Lea Michele Thinks the Whole ‘Can’t Read’ Thing Is Sexist

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One of the best scenes in Hulu’s 2022 Elizabeth Holmes miniseries, The Dropout, occurs when Holmes is attempting to calm her investors down after a Wall Street Journal article accuses her company of lying about its technology and defrauding investors. “It’s sexism,” she tells her board members. “This reporter clearly has an issue with women, women in power.” Anyway, Lea Michele has addressed the internet’s long-standing bit about her not being able to read by saying they wouldn’t do this to a man. Jokes that Michele in fact cannot read have been roaming around the internet since 2018, when podcasters Jaye Hunt and Robert Ackerman shared the theory on the Facebook page for their podcast, One More Thing, including such evidence as her early career on Broadway. The rumors resurfaced when reviews of Beanie Feldstein in Funny Girl inspired jokes about Michele reading / not reading the reviews that were simply too good to avoid. But now Michele has been announced as Feldstein’s replacement, and in a recent New York Times profile, Michele directly says, “I can read.” Wait, sorry, that’s wrong — she says, “It’s sad,” which is almost the same thing.

“I went to Glee every single day; I knew my lines every single day,” says Michele. “And then there’s a rumor online that I can’t read or write? It’s sad. It really is. I think often if I were a man, a lot of this wouldn’t be the case.” Michele previously combatted rumors of her illiteracy by saying on Watch What Happens Live that Ryan Murphy did not have the time to feed her lines and by reading a children’s book that she easily could have memorized. Michele will begin her time as Fanny Brice on September 6 and will, we assume, be reading the reviews to combat misogyny.