Lena Dunham Quits Twitter

Lena Dunham has pulled the plug on Twitter.

In an interview on the Re/Code Decode podcast earlier this week, the Girls star revealed she quit the social media service over “verbal abuse” directed toward her by other users.

“I don’t look at Twitter anymore. I tweet, but I do it through someone else,” Dunham told podcast host Kara Swisher, according to the Hollywood Reporter. “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.”

In explaining her decision to quit the service, Dunham cited “disgusting” comments made on a particular photo she posted to her Instagram page last week:

View this post on Instagram

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.)

A post shared by Lena Dunham (@lenadunham) on Sep 16, 2015 at 9:31pm PDT

“It wasn’t a graphic picture,” Dunham 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.”

“Even if you think, like, ‘Oh I can read, like, 10 mentions that say I should be stoned to death and kind of, like, laugh and move on,’ that’s verbal abuse. Those aren’t words that should be directed at you ever. And so, for me personally, it was safer to stop [using Twitter].”

Dunham also revealed that she has quit checking out left-leaning media outlets Gawker and Jezebel, likening reading the sites to “going back to a husband who beat me in the face.”

“I used to read Gawker and Jezebel in college and be like, ‘I can’t wait to get to New York where my people will be to welcome me,'” she said. “And it’s like, it’s literally, if I read it, it’s like going back to a husband who beat me in the face – it just doesn’t make any sense.”

In other news, Dunham told radio host Elvis Duran on Tuesday that HBO’s Girls will likely end after its upcoming sixth season.