Lena Dunham signed off of Twitter — here’s the important reason why

Hands down, Lena Dunham is one of the funniest  and brightest people on Twitter. Exhibit A: 

But the Girls creator and star recently revealed that despite appearances, she hasn’t been actively tweeting for quite some time. The reason? The online abuse she consistently received on the social media site got to be too much.

“I really appreciate that anybody follows me at all, and so I didn’t want to cut off my relationship to it completely,” Dunham said in an podcast interview with Re/Code to promote her new Lenny newsletter. “But it really, truly wasn’t a safe space for me.”

She continues, “I think that even if you think you can separate yourself from the kind of verbal violence that’s being directed at you, it creates some really kind of cancerous stuff inside you . . . that’s verbal abuse. Those aren’t words you would accept in an interpersonal relationship and those aren’t words that should be directed at you, ever. For me, personally, it was safer to stop.”

So, Dunham has someone else sending out her tweets now. And she’s trying to pay that forward by boycotting sites like Gawker, which she equates reading with, “going back to a husband who beat me in the face.” She also hopes that through Lenny, she will create a platform where young women can engage with her without also shuffling through the body-shaming, misogynistic vitriol regularly thrown her way.

“The teenage girls who come to my [Instagram] page and come because they want to see what I’m reading or see a picture of my weird, underwear-eating dog or see what Jenni and my office looks like—I don’t want them seeing a picture of me in my boyfriend’s boxers and then be told that I’m obese and anyone who looks like me is repulsive and I deserve to be dragged around and smacked,” she says. “I don’t want that in the space.” We will miss Lena on Twitter, but we honestly totally get it. 

Check out the whole interview by heading to iTunes and downloading the interview for free.

We’re loving Lena Dunham’s paparazzi pic she posted to her Instagram. Here’s why.

Lena Dunham’s ‘Lenny’ has finally arrived and it’s so, so good

[Images via Instagram and Twitter]