The Notre Dame American football star Manti Te'o, whose on-field excellence after his grandmother and online girlfriend purportedly died made him a hero in the sports media, was the victim of a hoax because the girl never existed, the university said.
But the remarkable story appears to have taken another twist, after an NFL player claimed to have met the girl in question.
So the story went, the linebacker Te'o had suffered an unthinkable double tragedy in his personal life. Just hours after finding out about the death of his beloved grandmother in Hawaii, Te'o learned that his girlfriend, Lennay Kekua, had also died, succumbing to the leukemia she had been fighting after a near-fatal car crash months earlier. Three days later, Te'o played the game of his life, leading the Fighting Irish to a 20-3 victory over Michigan State.
An investigation by the sports website Deadspin established that Kekua never existed, apparently outside of a fake Twitter account that used a picture stolen from an unwitting woman's Facebook page.
"I would refer all of you, if you're not already familiar with it, with both the documentary called Catfish, the MTV show which is a derivative of that documentary and the sort of associated things you'll find online and otherwise about Catfish or 'catfishing", said Jack Swarbrick, Notre Dame's athletic director, referring to the 2010 documentary ? the authenticity of which has been called into question ? about a young man who is tricked on Facebook into falling for a fictitious woman.
After explaining that the university had hired private investigators, Swarbrick added: "Through their work [they] were able to discover online chatter among the perpetrators that is sort of the ultimate proof of this, the joy they were taking, the sort of casualness with which among themselves they were referring to what they had accomplished and what they had done."
However, Reagan Maui'a, a fullback with the Arizona Cardinals, now claims to have met Kekua in person while doing charity work in American Samoa with other team-mates in June 2011.
"This was before her and Manti," ESPN reported Maui'a as saying. "I don't think Manti was even in the picture, but she and I became good friends. We would talk off and on, just checking up on each other kind of thing. I am close to her family. When she was going through the loss of her father, I was ? I offered a comforting shoulder and just someone to bounce her emotions off. That was just from meeting her in Samoa."
"She was tall," he added. "Volleyball-type of physique. She was athletic, tall, beautiful. Long hair. Polynesian. She looked like a model."
Te'o's sole interaction with a woman he described as his girlfriend, whom he loved and whose heartwrenching story he generously shared with a lot of reporters, appears to have been through Twitter. As the internet reacted with astonishment to that news, Notre Dame held a press conference to claim that Te'o was in fact the victim of the elaborate hoax and not its perpetrator.
Before losing the BCS title game to the Alabama Crimson Tide, Notre Dame had enjoyed an undefeated season, thanks in large part to the heroics of Te'o. He was one of three finalists for this year's Heisman Trophy, which is awarded to the best player in college football. He is expected to be a top pick in the NFL draft. He brought great accolades to Notre Dame athletics.
Notre Dame responded to Deadspin's story by releasing a statement which said that Te'o, a devout Mormon of Samoan descent, had informed the university weeks ago that he been taken in. "On 26 December, Notre Dame coaches were informed by Manti Te'o and his parents that Manti had been the victim of what appears to be a hoax in which someone using the fictitious name Lennay Kekua apparently ingratiated herself with Manti and then conspired with others to lead him to believe she had tragically died of leukemia."
Certain details of the story Te'o told are difficult to square with the notion that he was the victim of a hoax. Sports Illustrated reported that Te'o slept with a phone, listening to his girlfriend breathe as she was convalescing on a cancer ward. Those and other excruciating details of his fictional girlfriend's painful illness and death, details Deadspin rounds up from the numerous media outlets where they were published, appear to have come from the football star and his family.
Te'o has since released a statement, saying:
"This is incredibly embarrassing to talk about, but over an extended period of time, I developed an emotional relationship with a woman I met online. We maintained what I thought to be an authentic relationship by communicating frequently online and on the phone, and I grew to care deeply about her. To realise that I was the victim of what was apparently someone's sick joke and constant lies was, and is, painful and humiliating. It further pains me that the grief I felt and the sympathies expressed to me at the time of my grandmother's death in September were in any way deepened by what I believed to be another significant loss in my life."I am enormously grateful for the support of my family, friends and Notre Dame fans throughout this year. To think that I shared with them my happiness about my relationship and details that I thought to be true about her just makes me sick. I hope that people can understand how trying and confusing this whole experience has been. In retrospect, I obviously should have been much more cautious. If anything good comes of this, I hope it is that others will be far more guarded when they engage with people online than I was. Fortunately, I have many wonderful things in my life, and I'm looking forward to putting this painful experience behind me as I focus on preparing for the NFL Draft."
Deadspin identifies a suspect behind the fake identity and fake account. His name is Ronaiah Tuiasosopo, a classmate of the woman whose Facebook photo was apparently stolen. Tuiasosopo also was an acquaintance of Te'o's before the linebacker's rise to stardom.
The nature of the relationship between Tuaisosopo and Te'o, however, is unclear, leaving the question of the football prospect's complicity in the hoax, if any, an open one.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2013/jan/17/manti-teo-girlfriend-hoax-notre-dame
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