Jack Antonoff’s marriage to Margaret Qualley has been thrown into the spotlight amid reports that they have separated after five years together.
People reported Wednesday that the couple is separating, with a source telling the outlet that the pair’s relationship is “rocky.” Another insider, however, insisted that the pair were “figuring things out.” The actor, 31, and singer-producer, 42, have been married since 2023. The Independent has contacted them both for comment.
The musician’s past relationships made headlines this year after his ex-girlfriend, Girls creator Lena Dunham, published an intimate memoir in April that detailed the breakdown of their six-year relationship.
In Famesick, Dunham suggests that their relationship became strained in part because she was dealing with chronic pain, which affected everything from intimacy to holidays. As she discussed vignettes from their relationship, she claimed that Antonoff had started spending time with a “teen pop star” and that he flushed her pain medication down the toilet during a heated argument.
The pair met when comedian Mike Birbiglia set them up on a blind date in 2012, the year Dunham’s HBO show Girls premiered, while Antonoff — now a super producer to stars like Taylor Swift and Sabrina Carpenter — was enjoying commercial success from his pop band, Fun.
Below are the biggest revelations from Dunham’s memoir about their relationship.
Dunham recalls Antonoff spending a lot of time with a ‘teen pop star’ before their breakup
In Famesick, Dunham remarked that Antonoff’s professional relationship with a “teen pop star” started “striking an odd note” while they worked together.
Dunham recalled FaceTiming Antonoff while visiting her grandmother, only to find him in “the recording studio in our apartment, where he was ensconced with a teen pop star I was too oblivious to be jealous of.”
She later noted that Antonoff spent his time “locked in a room with a teen pop star whose needs seemed as massive and complex as my own, and who called me ‘Aunt Lena’ when I hobbled into the kitchen with my walker to grab another bottle of green tea.”
Dunham writes about returning home from a bone density test one day to find the pop star “sprawled across our sectional couch, weeping into Jack’s lap as he told her that ‘your teens are for experimenting’ in a tone so comforting, it almost brought tears to my eyes,” adding, “It had been so long since he’d spoken to me with that kind of expansive generosity.”
While Dunham did not divulge the artist’s name in her book, it has been suspected that she is referring to Grammy-winning singer-songwriter Lorde. Antonoff co-wrote and co-produced the New Zealand musician’s 2017 album Melodrama. At the time, the collaborators fielded romance rumors — which they denied — in the months following the record’s release and Antonoff and Dunham’s split in early 2018. The Independent has contacted Antonoff’s representatives for comment.
Dunham alludes to Antonoff cheating, and admits she cheated
In the book, Dunham describes herself as “an adultress” and reasons that Antonoff may have also strayed.
After a huge fight following her hysterectomy, Dunham and Antonoff decided to take a break, according to Dunham’s account. At first, Dunham was cautious about pursuing any type of relationship with another man, observing “careful boundaries.” But, she wrote, “If I wanted to look, perhaps I may have seen that Jack was not observing them as closely as I was.”
She claimed that after an argument, Antonoff “spoke to me in ways I have never been spoken to,” which prompted a desire “to be wanted.” She wrote that she texted an old school friend to meet her, and they slept together that evening.
Dunham said Antonoff threw her pain medication down the toilet
Dunham wrote that she and Antonoff got into the “worst fight” of their relationship when Dunham spoke to him about her increasing reliance on pain medication, two weeks after her hysterectomy (to treat endometriosis).
His response, she wrote, “was to go to the bathroom and angrily flush all my pills down the toilet, which necessitated a call to the doctor and a late-night trip to the pharmacy to get more so that I wouldn’t go into withdrawal — from any one of the drugs — overnight.”
Dunham said she cried when she found out about Antonoff and his relationship with Qualley
In her book’s epilogue, Dunham reflected on Antonoff’s marriage to the “beautiful” Margaret Qualley, whom she had previously befriended.
“He’d won the friend that I wanted, so when I wept like a child on the first afternoon I saw a paparazzi picture of them kissing on the Brooklyn Bridge, I knew that nobody would understand why I was so upset, that they’d assume it was because I was jealous of her, and that made me weep even harder,” she wrote.
Five months after her split from Antonoff, Dunham wrote in an essay for Vogue: “We sat in our shared kitchen of nearly four years and quietly faced each other, acknowledging what nobody wanted to say.
“That obsessive connection had turned to blind devotion, and the blinders were coming off to reveal that we had evolved separately (the least shocking reason of all and perhaps the most common).
“That anger wasn’t sexy or sustainable. That our hearts were still broken from trying so hard to fix it but no longer uncertain about whether or not we could. The finality nearly killed me, and I remember muttering, ‘But what if we still went on dates?’ He laughed sadly. ‘Whatever you want,’” she wrote.
