Lena Dunham Admitted a Viral PowerPoint Made Her Rethink Lorde’s Relationship With Jack Antonoff

Lena Dunham and Jack Antonoff were together from 2012 to 2018. Towards the end of their relationship, Antonoff began working closely with Lorde on her album Melodrama. The two artists spoke glowingly about each other in interviews and spent a great deal of time together. This led fans to wonder if their relationship was more than just professional. While Dunham once said she didn’t think they ever crossed any lines, she now admits that a viral PowerPoint made her reconsider their relationship.

Lena Dunham said she started to question Lorde’s relationship with Jack Antonoff

Lorde and Antonoff’s close relationship led to a great deal of public speculation. At one point, someone made an over 20-slide PowerPoint presentation of their theory that Antonoff and Lorde had an affair. Dunham said she stumbled across the PowerPoint, and it made her reconsider their dynamic. 

“I had never stopped flirting — I mean, I wasn’t dead yet — but I had observed careful boundaries, never taking it far enough that I could be declared out of bounds. If I’d wanted to look, perhaps I may have seen that Jack was not observing them as closely as I was,” she wrote in her new book Famesick (via Entertainment Weekly). “I wasn’t paying attention, but the Internet sure was, and they made some pretty amazing PowerPoints on the issue, so convincing they had me rethinking events that I myself had been present for.”

She even reached out to the maker of the PowerPoint at one point. Their conversation didn’t go far, though.

“She immediately asked if I wanted to go on her podcast,” she wrote. “I did not.”

She previously said she trusted that nothing was going on

While Dunham said she thought the PowerPoint was funny and well-made, she admitted, “It was so embarrassing.” Shortly after her relationship with Antonoff ended, she said she didn’t think anything happened between Lorde and Antonoff. 

“I don’t think anything happened between them. I can never know someone else’s life. I have never spoken to Ella [Lorde] about it. We haven’t talked since Jack and I broke up,” she told The Cut in 2018. “It was awful, and I couldn’t do anything about it except trust that what he was saying to me was true.”

Lena Dunham hinted at Lorde’s relationship with Jack Antonoff in her new book

In Famesick, Dunham delved into the dynamic between Antonoff and an unnamed pop star. Many believe she is referring to Lorde. At one point, she recalled FaceTiming Antonoff and realizing he was in “the recording studio in our apartment, where he was ensconced with a teen pop star I was too oblivious to be jealous of.”

During this time, Dunham was dealing with chronic illness related to her endometriosis. She said that after a bone density test, she came home to find the pop star “sprawled across our sectional couch, weeping into Jack’s lap as he told her that ‘your teens are for experimenting’ in a tone so comforting, it almost brought tears to my eyes,” adding, “It had been so long since he’d spoken to me with that kind of expansive generosity.”

Dunham eventually told Antonoff that she felt “like a ghost” when she witnessed the two of them together.

“‘You’re just mad because she doesn’t want to be your friend,’” Dunham recalled him saying. “And he was right.”