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Los Angeles - Lena Dunham admits she "spent so much time ashamed" after being date raped at university.
The Girls creator and star, who is now in a long-term relationship with Fun.'s Jack Antonoff, says it took her a long time to get over the experience and she found it therapeutic to write about it in her new memoir, Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She's Learned.
The 28-year-old actress told National Public Radio’s Fresh Air host Terry Gross: "It was a painful experience physically and emotionally and one I spent a long time trying to reconcile."
Lena - who studied creative writing at Oberlin College in Ohio - kept the assault a secret from friends at the time.
She said: "I actually [have] been thinking about it a lot this week because I sent an e-mail to somebody who I had known at that time who knew the guy who had perpetrated the act...I wanted to make it clear to this old friend what I felt had happened before he potentially...read about it.
"I said to this old friend in an e-mail: 'I spent so much time scared; I spent so much time ashamed.'"
The Golden Globe winner believes sharing her story has helped her to recover.
She said: "I don't feel that way [ashamed] anymore and it's not because of my job, it's not because of my boyfriend, it's not because of feminism, though all those things helped. It's because I told the story.
And I'm still here, and my identity hasn't shifted in some way that I can't repair. And I still feel like myself and I feel less alone."
Listen to the full interview here.
(Photo: AP)
