Kevin Winter / Getty Images Entertainment via Getty Images
By
Nadia Santiago
A Twitter user named Hillary created a 29-slide deck in 2018 titled “Lorde and Jack Antonoff, An Emotionally Broken Journey,” arguing that she had an emotional relationship with Lorde while they were making Melodrama and dating Lena Dunham. Dunham’s new memoir Famesick, out in April, admits that online debates (including PowerPoints) were persuasive enough to make her rethink the events she attended. Antonoff and Margaret Qualley separated this week after nearly three years of marriage.
Page Six confirmed the split between Qualley and Antonoff this week, and within hours fans were back in the 2018 archives.
The most talked about clips of the Famesick center later in the summer of 2016, the high season of the Melodrama studio. Dunham explains that she was in the hospital with her terminally ill grandmother when Jack FaceTimed her from their recording studio, “meeting a pop star that I didn’t realize I could be jealous of.” In severe pain from a bleeding tumor, she writes of pacing back and forth in the tub “trying to get out of the way of Jack and the young singer,” whose needs felt “as big and complicated as mine.” When Dunham walked in with a walker to get green tea, the singer called her “Aunt Lena.”
Fans of the scene have taken part in this: Dunham comes home to find the singer “crawling on our couch, crying in Jack’s lap.” When he held it up, Jack told him, “Your youth is for testing.” He told her that he was “hitting a weird note” and that the singer wanted something from him that he couldn’t give her. His answer: “He’s just mad because he doesn’t want to be your friend.”
Dunham also writes directly about fan opinions. The Internet, he says, “made amazing PowerPoints on the subject” that were “so convincing that they made me rethink the events I was in.” During the down time he sent the creator, @buzzkillary, to prove that he knew how to make a joke and wasn’t “participating in a pile of packing nuts.” The creator invited him to the podcast; he refused. Asked directly in interviews if the pop star was Lorde, Dunham immediately concluded that it was Connie Francis.
The memoir doesn’t paint Dunham as a negative group. She admits to a flirtation that turned into sex with her best friend in 2017, as the relationship was falling apart, and points out the boundaries she thought she defined: “If I’d looked, maybe I’d have noticed that Jack wasn’t looking as closely as I was.”
The artifact that started it all is a 29- or 30-slide PowerPoint made by a Twitter user known as @buzzkillary, titled “Lorde and Jack Antonoff 100% Were/Are Being Shady… Lena Is Too Prejudicial But This Is Bullsh*t and People Deserve The Truth.” It dissects Melodrama’s lyrics (“Green Light,” “Sober,” and others) as coded references to alleged romances, a catalog of stage chemistry and paparazzi photos, and says Lorde moved into the Brooklyn apartment Jack shared with Lena during filming. Antonoff dismissed the rumors at the time as “dumb, dumb gossip.”
The current split gives the slides fresh oxygen. Confirmed this week by People and Page Six, the marriage that began in August 2023 ended with an intimate wedding on Long Beach Island, New Jersey, attended by Taylor Swift and Lana Del Rey. Sources describe the marriage as “rocky” for many years. Among the latest signs: Jack attended Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s wedding solo, bringing his sister Rachel to both the rehearsal dinner and the ceremony, while Qualley reportedly deleted their wedding photos from Instagram. Rumors have spread about Qualley and his teammates, with Drew Starkey mentioned in other stories.
There is no public statement from the couple and no divorce file yet. The scene reads like a trial split as Jack visits the Bleachers and Qualley prepares for the horror film Possession. Sources say that “things weren’t happy for a long time” and that “it was his decision more than hers,” but that “there’s still love there” and “they’re working things out.”
What we must state clearly is what has not been confirmed. No one has ever confirmed the issue of the body. Jack and Lorde have always described their bond as a creative friendship, and have continued to collaborate on occasion. The deck is a fan theory, not a proven fact, and Jack and Lena’s 2018 split has been declared mutually exclusive. What Famesick does is ensure emotional intimacy, Dunham’s secret doubts, and her carefree story without naming names, which is why PowerPoint feels “proven right” to many people even though it remains an unproven guess. Every time Antonoff’s love life is in the news, the slides come back, and this week they came back with a memoir attached.
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