Silence of the Lamby

Forget #TrumpRussia. It’s a distraction. The most important story right now is what really happened with Lena Dunham’s dog Lamby? Yahoo! Celebrity has refuted Lena’s story that she had to give Lamby away because of behavioral issues that stemmed from Lamby suffering “terrible abuse as a pup.” Lamby’s original home, Brooklyn Animal Resource Coalition (BARC), stated that Lamby was treated well by his previous owner, “was mild mannered and very well behaved” at their shelter — and Lena never complained to them about any aggression. But neither Yahoo! nor BARC dared to delve deeper to discover the true circumstances that led Lena and rocker boyfriend Jack Antonoff to abandon Lamby. And no one has explored the PR war that’s been raging since the story broke.

Here’s my theory: Lamby arrived at Casa de Lena in fine shape, then started having some minor behavioral issues due to Lena and Jack’s busy work schedules. Wanting some fresh energy in the house, Lena got two new puppies — the adorable Susan and Karen. Once Lena and Jack saw how fun and easy their new dogs were, they soured on Lamby. So they secretly gave him away to a dog shelter in Los Angeles, who worked with him for a bit and then found him a new home. Yet with fans on social media asking where Lamby was, Lena had to say something. Giving up a pet because you didn’t feel like dealing with him anymore would not look good, so Lena made up this story about Lamby being a hyper-aggressive dog with canine PTSD from previous owners. But when BARC revealed the truth to Yahoo!, Lena went into damage control mode and deployed every media resource in her arsenal — from lowly Twitter bots to celebrity social media accounts, all the way up to The New York Times — to destroy Lamby! And she was confident she’d win this PR war because her opponent couldn’t speak… or so she thought. For I will speak on Lamby’s behalf! Let’s start at the beginning of this dark tale.

Canine Character Assassination

Lena’s recent claims about Lamby’s aggression are not the first time she has accused him of violence. In fact, in the 2013 New Yorker article that thrust Lamby onto the world stage, Lena recalled that on his first night home, “My boyfriend reaches his hand out to calm him and Lamby lunges, biting him.” And later, “Lamby tries, desperately, to bite at any part of my boyfriend’s body he can reach, then hurls himself onto the tile floor.”

Yet in the same article, Lena claimed Lamby “had three other homes, three other names.” This was thoroughly refuted by BARC in the Yahoo! article, where spokesman Robert Vazquez stated that Lamby had only one owner prior to Lena’s adoption. So if Lena was already playing fast and loose with the facts about Lamby’s history, why should we believe her claims about Lamby’s temperament? This contemporaneous photo of Jack calmly putting his finger in Lamby’s mouth certainly doesn’t help her case.

Speaking of photographic evidence from the early days of Lena/Lamby, much has been made in the #TeamLena camp about the bloody panties in her since-deleted Instagram photo in 2014. This is supposedly the work of Lamby, but let’s take a closer look:

It’s time for some blood spatter analysis. If the claimed Lamby bite happened around the R in “Romantic,” why is there blood all the way at the top of the panties? You’d expect blood to drip downward. Can Lamby defy the force of gravity??? And if Lamby bit Lena so viciously that she was bleeding, why are there no holes in the fabric? These are the kinds of tough questions that probably led Lena to take this photo down.

New Kids on the Block: Karen and Susan

From 2013 to early 2016, Lena and Jack seemed to be enjoying Lamby. Though with the rigors of Lena’s Girls schedule and Jack’s pop songwriting plus “Bleachers” recording and touring, it must have been tough to find the time to hang with him. In fact, the number of Lamby posts on both of their Instagram accounts declined each successive year. By the second half of 2016, Lamby had basically vanished from Lena and Jack’s social media. And when Lena would post her #DogDayAfternoon series featuring other rescue dogs, fans took notice:

A cryptic post by Jack featuring a dog you could just barely make out hinted that a canine change was afoot in the Dunham-Antonoff household, but it wasn’t until Lena’s February 2017 appearance on The Tonight Show that the world learned the (partial) truth.

Lena cooed as she introduced her cute new poodle puppies Karen and Susan, and casually stated that their “brother” Lamby lived in California because he’s more of a “Cali kinda guy.” Who can blame Lena for loving Karen and Susan — they’re young, adorable, and relaxed. Maybe too relaxed — Lena joked (I think it was a joke?) Karen was on Klonopin.

But what was really going on with Lamby? The story that he was still part of the Dunham-Antonoff clan but just chillin’ in Cali for a little while started to strain credulity by June of this year. What was he doing there — meditation retreat? Trying to sell a screenplay? A much more likely explanation was that Lena and Jack, in “puppy love” with Karen and Susan, had simply tired of Lamby and had given him away. On a sequence of Instagram posts — one of Karen and one of Susan — fans got increasingly pointed about Lamby in the comments:

It was clear to her most passionate fans that Lena had given Lamby away. So Lena, savvy media operator that she is, concocted a PR strategy to frame the narrative in a way that made her look like a caring mother doing the best thing she could for her dog.

La La Lamby

On June 21, Lena posted the infamous Instagram in which she blamed Lamby’s supposed “terrible abuse as a pup” for his “aggression,” and described getting rid of Lamby as a “responsible” action. Ironically, she started the post off by saying “honesty is my jam.” Uh, yeah…

This post immediately led to a series of Lena-regurgitating puff pieces on celeb sites like People, US Weekly, and Just Jared, with headlines like, “Lena Dunham Explains ‘Heartbreaking’ Decision to Give Up Beloved Dog Lamby.”

