Lena Dunham Apologizes to Odell Beckham Jr. for Met Gala Comments: I Made 'Narcissistic Assumptions'

Lenny Dunham is in hot water over her comments about Odell Beckham Jr. (Photo: Getty Images)

Lena Dunham is apologizing to Odell Beckham Jr. after she joked about him ignoring her because she thought he didn’t want to sleep with her at the Met Gala.

“I owe Odell Beckham Jr. an apology,” she said in a statement posted on Instagram on Saturday afternoon. “Despite my moments of bravado, I struggle at industry events (and in life) with the sense that I don’t rep a certain standard of beauty and so when I show up to the Met Ball surrounded by models and swan-like actresses it’s hard not to feel like a sack of flaming garbage.

"This felt especially intense with a handsome athlete as my dinner companion and a bunch of women I was sure he’d rather be seated with,” she continued. “But I went ahead and projected these insecurities and made totally narcissistic assumptions about what he was thinking, then presented those assumptions as facts. I feel terrible about it. Because after listening to lots of valid criticism, I see how unfair it is to ascribe misogynistic thoughts to someone I don’t know AT ALL. Like, we have never met, I have no idea the kind of day he’s having or what his truth is.

"But most importantly, I would never intentionally contribute to a long and often violent history of the over-sexualization of black male bodies- as well as false accusations by white women towards black men,” she said. “I’m so sorry, particularly to OBJ, who has every right to be on his cell phone. The fact is I don’t know about his state of mind (I don’t know a lot of things) and I shouldn’t have acted like I did.”

Dunham received intense criticism on social media after she said in an interview with Amy Schumer for her Lenny Letter newsletter that she thought that Beckham ignored her at the Met Gala in May because he wasn’t sexually attracted to her.

“I was sitting next to Odell Beckham Jr., and it was so amazing because it was like he looked at me and he determined I was not the shape of a woman by his standards,” Dunham said in the interview published on Friday. “He was like, ‘That’s a marshmallow. That’s a child. That’s a dog.’ It wasn’t mean – he just seemed confused.

"The vibe was very much like, 'Do I want to f— it? Is it wearing a … yep, it’s wearing a tuxedo. I’m going to go back to my cell phone.’ It was like we were forced to be together, and he literally was scrolling Instagram rather than have to look at a woman in a bow tie. I was like, 'This should be called the Metropolitan Museum of Getting Rejected by Athletes,’” she said in the interview.

After social media users accused Dunham of being unfair to Beckham – who has not commented on the incident – the Girls creator attempted to clarify her remarks on Friday night.

“.@OBJ_3 is talented, stylish, seems super awesome and wasn’t into chatting with me at a fancy party,” she tweeted.

“My story about him was clearly (to me) about my own insecurities as an average-bodied woman at a table of supermodels & athletes,” she wrote on Friday, adding, “It’s not an assumption about who he is or an expectation of sexual attention. It’s my sense of humor, which has kept me alive for 30 years.”

Dunham also said that “the outrage machine roars on” in her Friday comments.

Social media users were not satisfied by her clarification on Friday, with some accusing her of being racially prejudiced against the NFL star and sexist.

“Lena Dunham is the type of white woman that believes all black men should be attracted to her because she’s white and if they’re not then they must be against fat people or against 'women in suits,’ ” one Tumblr user wrote in a post that went viral.

In response to Dunham’s tweet that Beckham wasn’t interested in talking to her, a Twitter user responded: “Girl I’m pretty sure he didn’t even know who you were. RELAX.”

Another Twitter user said that Dunham “gentrified Odell Beckham Jr.’s thoughts.”