Lenny Letter

» see lennyletter.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Lenny Letter was an email, in English, for American women who already knew who Lena Dunham was. Girls never ran on Turkish television in any form that reached me, and I have read exactly one Lenny piece, years after it closed, because somebody linked it. So what follows is a page about a publishing format, written by somebody who was never in its readership. The format is the part worth the page.

Issue one went out on 29 September 2015, self-funded, as an email, and led with an interview with Hillary Clinton. That was the whole product. Not a site with a newsletter attached but a newsletter with a site attached later, arriving in an inbox at a moment when the inbox had stopped being a place anyone launched anything. Dunham and Konner were coming off Girls and had the kind of audience that could be moved somewhere by being asked, and they asked it to subscribe to an email.

It worked immediately and the numbers were the argument. By March 2016 Lenny had roughly 400,000 subscribers at a 65 percent open rate, which in email terms is extraordinary and in media terms meant something more pointed: 260,000 people were opening a thing no algorithm had decided to show them. By that June it was past 500,000, and 97 percent of them were women. Jennifer Lawrence's essay about being paid less than her male co-stars ran in October 2015, inside the first few issues, and became a story large enough that the newsletter it appeared in stopped needing an introduction.

Hearst handled advertising at the start. After December 2017 that moved to Conde Nast. The editorial operation stayed small, with Jessica Grose editing and Laia Garcia deputizing, and it ran essays and interviews alongside original fiction from writers who in most cases were not famous.

~ the chronicle ~

~ november 2017 ~

Aurora Perrineau accused the Girls writer Murray Miller of sexual assault. Dunham and Konner put out a statement defending him, describing the accusation as one of the rare false ones, and the statement did not survive the day. Dunham apologized. The apology did not fix it either.

What followed is the part that mattered for Lenny specifically. Zinzi Clemmons, who had written for the publication, announced publicly that she was done with it, said Dunham's racism was well known in the circles they shared, and called on other women of color to withdraw from her orbit. Other contributors followed. A publication whose entire proposition was that it was a safe and decent place for women writers to publish had its own writers resigning from it in public and explaining exactly why. Advertising revenue does not repair that particular hole.

~ what the email could and could not do ~

The format gave Lenny a direct line and nothing else. An email list is yours in a way a Facebook page never is, which is why it worked so well at the start, and the same property is why it could not be rescued. There was no recommendation engine to turn back on and no feed placement to go and negotiate for. When the list shrank, there was no second surface to make up the difference, and Lenny had never managed to build momentum anywhere other than the inbox.

By October 2018 the list had fallen to around 350,000 and had been dropping sharply since the summer. Dunham and Konner had dissolved their producing partnership that July, three months before the end, and the newsletter was the last thing still holding them together as a working pair.

~ the eighteenth and the nineteenth ~

Digiday broke the closure on 18 October 2018. The final issue went out the next morning, four stories and a farewell note signed by Dunham, Konner and Molly Elizalde, which offered no single explanation and said that the change allowed for growth and a shift in perspectives. Contributors had been given about a week's notice, and writers with commissioned but unpublished pieces were paid kill fees, which is better treatment than most shutting publications manage and was noted at the time as such. By then the masthead was three full-time editors and one part-timer.

The day after the last issue the site was still serving its full front page, every essay in place, nothing marked as ended. What happened next took seven years. The archive sat on Conde Nast's platform until June 2021, when it was lifted off and rebuilt on a bare WordPress install running a free theme. By 2025 somebody had attached Google AdSense to it. On 27 April 2025 it started returning server errors and it has not served a page since, though the domain is still registered through 2027. The writing survives in the Wayback Machine and nowhere else.

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