Lea Michele, Cory Monteith and Chris Colfer aren't going anywhere.

So, why did Glee creator Ryan Murphy make a point of saying these three stars would not return to the show on season four? And why did Michele and Colfer release statements that appeared to verify this news?

It was all part of a spinoff plan gone horribly wrong, Murphy says in a new interview, taking some responsibility, but also placing a lot of blame on the actors, their representatives and the media.

"We were asked to investigate doing a spin-off and it was a spin-off specifically for three of them" Murphy explained to Deadline. "All three of them expressed interest... for any of those actors to say, ‘I found out that I was fired off the show from Twitter,’ is absolutely 100% not true. None of them were fired. It was never about that. We were going to do a spin-off where the three of them were going to go on [to Julliard in NYC]."

Where did it all go wrong? Murphy said no one was allowed to actually mention the plan for a new series.

"I think that some of those actors’ representatives spun it in a certain way, to be quite honest, I don't understand... When I say they’re seniors and they’re not coming back to the show, what I did not say is they’re not coming back to the show because there will be another show. What Brad [Falchuk] said this weekend at Comic-Con is now correct: they’re graduating. What we wanted is to get people away from this idea that the actors were fired which is ludicrous. Nobody was fired. They were talked to for months about the show."

Murphy says plans for a spin-off have "collapsed," but Lea, Cory and Chris are under contract for seven years. No one is going anywhere and the writing staff is working on new ways to graduate the characters while still keeping them on Glee.

"I’ve learned a lesson from this experience. I’ve learned to really really monitor what I say. Before I didn’t do that. My bad. Stupid."

Matt Richenthal is the Editor in Chief of TV Fanatic. Follow him on Twitter and on Google+.