Did Lena Dunham Really Invite Beyonce to Play a Janitor On Girls? (No.)

2:20 pm | It’s a confirmed hoax. See third update below.

About an hour ago (not long after noon Eastern), word began to go around Twitter that Lena Dunham had tweeted to invite Beyonce to play a janitor on the new season of Girls, and then deleted the tweet. Soon the screenshot at right appeared to confirm it, along with links to a tweet Dunham posted apologizing.

So is this real?

I can’t say for sure that it’s not. The apology tweet is real, and I haven’t yet found confirmation that the apology wasn’t for the janitor tweet that’s floating around. But I’m skeptical.

To start with, the tweet is supposedly from March 23rd, and supposedly got more than 800 RTs and 1000 Favorites before it was pulled, but I’m not finding any references to it before this afternoon. A Twitter search on “lenadunham” (or “dunham”) along with “Beyonce” (or “bey) and “janitor” turns up nothing, and Google, as of ten minutes ago, returned exactly zero hits on “Do you want to play a janitor on Girls? Would be so touched if you would,” the text of the supposed tweet.

More soon, but my hunch is it’s fake.

Update | As of 2:08 pm, this post is the only Google hit for the phrase “Do you want to play a janitor on Girls?” 886 people RTed it before it was taken down, and nobody blogged about it? Really?

Second Update | The apology tweet is dated March 22 of this year, at 8:51 pm. The janitor screenshot is delated 1:57 am the next day, which doesn’t seem to fit. Not sure how Twitter deals with time zones, though.

Third Update | It’s a fake, from a Tumblr that does fake Lena Dunham tweets. Here’s the original Tumblr post.