Mean Mom Chat: Meghan Markle Edition. Plus, Channing Tatum’s Burner and Julia Stiles Is Cool Again

Key takeaways

• A screenshot of a WhatsApp message Meghan Markle sent to her kids' new school's mom group (signed simply "M" and including her phone number) reportedly leaked to tabloids and fed into the "security concerns" that pushed Lily and Archie out of the school after two days. The hosts use this as a springboard for group-chat etiquette: never screenshot and forward private chat content, remember your name is attached to what you post, and periodically check how many people are actually in a group thread (it could be 160 strangers, not your inner circle).
• The Cut published a lengthy piece by Jessica Bennett offering Amy Griffin's side of the New York Times story that questioned whether the recovered-memory sexual assault account in her memoir "The Tell" actually happened to her or to a classmate. The piece reveals Griffin hired a crisis team and lawyers who tried to kill the original Times article, and that litigation is now flying on multiple sides, including a suit against her publisher.
• Both pieces sidestep real conflicts of interest: Griffin's husband is a major investor in MDMA therapy, and the MDMA therapist who treated her says Griffin had already described fragments of the memory before their sessions began. The hosts note the reporting exposes how many parties (publishers, ghostwriters (including Sam Lansky, who also worked on Britney Spears's memoir), therapists, and PR teams) profit from turning private trauma into a commercial thriller-style memoir.
• Channing Tatum publicly denied being behind a "burner" Instagram account that only followed him and left obsessive comments on Zoe Kravitz and Harry Styles posts, even though the account had already been debunked as an old rebranded fan page. Travis Kelce was separately named a victim of a Ponzi scheme run by Siddhartha Jawahar, who allegedly used investor money from athletes to fund a lavish lifestyle; the hosts note Kelce will likely be fine given Taylor Swift's wealth.
• Dancing with the Stars is drawing huge ratings (a top broadcast show among adults 18-49) in its 35th season, but the hosts flag it as unfair that former Glee dancer Harry Shum Jr. and trained professional dancer Jenna Dewan (who met Justin Timberlake on tour) are competing as "celebrities" against non-dancers like Julia Stiles.
• Julia Stiles has reemerged as a fan favorite: she's turned out to be a genuinely strong, earnest dancer on DWTS (paired with pro Ezra Sosa) despite her non-dancing reputation from "Save the Last Dance," and she's been charming the press circuit, including a colorful entrance on the Jennifer Hudson Show.

Notable moments

• On the leaked Meghan Markle text: "Happy to be here, thanks to the warm welcome"—the innocuous message that allegedly got screenshotted, spread, and blamed for a security scare.
• "Anyone who sends this private information from the school chat to tabloids sucks... This is about kids being able to go to school. Just have some chill, be a human being."
• On group chat rules: "Check how often you're posting versus how often everybody else is posting"; a texting-style ratio check applied to mom chats.
• On the Amy Griffin saga: "The lesson from this is just don't say anything, which is also sad in its way."
• Channing Tatum posted denying the burner account, prompting a Reddit user's viral reply: "If you have a burner, I don't get why you'd follow it."
• On Jenna Dewan competing as a celebrity dancer: "How is that legal?"; Litman's reaction to a trained professional joining the "celebrity" cast.
• Andrew Garfield's "Hot Dudes Reading" cameo, where he holds up William Finnegan's "Barbarian Days" the entire time but never mentions it, instead discussing Anne Lamott and Ursula K. Le Guin.

Time saved: 55 minutes.