Hillary Clinton and Lena Dunham, Her Main Millennial, Hit the Weinstein Wall
The millennial daughter of New York privilege known for her audacious public presence
and frequent nudity on her HBO show, “Girls.” And the baby boomer raised with a steely Midwestern reserve, a devotion to her Methodist faith and a fierce affinity for a “zone of privacy.”
But early on in a presidential election unlike any other, Ms. Dunham
and Mrs. Clinton became a kind of package deal, with the campaign scrambling to reach young women and dispatching Ms. Dunham as one of its most visible ambassadors.
(“Hi, I’m Lena Dunham and according to Donald Trump, my body is probably, like, a 2.”)
Ms. Dunham’s statement to The Times that she had warned the Clinton campaign about Mr. Weinstein came not long after she
had stirred controversy by publicly defending a “Girls” writer, Murray Miller, who had been accused of sexual assault.
In reply to Ms. Dunham’s comments, Nick Merrill, the communications director for Mrs. Clinton,
said, “As to claims about a warning, that’s something staff wouldn’t forget.”
Ms. Dunham’s prominence in the Clinton campaign made her comments particularly resonant.
After a 2015 dinner party at the Park Avenue apartment of Richard Plepler, the chief executive of HBO, several guests said
that Ms. Dunham had expressed discomfort with how the Clintons and their allies had discredited the women who said they had had sexual encounters with or had been sexually assaulted by former President Bill Clinton — an issue that many Democrats have reassessed in recent weeks.
In the article, Ms. Dunham said she had warned two Clinton campaign officials against associating with Mr. Weinstein.
