Lena Dunham recalls her own father not wanting to be seen at the voting booths with her during the 2012 Barack Obama versus Mitt Romney election.
On “The Interview” podcast, Dunham recalled that once she began receiving hate online, it affected even her personal relationships.
“I remember there was a day, and this is not in the book, where I was going to vote with my father. And I had been campaigning for Obama. It was 2012. And I remember he said, ‘I don’t know if I wanna go vote with Lena Dunham,'” she recalled.
“And I was like my father thinks going to vote with me is going to signal something,” Dunham continued.
The actress and producer said that her father is her “best friend in the world,” so him wanting to not be seen with her in public was the moment she understood “something was going on here.”
In 2012, Dunham faced offline drama for her HBO series, “Girls,” which she wrote and starred in. At the time, viewers were unhappy with the lack of racial inclusivity and the economic privilege that was highlighted in the show that aired for five years.
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Speaking on the New York Times’ podcast, Dunham believes the negativity she received from the series stemmed from people disliking her as a person.
“I’m going to say something that’s going to sound like a cop out. And I don’t, but I can only phrase it this way. I have annoyed people since I was so small. Like, I was an annoying kid,” she said.
Dunham believes that, paired with the intense female sexuality on the show, led to unhappy viewers.
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Just before “Girls” premiered in 2012, old racially insensitive tweets that Dunham wrote resurfaced.
Over the years, Dunham has found herself in several controversies. Dunham compared producer Judd Apatow’s “obsession” with the rape allegations against Bill Cosby to an obsession with the Holocaust. She compared online hate from blogs to domestic violence, and she compared President Donald Trump to Dylann Roof, the man who murdered nine black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015 because of their race.
