Here's How Lena Dunham Became the Queen of Controversy

On April 5, Lena Dunham announced her plus-sized clothing line that promises to free curvy women from the shackles of Spanx. Lena, who says that she’s been anywhere from a size four to a size 14 on the red carpet, said that her latest collaboration with 11 Honoré will celebrate all body types.

But the internet is like an elephant — it never forgets. And according to social media, Lena Dunham is still canceled. From allegations of abuse to accusations of hypocrisy, the Girls’ actress has been stirring the pot for years. Here’s everything we know about the Lena Dunham controversy.

Many of us were first introduced to Lena Dunham in 2012 on the series premiere of Girls, which was later criticized for its almost all-white cast. Lena became a target of criticism after the release of her book, Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She's "Learned”, which featured passages that some considered unsettling.

In the memoir, she details interactions of a sexual nature at an early age, one of which included her little sister Grace. Lena was later embroiled in a legal battle with TruthRevolt after the publication suggested that the passages in her book were predatory.

Doctors chimed in to confirm Lena's account as sexual exploration, but editors for the site refused to retract their accusations, asking “why she believes it is now appropriate for a 28-year-old woman to make light of opening her baby sister's vagina, paying her with candies for prolonged kisses on the lips in the manner of a 'sexual predator,' or masturbating in bed next to her prepubescent sister."

In September of 2016, Lena Dunham ruffled feathers after she critically detailed her encounter with Odell Beckham Jr. at the Met Gala. She said, “I was sitting next to Odell Beckham Jr., and it was so amazing because it was like he looked at me and he determined I was not the shape of a woman by his standards. He was like, 'That's a marshmallow. That's a child. That's a dog.' It wasn't mean — he just seemed confused.”

She added, “The vibe was very much like, 'Do I want to f--k it? Is it wearing a ... yep, it's wearing a tuxedo. I'm going to go back to my cell phone.' It was like we were forced to be together, and he literally was scrolling Instagram rather than have to look at a woman in a bow tie. I was like, 'This should be called the Metropolitan Museum of Getting Rejected by Athletes.'” 

Users on social media seemed unimpressed with her account of the interaction and ultimately deemed her comments self-indulgent and entitled. 

In 2017, Lena took to Twitter to publicly defend Girls writer Murray Miller after he was accused of rape by actress Aurora Perrineau. In her tweet, Lena said she had “insider information” about the situation which she later revealed was not true. 

In her apology to Aurora, she wrote, “When someone I knew, someone I had loved as a brother, was accused, I did something inexcusable: I publicly spoke up in his defense. 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.”