Lena Dunham, the creator and star of "Girls" was detained by the TSA at LAX because of a "dangerous" keychain that was considered to be a weapon.
Dunham appeared on Late Night with Seth Meyers and told him about a recent incident in which she was stopped by the Transportation Security Administration in Los Angeles.
"The only thing that got me out of it sane was thinking that this might be an okay talk-show story," she joked to Seth Meyers. "I'm actually getting nervous talking about it, so if I do a bad job retelling the story, it's because it's so stressful for me to relive it!"
Dunham was on her way to Ohio from Los Angeles to visit her alma mater, Oberlin College. However she was stopped by the TSA due to a self-defense keychain that her co-worker gave her and her staff.
"I see two guys look at each other like, 'Oh, we got a real situation on our hands,'" Dunham said of the TSA agents after scanning her carry-on bag. "It's shaped like a cat -- it goes over your knuckles, but I guess the two ears could gut somebody."
Dunham acknowledged that the gift could be used as a weapon, but when she received it, she appreciated the cute factor more. "The crazy thing about me is that I understand intellectually that it could be used as a weapon, but, really, all I thought was, what a cute little cat!"
She explained that it got so serious that she had to wait for police to come assess the situation and she wasn't able to make any phone calls. She was held for 45 minutes and was crying. No one seemed to recognize her.
"I felt like so much guilt about just hoping someone might be passing by and go, like, 'love the show,' just so they would have the sense that I wasn't a convicted criminal," she told Meyers.
"If it really was a weapon, I wouldn't use it as a keychain," Dunham said she repeatedly told the agents. "If I was really trying to shiv somebody on the plane, I wouldn't have attached this to like the keys to my gym locker and stuck it in my purse for everyone to see."
The keychain was eventually confiscated. After she was released, Dunham said she called her mom who said "OMG, do you think anybody saw and tweeted about it?"
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