Lena Dunham Isn't Doing Anything to Protect Other Women From Her Alleged Rapist

brietbart ^ | October 10, 2014 | John Nolte

[The_Reader_David]

I'm curious in her book does she actually, in her own voice, accuse "Barry" of raping her? In the excerpts the media has printed, Breitbart included, Dunham herself never seems to assert the "Barry" raped her. She reports the encounter and then relates that various and sundry folks, her roommate, her coworkers, interpret her narrative as having been a rape (on the basis of feminist definition of rape which is so expansive as to encompass, as one wag put it, "drunken whore's regret" as a basis for an accusation of rape).

When I was in college women of a certain sort would boast to their friends at Saturday or Sunday breakfast of encounters of the sort Dunham describes (and which lots of feminists now call "rape" even when it fails to meet the standards of the criminal law's definition). They seemed quite please with the results of their willfully lowered inhibitions, and would also have laughed at anyone telling them they had been raped, as Ms. Dunham reports she did when her roommate interpreted her narrative as a description of a rape.

[grundle]

I haven’t read the book, but the way that you describe the article that you read is an accurate description of how she wrote it. For all practical purposes, she accused the person of rape.

[x]

Heck, the school isn’t that big. How many guys named “Barry” could there be at any one time?

It's common to change names in memoirs for legal reasons. I suspect that Lena changed a lot more than that, though. Every detail makes the story a less believable.

My sense is that the story is a "composite" of details -- some things that happened to her at that time, some things from other experiences, some things she heard about that happened to other people, some things she just made up.

Here's a blog arguing that there's no legal case for rape in this incident. But I suspect that taking her story seriously as a factual account of something that actually happened is a mistake, but it's not hard to understand why the media take it at face value and aren't going to try to discredit her -- too much trouble, too hard to prove, too much potential blowback.

[cynwoody]

So if “Barry” is real (and knowing leftists, I doubt it), it surely wouldn’t be difficult to figure out who he was if he was a student.

She does drop some details about him ...

• He was a Republican
• He was the campus's "resident conservative"
• He hosted a radio show called Real Talk with Jimbo. (She calls him "Mr. Face for Radio")
• He wore purple cowboy boots
• He graduated in December (he was apparently ahead of her)
• He had a mustache that "rode the line between ironic Williamsburg fashion and big buck hunter"
• He wore white Reeboks
• He worked part-time in the library, misshelving the books
• He had a voice that "went Barry White low"
• He smoked

It turns out there was a Barry who was president of the Oberlin College Republicans.

[The_Reader_David]

For all practical purposes, she accused the person of rape.

Yes and no. She plainly accused him of what feminists now call "rape" to create arguably specious stories about the "epidemic" of "rape" on college campuses.

It is not so clear that she accused him of violating Ohio's rape statutes, since we have only Dunham's report of her own intoxication, and no way of gauging whether "Barry" knew or had reasonable cause to believe her "ability to resist or consent is substantially impaired because of a mental or physical condition." For all we know, "Barry" might have also had his ability to resist or consent substantially impaired because of a mental or physical condition, and (if they both knew or had reasonable cause to believe this about each other) they are both guilty of rape under Ohio law.

[x]

More here

...There are not a great many Republicans at Oberlin, and there was a College Republicans president named “Barry” whose time at the school coincided with Dunham’s. I had a very brief conversation with him in which he declined to talk about the matter. He has since been in contact with me to say that he has never met Dunham and had no relationship with her. ...