Lena Dunham Warned Hillary Clinton About Weinstein’s Treatment Of Women

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By Helen Chernikoff December 6, 2017

Feminist allies of Hillary Clinton’s warned her before the 2016 election about movie mogul Harvey Weinstein’s treatment of women, troubled by his high profile at her side during the campaign, according to the New York Times.

Both Lena Dunham, creator of the HBO series Girls and a loud voice on a range of women’s issues and iconic magazine editor Tina Brown said they talked with Clinton’s team.

“I was hearing that Harvey’s sleaziness with women had escalated since I left Talk in 2002 and she was unwise to be so closely associated with him,” Brown wrote in an e-mail to the Times.

The campaign’s communications director responded by saying the staff would have responded if they had truly known about Weinstein’s predations.

Dunham herself was widely condemned last month after she jumped to defend a friend and colleague who had been accused of rape. She later apologized.

Helen Chernikoff is the Forward’s News Editor. She came to the Forward from The Jewish Week, where she served as the first web director and created both a blog dedicated to disability issues and a food and wine website. Before that, she covered the housing, lodging and logistics industries for Reuters, where she could sit at her desk and watch her stories move the stock market. Helen has a Master’s of Public Administration from Columbia University and a BA in History and French from Amherst College. She is also a rabbinical school dropout. Contact her at [email protected] and follow her on Twitter at @thesimplechild.

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