retracted the statement, writing on Twitter that she “naively believed it was important to share my perspective on my friend‘s situation as it has transpired behind the scenes over the last few months.” The Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office declined to move forward with charges against Miller.
In a recent New York magazine interview, Dunham said that after she defended Miller, some people in her inner circle, like director and producer Judd Apatow and model Hari Nef, warned her that she had made a bad decision. She was also asked to refrain from calling in to editorial meetings at Lenny, the newsletter she ran with Konner.
Dunham later reached out Perrineau to personally apologize. The actress’s mother told New York that their chat “went better than expected.” In the T.H.R. essay, Dunham referenced Perrineau’s mother, Brittany, calling her “fierce, powerful, a born leader, a patient mother, the kind of woman I hope to be. Getting to know her has been the unexpected gift that came from being humbled and re-assessing so much over the past year: about women and power.”
She then directly praised Perrineau, saying her “bravery, openness, forgiveness, dignity, and grace in the face of legal proceedings and endless questioning and in the face of my statement has been astounding. You’ve been a model of stoicism, all the while reminding other women that their assault experiences are theirs to process as they wish (with noise, with silence, with rage—it’s all O.K.). You have generously allowed me to speak about your many virtues here and tell these readers that you are moving on as a woman and as an artist.”
“I see you, Aurora. I hear you, Aurora. I believe you, Aurora,” she added.
Dunham has, in the past, been open about her own experiences with sexual assault. In the essay, she goes even further, alluding to other traumatic events in her life, such as “the 70-year-old Hollywood luminary who was so angry that I rebuffed his kiss that he made me do 30 takes of the word ‘hello,’” and the “Oscar nominee who drove me to the place he lost his virginity while I asked again and again when I could be dropped home.” She also referred to other instances of abuse, writing about the “pseudo boyfriend who tied me up with my special-occasion stockings and forced himself inside me anally.”
“Moving forward from trauma is never easy, but there are brave women doing it for us,” she wrote. “All we have to do is listen.”
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