Lena Dunham: "Twitter wasn't a safe space for me."

“Even if you think, like, ‘Oh I can read, like, ten mentions that say I should be stoned to death’ and kind of, like, laugh and move on, that’s verbal abuse.“

Lena Dunham  — Girls’ creator, writer and Taylor Swift squad member — has spoken about the dangers of social media after she was verbally abused last week for posting a photo.

Dunham, 29, spoke to the Re/Code Decode team in a podcast with Girls producer Jenni Konner and said Twitter wasn’t a safe place for her.

“I don’t look at Twitter anymore. I tweet, but I do it through someone else,” she said.

“I really appreciate that anybody follows me at all, and so I didn’t want to cut off my relationship to it completely, but it really, truly wasn’t a safe space for me.”

Dunham went on to say the abuse she was receiving created something “cancerous” inside her.

“Even if you think, like, ‘Oh I can read, like, ten mentions that say I should be stoned to death’ and kind of, like, laugh and move on, that’s verbal abuse,” she said.

“Those aren’t words that should be directed at you ever. And so, for me personally, it was safer to stop [using Twitter].”

Her decision to relinquish control of her account to her management came after she posted the following photo of herself wearing her boyfriend Jake Antonoff’s underwear and copped a torrid of abuse from commenters.

“It wasn’t a graphic picture,” she said.

“I was wearing men’s boxers and it turned into the most rabid, disgusting debate about women’s bodies, and my Instagram page was somehow the hub for misogynists for the afternoon.”

In the photo, Dunham was brutally honest about her health at that moment. She wrote alongside the image:

TBH this was a rough week. It felt like my body, my hormones, my general sense of well-being were betraying me. I wanted to crumple into a pile or hide like a sweatshirt in the lost and found. And I felt as though there wasn’t a way to ask for the space and time I needed without hurting someone else. What a shitty feeling, but isn’t that the reality for so many of us? I am certainly no self-help guru but here is what I know tonight: when you take the time and space you need, kindly and responsibly, you’re suddenly available to the people you love in a whole new way. There is no other answer (except Calvins… Nothing gets between us.)

Anyone who has been the subject of verbal harassment on Twitter will know the feeling that Dunham describes, but for a public figure this hatred can be overpowering. Dunham says she doesn’t even know the password to her Twitter account now, after giving it up.

For more photos of Lena Dunham, click through the gallery below.