To keep the positive buzz going, Lamby’s new owner Dani Shay, a singer/songwriter/actress, posted an Instagram collection of Lamby enjoying his new life in LA. She made sure to praise Lena — and bash Lamby.

Did she really need to talk about Lamby drinking his own piss??? And I’m sure calling Lena an “angel” and thanking Jack had nothing to do with Shay’s acting/singing aspirations, which could be seriously helped by this entertainment power duo…

But after digging deeper, I realized that Shay was a mere pawn in the much larger game of triple-threat singer/actor/dog whisperer Matt Beisner, owner of Lamby’s LA “treatment facility” The Zen Dog. Shay (who is a former Zen Dog employee) toeing the Lena line to help her career is nothing compared to Beisner. Beisner, who is working on a musical called “Jesus Morrison” and plays with a band called “Yellowdog,” spun his time with Lamby into a New York Magazine article all about Zen Dog — complete with a hero shot.

In the article, Beisner tips his fame-obsessed hand by name-dropping comedy A-listers Carrie Brownstein, Max Winkler and Jen Statsky as clients. And in between New Age aphorisms, he manages to describe Lamby’s condition upon arrival at Zen Dog as, “Heavily medicated, had a nasty temperament, and was drinking his own urine.” Again with the piss-drinking! Beisner claims that drinking his own piss is a sign that Lamby was abused as a pup as Lena claimed. But ironically, my own research suggests that urine-drinking is actually a sign that a dog needs to be taken out of the house more frequently — which was tough for Lena and Jack with their schedules.

In any case, Lena’s media push was going great. She looked good, Dani Shay looked good, Beisner looked like the Dalai Lama of Dogs. Sure, Lamby was made out to be a pee-drinking madman, but that was neither here nor there for this crew.

BARC Bites — and Beisner Bites Back Harder!

Then Yahoo! dropped their BARC bombshell on July 6, and Lena faced a wave of negative press. Everyone from The Hollywood Reporter to The Washington Post to USA Today picked up the story and was questioning her claim that she gave away Lamby because he was aggressive due to “abuse.”

So Lena and Jack took to social media to mount their defense, doubling down on the “Lamby was aggressive” story. Somehow Lamby posted as well — defending Lena…

The Lamby Twitter and Instagram accounts claim to be run by a fan, although some say Lena herself is behind them. Speaking of Twitter chicanery, who are these people who were retweeting pro-Lena Lamby stories?

Does Jeremy Pittman, “Online Business expert // Part-time traveler // Full-time dad/husband” exist? Or is he just a bot? A Jack sock-puppet perhaps?

More importantly, the article this “Jeremy Pittman” retweeted was part of a wave of Matt Beisner-related press to come out after the Yahoo! story. For while Lena and Jack played nice even as they disagreed with BARC’s characterization, Beisner served as the attack dog of the #TeamLena media operation. He hit back hard at BARC — and Lamby — in the tawdriest of web tabloids, TMZ. The key paragraph:

Now Lamby’s drawing blood from 3 people?! Where does he come up with this shit — has he been reading too much Bunnicula? And questioning BARC’s judgment when they’ve been rescuing dogs for 30 years and Zen Dog is just a few years old is absurd.

The TMZ story got some pickup from People-type publications, so #TeamLena had accomplished its pushback goal. But having tasted the attention that TMZ brought him, Beisner couldn’t be stopped. Like many attack dogs let off their leash, he got out of control. He went rogue. He started tagging every publication he could think of on Instagram to try to get more coverage. He seems to have succeeded: a Google News search now shows his name popping up all over the internet. Oddly, even after being on TMZ, Beisner was obsessed with getting on Inside Edition, the now-irrelevant but very popular in its day ’90s version of TMZ. I guess he’s a millennial at heart!

Beisner’s insatiable media hunger and general inability to be controlled soon became too much for Lena. It was like having Kellyanne Conway out there as your spokesperson. So she decided to take this story out of the gutter… and into the august pages of The New York Times.

Lena, PR Warrior Princess

Instead of continuing to fight back, Lena realized she had to change her personal narrative to an entirely different story. So she got The New York Times to publish this flattering piece on July 9 about her selling her clothes at an auction, with the proceeds going to Planned Parenthood. Aside from a passing mention of #Lambygate, the article’s canine content consists of, “her toy poodles, Susan and Karen, napped around her.” Maybe they were on Klonopin. Either way, Lena’s “moving on” gambit seems to have succeeded:

Having worked in media, I can tell you the press has an incredibly short attention span and is easily whipped in a different direction from the one they were headed in just a day earlier. Ask President Trump. Pretty soon, Lamby will fade from the public consciousness, just as Lena wanted him to.

But I haven’t forgotten. And I hope you don’t either. For Lamby watches us all from his perch atop the mountains of Southern California, reminding us that in the age of “Fake News” and sophisticated PR campaigns, the truth has never been more important.

Paws and Reflect

All jokes and speculation aside, the story here — and the reason why #Lambygate should be seen as relevant whatsoever — is that if we peel back the layers of this mini-scandal, we see how contemporary internet celebrity power operates. Today’s star lives a life so out of balance that she cannot care for a dog. Today’s star is so scrutinized that she can’t even get rid of her dog when it becomes obvious that she should. Today’s star then attempts to manipulate the media as a kind of selfish damage control — all against the obvious alternative, which would be to simply be honest about the problem: that the life of a star today is grotesquely difficult and perhaps even inhumane.

Post Script: Since I started writing this post, Matt Beisner managed to get on Inside Edition, in a segment called “UPWARD, DOG.” Way to go, Matt!