A deep dive into the conspiracy theory that believes Lea Michele from Glee is illiterate

Were you chronically online in 2018? If so, and if you lurked on the dark corners of Twitter like yours truly, you may remember a riveting theory. The riveting theory in question centres around one Lea Michele, one Rachel Berry, one Hester Ulrich, and it centres on one key question: Can Lea Michele read or write? Yep, the theory is that Lea Michele is illiterate. A, singular, iconic 40 minute video titled Lea Michele Is Illiterate was posted in 2018 that has sadly now been taken down, but thanks to the power of TikTok the theory lives and breathes once more.

Okay but why the hell do people think Lea Michele is illiterate?

Right, stay with me here, but it actually makes a lot of sense. The theory centres around the fact that Lea Michele was a child star. She performed in Les Miserables on Broadway from a very young age and then worked prolifically building to her lead role on Ryan Murphy’s cursed singing odyssey Glee. It started off as a joke between two pals who read Naya Rivera’s autobiography, which touches on her known feud with Lea.

Nine key points of ‘evidence’ in favour of Lea Michele being illiterate:

1. Lea Michele can’t read and has her lines fed to her, because she was a chid actor on Broadway and never had time to go to school.
2. She did the show Spring Awakening for years and years, because she only had to memorise the show once and it would make it easier for her.
3. Lea Michele went to Scream Queens after Glee, another Ryan Murphy show, because he already knew her illiteracy secret and could feed her lines to her.
4. On Glee as Rachel Berry, she always sung well known standards by Barbra Streisand and Celine Dion and never had to read the lyrics.
5. Lea Michele never uses her own phone, her assistants do it for her – backed up by photographic evidence of this happening.
6. In her Instagram captions, she uses a lot of emojis. If it’s just emojis – Michele wrote it. If it’s words someone wrote it for her. If it’s both, someone wrote the words but they let her pick the emojis after.
7. In pictures of Lea Michele signing books, the pen is not touching the book. It’s simply hovering above it.
8. Her book, the hilariously titled Brunette Ambition, doesn’t have a lot of words and instead has more photos, recipes and workouts.
9. In a picture of her signing a wall, her name is already written and she’s just drawing a line under it.

Has Lea Michele addressed the situation?

She actually has, posting a tweet laughing it all off when the theory originally circulated back in 2018. Lea Michele deleted Twitter in 2020, but this screenshot of the tweet still lives on:

This proved to many as concrete evidence that Lea Michele is indeed not illiterate, but also had its many subtractors who claimed someone else wrote the tweet for her. In the world of online speculation, it seems Lea Michele cannot win.

Glee is available to watch on Netflix now. For all the latest Netflix news, drops, quizzes and memes like The Holy Church of Netflix on Facebook.

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