Lena Dunham has revealed she once cheated on music producer Jack Antonoff during the breakdown of their six-year relationship.
In her forthcoming memoir, Famesick, Dunham suggests that their relationship became strained, in part because she was dealing with chronic pain, which affected everything from intimacy to holidays.
Per The Telegraph, the 39-year-old Girls creator writes that she and British musician 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 writes, “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.” The Independent has contacted Antonoff’s representatives for comment.
She claimed that Antonoff “spoke to me in ways I have never been spoken to,” which prompted a desire “to be wanted.” She writes that she texted an old school friend to meet her, and they slept together that evening.
In the book, Dunham describes herself as “an adultress” and reasons that Antonoff may have also strayed.
“I wasn’t paying attention, but the internet sure was,” she wrote, referring to the public speculation about Antonoff and musician Lorde. (Both Antonoff and Lorde denied the rumors at the time.)
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.
Five months after the split, 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.
Speaking to The New York Times ahead of the launch of Famesick, Dunham said it was a “unique privilege to have every breakup song you love written by your ex.”
“I feel blessed. I was a really late bloomer. That was my first. I felt like you fall in love with someone and then you’re together for the rest of your life. That ending was extremely intense for me,” she said.
Dunham married the British musician Luis Felber in 2021, while Antonoff wed The Substance actor Margaret Qualley in 2023.
