In a strange and unpredictable turn of events, Lena Dunham has acknowledged she made a mistake.
The “Girls” creator wrote an open letter, published in The Hollywood Reporter Wednesday, apologizing to the woman who accused Dunham’s close friend and colleague of sexual assault. (RELATED: Lena Dunham’s New HBO Show Is Reportedly Flaming Hot Garbage)
You’ll recall, the woman, actress Aurora Perrineau, formally accused scriptwriter Murray Miller of sexual assault in November 2017. She filed a report with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, claiming Miller raped her in 2011. The charges were later dropped due to “the delay in reporting.”
Dunham initially rushed to Miller’s defense, claiming the accusations levied against the former “Girls” writer had to be “misreported,” since she’d worked extensively with him and never had a problem.
Dunham later apologized for her defense of Miller, saying “every person and every feminist should be required to hear her.”
In an op-ed in The Hollywood Reporter, Dunham walks almost all of this back entirely and takes full responsibility for her wrongdoing.
“I made 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,” she writes. “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. I wanted to feel my workplace and my world were safe, untouched by the outside world (a privilege in and of itself, the privilege of ignoring what hasn’t hurt you) and I claimed that safety at cost to someone else, someone very special.”
So far, neither Perrineau nor Miller has addressed Dunham’s apology, and since charges were dropped more than a year ago, they may just want to move past it.
Still, better late than never, right?