Lena Dunham, the Girls creator and star, opened up about an experience in college when she was date raped in her first memoir Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She’s “Learned.”

Lena Dunham On Date Rape

In Not That Kind of Girl’s “chapter about date rape,” Dunham recounts a traumatic experience during her college years at Oberlin College.

"It was a painful experience physically and emotionally and one I spent a long time trying to reconcile," Dunham told Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "I actually [have] been thinking about it a lot this week because I sent an email to somebody who I had known at that time who knew the guy who had perpetrated the act…I wanted to make it clear to this old friend what I felt had happened before he potentially… read about it."

"I hated the idea of somebody finding out that information [without a heads-up] because at the time that it happened, it wasn't something I was able to be honest about," Dunham added. "I was able to share pieces, but I used the lens of humor, which has always been my default-mode to try to talk around it."

Dunham went on to recall, "I said to this old friend in an email: 'I spent so much time scared; I spent so much time ashamed. I don't feel that way anymore and it's not because of my job, it's not because of my boyfriend, it's not because of feminism, though all those things helped. It's because I told the story. And I'm still here, and my identity hasn't shifted in some way that I can't repair. And I still feel like myself and I feel less alone.'"

Dunham, who has been called an over-sharer many times throughout her relatively short but successful career, did worry how her essay on sexual assault would be received. However, the self-proclaimed feminist actress, felt that she had a responsibility to talk about something that is often taboo.

"This was an essay I was very anxious and self-conscious about putting in the book because we are in a current culture where everything is turned into a game of telephone and it turns into a headline," she told Howard Stern on his radio show.

"[But] we are living in a moment where campus assault is an epidemic and the amount of young women who don't feel safe in their own college campuses or violated by people they know, then blame themselves because they are indulging in typical college behavior," she added. "And so, I think so many of these young women are speaking out."

Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She’s “Learned" is currently available for purchase.