Lena Dunhams memoir reopens the Jack Antonoff–Lorde case

I can't quite figure out what year we are living in.

Let me more clear. I can't pin down what year the chronically online are living in. We are in an unprecedented time of tech advancement, what with artificial intelligence taking over our lives and astronauts literally going back to the moon. But everywhere I turn, I see remnants of the past: People are yearning for 2010s hipster aesthetics. Avatar: The Last Airbender fan cams are all over my FYP. Celebrities are skeletally thin again, and thinspo pages and eating disorder content are taking over TikTok.

But most confusing: Lena Dunham and Jack Antonoff are once again the talk of the town.

Dunham (actor, writer, and director) and Antonoff (Bleachers frontman and pop-girl collaborator) dated from 2012 to 2016. Their relationship was quintessentially of the era. It was a bit messy. Then came "The PowerPoint."

Responding to swirling rumors after the release of Lorde's 2017 hit Melodrama, a former Twitter user by the name @buzzkillary put together a thesis. In her account and the accompanying 29-slide PowerPoint, Buzzkillary claims that Lorde and Antonoff were lovers and that the singer's breakout hit "Green Light," among others, was about him.

The conspiracy acted as all online conspiracies do, lying in wait in the dark corners of niche fandoms until a relevant Hollywood news item — like Lorde's 2025 album Virgin, Antonoff's marriage to actor Margaret Qualley, or Dunham's latest show about a young woman who was cheated on — wrenched it out from the shadows. But then Dunham's new memoir, Famesick, dropped, and everything got a little more real.

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In Famesick, Dunham describes the full fallout of her relationship with Antonoff for the first time, regaling the intimate details of an emotionally complicated relationship he had with a certain "teen pop star"(the internet, and PowerPoint, have long surmised it's Lorde).

Dunham says this artist and her partner spent hours "ensconsed together" and that she called her "Aunt Lena" during a period of time Dunham was using a walker due to chronic illness. One quote was particularly damning in the eyes of the internet. She describes the star in question "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." She goes on to say, "It had been so long since he'd spoken to me with that kind of expansive generosity."

Then, Dunham admits to her own faux pas: She cheated on Antonoff once it all became too much. The internet, of course, had many thoughts. Which cheating scandal was worse, Antonoff's or Dunham's? Who was the victim here?

Even Tumblr chimed in.

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There are those who have taken Dunham's as full-fledged confirmation of a torrid affair, reinforcing the knotted web outlined in the PowerPoint. Many felt sympathy for Dunham, who has been at the center of several controversies since the 2010s.

To some, this was an opportunity to visit other connections, including Taylor Swift. Could her songs have actually been about the Antonoff/ Dunham debacle this whole time, an observer and one of their closest friends?

Then there were others who, in a real throwback to the old internet, only had cruel words for the women involved in the emotional love triangle. Dunham and Lorde — both of whom have been targets of vitriolic comments related to their appearance and art — were transgressors, or were pitiful, or just simply ugly. Antonoff was...there.

Lorde, who would have been in her late teens and early twenties during the peak of her collaboration with then 32-year-old Antonoff, is just one of many young pop women who have collaborated with the producer. And Antonoff wasn't the only older Hollywood man with whom she was associated. As users tried to spot the Antonoff/ Dunham parallels in Lorde's discography, others rightfully pointed out the more probable muse, a Universal Music promotions director named Justin Warren who Lorde was linked in 2015. He was 17 years older than her.

Dunham's quote, taken in its full context in Famesick, acknowledges a larger problem: That Antonoff was extremely close to a lot of his collaborators and that they had a bond she wasn't invited to join.

These are layers that not even the internet's most infamous PowerPoint can sum up.

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Amid all the internet discourse, I ask: What outcome would soothe the masses the most? Do they need to see a mass cancellation of Lorde? Or Antonoff or Dunham, both of whom have been villains of the internet for years? Or is this just a big "I told you so!" moment for the PowerPoint truthers? What, ultimately, do we gain from theorizing about any of it online?

Dunham herself has acknowledged the conspiracy during the press cycle for Famesick, an honesty about her checkered past that the internet has come to respect about her as she's aged and embraced her cultural legacy — that's certainly not a vestige of the Old Internet. Dunham says she saw the presentation years ago and that it was "so convincing they had me rethinking events that I myself had been present for." She even admitted that she reached out to the PowerPoint's creator during a "low moment."

Dunham, through Famesick, is still processing what happened during the nascent years of internet rumor and cancellation, just like every other social media denizen who was online at the time. And we still don't know what to take from it.

If 2016 really was "the last good year," as many TikTok videos suggest, 2026 is trying really hard to reheat its nachos — right down to linking to Buzzfeed articles about Lena Dunham PowerPoint theories.