Lena Dunham Apologizes for Doubting Woman’s Rape Claim Against Former ‘Girls’ Writer Murray Miller

Girls creator Lena Dunham apologized Wednesday for defending former show writer Murray Miller when he was accused of sexual assault by actress Aurora Perrineau in November 2017. At the time of Perrineau’s accusation, Dunham and co-showrunner Jenni Konner sent a statement to The Hollywood Reporter defending Miller, writing that “While our first instinct is to listen to every woman’s story, our insider knowledge of Murray’s situation makes us confident that sadly this accusation is one of the 3 percent of assault cases that are misreported every year.” In a Wednesday essay for The Hollywood Reporter’s Women in Entertainment issue, Dunham expressed her deep regret over that statement. “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.” Dunham added that “Sometimes healing starts with the words: I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Moving forward from trauma is never easy, but there are brave women doing it for us. All we have to do is listen.”