Lena Dunham is down, but she’s not giving up. The Girls creator opened up about Donald Trump‘s presidential win and the emotional anguish she felt on behalf of Hillary Clinton in a new Lenny Letter essay, which she published on Friday, November 11.
Dunham, 30, worked on Clinton’s campaign for 18 months, urging the nation to cast their ballot for the former secretary of state, 69. Now, she is encouraging disappointed voters to fight for their future.
The actress and writer was one of thousands to watch the votes come in at the Javits Center in NYC on Tuesday. She expected Clinton to make a victory speech, but instead left in tears with her boyfriend, musician Jack Antonoff.
“The three hours I spent at the Javits Center Tuesday night, surrounded by campaign staffers and fellow surrogates for Hillary Clinton, are blurred and spotty,” Dunham recalled in her newsletter. “At a certain point it became clear something had gone horribly wrong. Celebrants’ faces turned. The modeling had been incorrect. Watching the numbers in Florida, I touched my face and realized I was crying. ‘Can we please go home?’ I said to my boyfriend. I could tell he was having trouble breathing, and I could feel my chin breaking into hives. Another woman showed me her matching hive, hidden by fresh concealer.”
“By the time we’d made it over the bridge, a friend called. ‘It’s over,’ she said. ‘I love you.’ I was frozen,” the star continued. “We stopped at the diner. No one was speaking as they ate, no one in the whole place.”
Once home, Dunham cried “even harder” while taking a shower. “My boyfriend, who had already wept, watched me as I mumbled incoherently, clutching myself. ‘It wasn’t supposed to go this way. It was supposed to be her job. She worked her whole life for the job. It’s her job,'” she wrote. “My voice was literally lost when I woke up, squeaky and raw, and I ached in the places that make me a woman, the places where I’ve been grabbed so carelessly, the places we are struggling to call our own.”
Hours earlier, Dunham was posting photos from the Javits Center with fellow celebs such as Lady Gaga, Amy Schumer and America Ferrera. Back in July, she spoke about being a sexual assault survivor next to Ferrera, 32, at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia.
In her essay, Dunham revealed that she received threats because of her support for Clinton. Her phone was hacked, she was sent images of aborted fetuses, and she was called a ‘fat whore.’ “My experience mimics that of so many women who organized for Hillary Clinton and against Donald Trump, most of them not celebrities,” she wrote. “We wanted a female president. We wanted guaranteed control over our own bodies. We wanted equal pay. That made us nasty. That made us targets.”
Nevertheless, Dunham refuses to give up though — now more than ever. “It’s a privilege to be heartbroken by the system for the first time at age 30. So many people — those in the prison system, those with undocumented American relatives, those who are trans, who are queer, who are people of color, who are Muslim, who are trying to prosecute their abusers — have felt the crushing failure of the system over and over again. This is just another dark week … Wednesday was a day of mourning. Thursday, too. Hell, I’m giving us till Sunday. But then we fight,” she wrote. “So no, the work isn’t done. It is only beginning … We will watch our friends in awe as they step forward and demand more, as they recognize and wield their politicized identities. We will not be governed by fear.”
Read the rest of Dunham’s letter here.
