Lea Michele Debunks Rumor That She Can’t Read

In one of the more bizarre celebrity conspiracies, Glee’s Lea Michele has debunked a rumor that she can’t read.

The whole thing goes back to a Facebook video posted by the hosts of the One More Thing podcast, Jaye Hunt and Robert Ackerman, Page Six reports.

In the 40-minute video, the duo jokingly alleged that Michele’s illiteracy goes all the way back to when she dropped out of school at the age of 8 to become a Broadway star.

They point to Naya Rivera’s memoir, “Sorry Not Sorry,” as giving them their first clue that Michele is illiterate, citing a passage where Rivera claims Michele was unwilling to improvise lines.

Hunt and Ackerman also reference things like Michele always having her presenting partner at awards shows be the one to read the name of the winner, never being seen with pen and paper, and using short messages or emojis on her Instagram post captions.

Michel finally responded to the conspiracy recently, by tweeting out, “Loved READING this tweet and wanted to WRITE you back. Literally laughing out loud at all this. Love you!!!”

While she has starred in shows like Scream Queens and The Mayor in the last couple of years, Michele is certainly most well-known for playing Rachel Berry on Glee.

Interestingly, in a 2017 interview, Michele revealed that she still enjoys watching old episodes of the show. “I think that everyone is so shocked when I say that,” the 31-year-old actress said, according to ET. “I’m shocked at people being shocked.”

“I’m so proud of the work that we did,” she added. “And I get that some people would be embarrassed to watch their own material. I understand that. But sometimes it’s so fun. I’ll be like, ‘Remember when we did that number?’ I think I watch it more because I can’t believe that we did it.”

“It’s just to remind myself, ‘You did that. You did that! And that’s incredible. And you should be proud of it.’ It’s sort of inspiring for me,” Michele continued.

When asked about her reported on-set feud with co-star Naya Rivera (who wrote about it in her memoir Sorry Not Sorry: Dreams, Mistakes, and Growing Up), Michele replied, “I don’t like to talk about that. There are so many more fun things to talk about.”

Michele also opened up about the final song on her album Places, which is about her ex-boyfriend and former co-star, Cory Monteith.

The couple first started working together on Glee in 2009, and then news outlets began reporting in 2012 that they were dating.

They had only been together about a year and a half when Monteith died at the Fairmont Pacific Rim hotel in Vancouver from “a mixed drug toxicity,” which reportedly consisted of heroin and alcohol.

“I wasn’t originally thinking of including that on the album,” Michele said of the track. “It’s sort of a sensitive subject for me that’s hard to talk about, and I didn’t want anything on the record that I couldn’t talk about. But it just felt so beautiful. … The song is pretty specific, and people are gonna make of it what they want, but I wanted to make a song about loss that wasn’t necessarily sad.”