Lena Dunham stopped drinking and going to parties after she was raped.
The ‘Girls’ creator was sexually attacked while studying at Oberlin college in Ohio and admits the aftermath saw her "remove herself from the social world" in a bid to stay safe.
She said: "he emotional trauma she suffered from the incident deeply affected her emotionally and dramatically altered her remaining college years. "I didn’t really go to anymore parties. I basically didn’t have a drink for the rest of college… I really removed myself from that world.
"I don’t know if I would’ve told you at the time, ‘Oh, I’m doing this to keep myself safe,’ but obviously in hindsight… I basically removed myself from the social world as I’d known it."
The 28-year-old star – who is in a relationship with Fun. musician Jack Antonoff – struggled to speak openly about what had happened to her, using the "lens of humour" to play down her ordeal.
She told NPR’s Terry Gross: "It was a painful experience physically and emotionally, and one I spent a long time trying to reconcile.
"At the time that it happened, it wasn’t something that I was able to be honest about. I was able to share pieces, but I sort of used the lens of humour, which has always been my default mode, to try to talk around it."
And Lena admits sharing her story with her best friend, who bluntly told her she had been raped, helped "lift" her and get over the shocking attack.
She said: "When I shared it with my best friend and she used the term ‘you were raped’ at the time, I sort of laughed at her and thought like, you know, what an ambulance-chasing drama queen.
"[I] later felt this incredible gratitude for her for giving me that, giving me that gift of that kind of certainty that she had. I think that a lot of times when I felt at my lowest about it, those words in some way actually lifted me up because I felt that somebody was justifying the pain of my experience."
Lena Dunham retreated after rape
