It’s currently rather unpopular to suggest that we should take five seconds to think critically about allegations of sexual misdeeds before presuming them to be true. Nevertheless, doing so remains necessary. We can’t discover the truth beneath the horrifying stories pouring out of Hollywood and the media if we unblinkingly assume that every woman is truthful and every man is a liar.

Does Dunham comprehend this? That depends. This, remember, is a woman who has built much of her feminist persona around the insistence that women never, ever lie about rape. This is a woman who has falsely and very publicly accused a Republican of raping her in college. A woman who, depending on how one reads a troubling passage in her own memoir, may be guilty of having molested her younger sister.

And after all of this, she expects to be taken seriously when she emerges to claim that, actually, sometimes women do lie about rape . . . at least when those women are accusing Dunham’s friends?