According to a statement released Tuesday by Barry One’s attorney Aaron Minc, they have been “contacting Random House and Ms. Dunham since October 6, 2014, seeking an apology and exoneration.” It was only this week that Random House finally exonerated Barry One. It was only yesterday, a full two months later, that Dunham herself finally cleared the man her memoir put under suspicion.
It is worth noting that neither Dunham nor her publisher have disputed the October 6 date.
Breitbart News can also independently confirm that Dunham chose to stay silent about Barry One’s innocence although, more than six weeks ago, she was apparently aware of the anguish and suspicion under which her memoir placed an innocent man.
As we reported in the original investigation that finally cleared Barry One, Kevin Williamson of National Review interviewed Barry One back in October. In retrospect, now that Barry One has finally been cleared, this is worth re-reading:
It takes me about two minutes to discover a Republican named Barry whose time at Oberlin coincided with Dunham’s. A few minutes later, I know a great deal about him: Where he works, where he lives, what he majored in, his high-school-prom plans, people we know in common, and other surprising intersections between our lives. When I call him at his office, I get the distinct impression that I am not the first reporter to have done so. “I don’t have anything to say about what I know you’re calling about,” he says. We speak very briefly, and he is concerned that I will use his name. It’s a strange thing to be concerned about — his name is out there, easily found.
On October 17, Barry One followed up with National Review to proclaim his innocence:
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. …
The Barry I spoke with calls this the “most unfortunate coincidence of my life[.]”
Just a few hours later, Dunham rushed to Twitter — not to clear an innocent man’s name — but to lash out at Williamson:
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In a statement released to BuzzFeed Tuesday evening, Dunham writes of Barry One, “To be very clear, ‘Barry’ is a pseudonym, not the name of the man who assaulted me, and any resemblance to a person with this name is an unfortunate and surreal coincidence. I am sorry about all he has experienced.”
Dunham says it’s just a coincidence that her fictional prominent Oberlin Republican rapist named Barry who worked at a campus library matches an actual prominent Oberlin Republican named Barry who worked at a campus library. From the sounds of it, a libel suit will ultimately determine the credibility of that statement.
What we do know is that Random House, Lena Dunham, and her legions of high-powered representatives knew that the memoir they were responsible for plucked an innocent family man out of obscurity and held him up to the world as Lena Dunham’s rapist — and they said nothing until the media piled on and a lawsuit loomed.
They let him twist out there.
For weeks.
As hundreds of thousand of copies of Not That Kind of Girl shipped and sold throughout the world.
As we made clear in our original report, maybe Lena Dunham was raped and maybe she was raped by a monster who voted for George W. Bush. Rape is a horrific crime, and the victim coming to terms with it is oftentimes a complicated and torturous process.
What is also horrific is The Powerful abusing The Powerless. And until the media took interest, and he went to the expense of hiring an attorney, an innocent and powerless man was abused by some of the most powerful people and institutions in our country.
John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC