Manti Te'o Untold: "The Girlfriend Who Didn't Exist" on NETFLIX

He's so gay.

This guy is a flaming queen.

No surprised that he recently bearded up and married a trashy looking hoe.

I'm not buying it.

He was sooooooooo cute!

GAYFACE for days!

[Quote] He was sooooooooo cute!

IS cute!

[quote] The Boy Who Cried Dead Girlfriend

Act I - In Which Manti Te’o Is a Golden God

The story is a classic of the genre. It opens on February 4, 2009—with an event that is, in the world of college football, the biggest day of the year that doesn’t involve tackling. This is National Signing Day, when the nation’s top high-school players officially commit to their chosen colleges. Among the most publicized and coveted recruits of 2009 is our protagonist, Manti Te’o, an explosive linebacker from the Hawaiian island of Oahu.

That Te’o happens to be of Hawaiian-Samoan descent—and Mormon, to boot—burnishes his star appeal. One of the N.F.L.’s biggest stars, Troy Polamalu, of the Pittsburgh Steelers, comes from a long line of Samoans. Pacific Islanders routinely play at the University of Southern California (because of its proximity) and Utah’s Brigham Young University (because it’s Mormon). And one extended family of Samoans with a large presence in Hawaii—the Tuiasosopos—has produced a steady stream of collegiate and professional stars.

Te’o, being the country’s top linebacker recruit, is primed to sign with U.S.C., the country’s top program. Everyone agrees they’re the ideal match—right up until the minute Te’o faxes in his commitment letter.

To Notre Dame.

This reversal rocks the college-football universe, which can’t fathom why a devoutly Mormon kid from Hawaii would select a devoutly Catholic university in frigid, landlocked South Bend, Indiana. “A matter of faith,” Te’o explained. “I closed my eyes and said a prayer. And after I said that prayer, everything just lined up.”

This divine intervention plays rather well at Notre Dame, a school with 105 winning seasons in 124 years that marries piety and public relationship better than any other. Inevitably our soul warrior makes 63 tackles and wins Freshman All-American honors. Over the next two seasons, he leads the Irish in tackles and becomes, in addition to an All-American and an Academic All-American, the most famous player on the most famous team in America’s second-most-popular spectator team sport (after professional football). Although Te’o is sure to be selected in the first round of the 2012 N.F.L. Draft, he surprises everyone by eschewing seven-figure riches in favor of one last season in the warm embrace of his school. There he determines to reverse three years of his team’s recent mediocrity, underscored by its 1–6 record against its storied rivals—U.S.C. and Michigan. Heading into the 2012 senior season, the Irish are unranked, facing the toughest schedule in America.

And guess what?

The team scraps its way to an undefeated regular season in which it combines several truly impressive wins with a few lucky escapes born of the fortuitous bounces and cowed officiating that can be endemic to Notre Dame Stadium.

But the driving force, in every win, is Manti Te’o, whose legend reaches full flower on September 15, in the aftermath of Notre Dame’s upset victory over the Michigan State Spartans. On national TV, an awestruck sideline reporter asks Te’o how he managed to play such inspired football—12 tackles—given that he was just a few days removed from a six-hour period in which he lost both his grandmother Annette Santiago, to complications stemming from diabetes, and his girlfriend, Lennay Kekua, to leukemia. “They were with me,” Te’o replied. “I’m just so happy that I had a chance to honor my grandmother and my girlfriend and my family.”

One week later, Te’o records two interceptions and eight tackles during a big win over the Michigan Wolverines. Afterward, he explains why he spent the day at Notre Dame Stadium rather than at his girlfriend’s funeral in California: Kekua, he says, made him promise he wouldn’t miss a game. “All she wanted was some white roses,” Te’o adds. “So I sent her roses and sent her two picks [interceptions] along with that.”

From this point forward he’s basically Manti Tebow—a less preening, more sympathetic version of last year’s self-styled football Christ figure. By the end of the regular season, which is punctuated by a win over U.S.C., Notre Dame is ranked No. 1 and is preparing to play the University of Alabama in the Bowl Championship Series National Championship Game. And Te’o is the only defensive player selected as a finalist for the Heisman Trophy.

Act II - In Which Manti Te’o Is a Fraudulent Scoundrel

The plot devolves into an ongoing riot of multiple story lines written and re-written by multiple authors: the media, Notre Dame, the College Football Industrial Complex—and, not least, by Manti Te’o, an elusive figure who becomes a kind of tabula rasa for all that is right and wrong with college football.

Since its founding, in 2005, the Web site Deadspin has been the hockey goon of the sports-media world. Foulmouthed and down-and-dirty, it goes straight at all the phonies, narcissists, and boneheads who inhabit the dark universe of big-time jock-dom, although its worst vituperation is reserved for the practitioners of “traditional” sports journalism, whom it views as corrupt, lazy, and slavish. That Deadspin itself sometimes seems devoid of any standards of taste or ethics—it has practiced checkbook journalism and has published alleged “dong shots” Brett Favre reportedly texted to a woman—is, by its light, just a way of keeping it real.

[quote] “The relationship, to me, was real,” says Te’o. “The illness, the accident, her dying—these were all real to me.”

Deadspin’s biggest story was born on January 11—just four days after the 2012 college-football season ended with Alabama’s violent defeat of Notre Dame, by a score of 42–14. The loss proved especially humbling for Te’o.

In the game, as in the voting for the Heisman Trophy awarded to quarterback Johnny Manziel one month prior, he finished second.

The story arrived at Deadspin via an e-mail from an anonymous tipster who claimed to be from Laie, Hawaii. The e-mail read, in part:

[quote] I know you guys get thousands of tips that are “out there” or crazy. This is one that should really be looked into. . . . While Manti Teo is a loved native son here in Hawaii he is also a fraud. The story about his girlfriend dying is completely made up. . . . The story floating around the island is this: Manti was [duped] by a man online pretending to be this girl, Lennay Kekua. Once Manti found out he had been tricked he made up the story that she died in order to ensure that no one asked questions and he never looked foolish.

The lucky reporter who fielded the tip was Jack Dickey, a 23-year-old wunderkind who was splitting his time between Deadspin and Columbia University, where he was halfway through his senior year. Within an hour of Deadspin’s receiving the tip, Dickey called dibs on the story and received a go-ahead from his editor, who teamed him with a second reporter, Timothy Burke, 34, a newcomer to the reporting game, having spent most of his journalistic career as a Ph.D. candidate in the field of “critical media theory.”

When Burke plugged “Lennay Kekua” into search engines, he found nothing but news stories about Manti Te’o and his dead girlfriend. Most of the stories, including those in The New York Times and on ESPN, rehashed the basics: 2012 was, to Lennay Kekua, the best of years and the worst of years. First she was in a car accident that left her “on the brink of death,” as Sports Illustrated put it. Months later, she was diagnosed with terminal leukemia—a prospect that would have proved devastating had it not been for the love of a good man.

The South Bend Tribune, having interviewed Te’o, detailed the moment young love had first bloomed, on November 28, 2009, after a tough road loss at Stanford: “Their stares got pleasantly tangled, then Manti Te’o extended his hand to the stranger with a warm smile and soulful eyes.”

HUGE penis! Delish!

In Sports Illustrated, a writer named Pete Thamel reported that, as Lennay lay dying in a hospital, Te’o routinely spent all night comforting her by phone from Indiana: “Her relatives told him that at her lowest points, as she fought to emerge from a coma, her breathing rate would increase at the sound of his voice.”

Increasingly, a couple of things jumped out at Burke. For starters, news accounts rarely agreed on even the most basic details pertaining to Lennay’s life and death: the date of her accident, the location of her funeral. Also, Lennay seemed to exist only within the context of Manti Te’o stories; otherwise, she was a person without any digital footprint of her own aside from the one thumbnail avatar photo that appeared in every news story.

Over the next five days, Team Deadspin assembled a bombshell so explosive that it would relegate to outlier status Lance Armstrong’s mid-January Oprah confessional about his use of blood doping. On January 16, Deadspin published the story, whose headline said it all: MANTI TE’O’S DEAD GIRLFRIEND, THE MOST HEARTBREAKING AND INSPIRATIONAL STORY OF THE COLLEGE FOOTBALL SEASON, IS A HOAX.

The article correctly pinned blame on a 22-year-old enigma named Ronaiah Tuiasosopo, a former high-school quarterback born and raised just north of Los Angeles. Starting in 2008, Deadspin reported, Tuiasosopo created a fake virtual persona—that of Lennay Kekua—by exploiting multiple social-media outlets: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. And the doe-eyed beauty seen in the avatar photo? Although Diane O’Meara did know Tuiasosopo from high school, she was neither Lennay Kekua nor a party to the hoax. Tuiasosopo had conned her into sending him a photo she thought would be used to cheer up a cousin injured in a car accident.

That Lennay was a fictive character raised questions about the veracity of Manti Te’o’s version of events. Obviously, there was no starry-eyed meeting in Palo Alto.

Also, Deadspin reported, “Te’o and Tuiasosopo definitely know each other.” As evidence, the publication cited friendly Twitter exchanges between the two. Te’o wished Tuiasosopo a happy birthday; Tuiasosopo addressed Te’o as sole—Samoan for “brother.”

Then came the money shot: “A friend of Ronaiah Tuiasosopo told us he was ‘80 percent sure’ that Manti Te’o was ‘in on it,’ and that the two perpetrated Lennay Kekua’s death with publicity in mind.”

The sentiment was widely shared. That afternoon, ESPN’s on-air news ticker shrank the story to a headline: DEADSPIN REPORTS: 80 PERCENT CHANCE TE’O INVOLVED IN HOAX. The ticker failed to mention that the claim was based on speculation by an unnamed source who proved to be wrong. Given that ESPN is to sports media what TASS was to the Soviet Union, nightfall brought a riot of screaming media attacks on Te’o.

Act III - In Which Manti Te’o Is College Football®

That college football is a professional sport masquerading as an amateur one has been a given since the 1980s, when top-tier football schools began making millions from ticket receipts, merchandising, donors, and TV revenue. By the 2000s, coaches of A-list teams—Alabama, Louisiana State University, U.S.C., Texas—earned upwards of $3 million a year. In 2012 the teams mentioned above made, on average, $45 million in profits. The figure would have been significantly higher but for the precipitous drop-offs in revenue at U.S.C. and Penn State, both of which are in N.C.A.A. prison—the former for alleged major recruiting violations, the latter for the Jerry Sandusky scandal. And, really, these are merely the two headliners in a period of widespread corruption wrought by the various moneyed forces—boosters, coaches, universities, media—who together compose the College Football Industrial Complex.

The Penn State scandal, being a textbook case of how not to handle an internal problem, also marked a sea change in the way both schools and players dealt with impending crises. To wit: Even before Deadspin revealed the hoax, both Notre Dame and Te’o determined to, in the words of Brian Te’o, Manti’s father, “get out in front of the story.” They had the advantage of time. On Christmas Day—three weeks before the piece was published—Te’o returned to Hawaii and told his parents, Brian and Ottilia Te’o, that his dead girlfriend had called to inform him that she was not really dead, that she’d faked her demise in order to fool murderous drug dealers out to get her. Also, Te’o told them, he strongly suspected that perhaps the girlfriend was neither dead nor alive, except in someone’s imagination. Or maybe not. At this point, according to Manti, he was as confused as they were.

The parents told him they wanted the hoax exposed, no matter what. They instructed Manti to lay it all out there to Notre Dame and to Tom Condon, a football superagent with whom Manti planned to sign immediately after the Bowl Championship Series National Championship Game. According to the family, Condon, who works for the Creative Artists Agency and represents New Orleans Saints quarterback Drew Brees and Denver Broncos quarterback Peyton Manning, told them, “We’ll talk to our legal and P.R. departments, and we’re going to coordinate with Notre Dame. We’re going to come out with a statement and then we’ll see where this goes.”

For nearly three weeks, though, the story went nowhere. That this silence happened to coincide with the lead-up to Notre Dame’s biggest game in decades was, at the very least, noteworthy.

Only after the Deadspin story broke, on January 16, did Te’o and Notre Dame publicly acknowledge LennayGate. Te’o issued a written statement saying that he’d been duped and that he was embarrassed. Notre Dame’s athletic director, Jack Swarbrick, discussed the matter at a press conference. Fighting tears, Swarbrick called Te’o the blameless victim of a complex “catfishing” scam. But the press conference raised more questions than it answered. Most notably, Swarbrick’s time line seemed at odds with the one Te’o would provide two days later, to ESPN. He told the network that Fake Lennay had revealed herself on December 6; Swarbrick said Te’o hadn’t told Notre Dame until the 26th.

If the hoax had been revealed to Te’o on the 6th, and if Te’o purported to be a blameless victim, why did he say two days later, on December 8, to a group of journalists, “I lost both my grandparents and my girlfriend to cancer.” It seemed suspicious, given that this was the day of the Heisman Trophy ceremony, when the winner was announced. And, not least, why the hell did the kid never once visit—or even Skype—a woman he had described as “the love of my life.”

If nothing else it was a new chapter in Notre Dame’s long history of self-mythologizing malarkey. (That I happen to be a diehard fan of Michigan—and therefore weary of all things Notre Dame, especially their dancing leprechaun mascot—makes this assertion pointed but no less true.) That “win one for the Gipper” speech in the 1940 Ronald Reagan film Knute Rockne All-American? Fictitious. Rudy, the 1993 hit about a tiny walk-on player who sees the field in the final game, a) was loose with the truth, and b) immortalized a guy, Daniel “Rudy” Ruettiger, who was later accused of being complicit in a scam involving penny stocks. (Ruettiger admitted no wrongdoing and settled with the S.E.C.) In recent years, Notre Dame has stood accused of downplaying criminal offenses committed by its football players. In 2011 a star receiver convicted of multiple D.U.I.’s was quickly reinstated on the team. A year earlier, the Chicago Tribune had reported that a young woman, having accused an unnamed Fighting Irish player of sexual assault, faced a gauntlet of harassment and institutional resistance. (Notre Dame strongly denied that they were slow to act or that there was any cover-up.)

Act IV - In Which Manti Te’o Is Here but Not

The Te’o family lives on the North Shore of Oahu, the Hawaiian vacationland famed for its beach houses, five-star resorts, and the surfing mecca known as “the Banzai Pipeline.” But trying to find the Te’os is to hear directions like “O.K., just keep heading east out of town, past the shrimp trucks, the pineapple plantation, and the cow pasture.”

There you will find Laie, a tiny coastal town with one stoplight and four houses of worship affiliated with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, Laie being among the first beachheads established by Mormon missionaries in 1865.

Laie is also home to a small, one-story house stocked with large Hawaiian-Samoan Te’os.

[quote] “He was afraid to tell me he’d never met Lennay in person,” says Te’o’s father. “In the end, he didn’t lie to anyone except me.”

“This isn’t Honolulu,” says Brian Te’o, a gregarious bear of a man who works as an educational coordinator at the Punahou School, the private college-prep academy where Manti became a high-school all-American. Brian, too, is a former high-school football player. So are his three brothers.

“No liquor. On Sunday, nothing’s open except church, fishing, and our garage,” Brian explains.

Inside the garage is a typical Sunday luau populated by 20 or so of the Te’os’ closest relatives and friends. The group digs into a potluck feast of pork ribs, sushi rolls, poi doughnuts, and PowerAde sports drink. Everyone here believes the media coverage of the scandal is born of a fundamental ignorance about Samoans. “They don’t understand our culture,” says Manti’s uncle Ephraim Te’o. “This is the part we’re having a hard time with.”

“He’s a typical local kid,” says Manti’s mother, Ottilia, a tall, powerfully built woman who played volleyball at the University of Hawaii. She adds, “Fake Facebook profiles? Within our community, it’s not how our kids operate. They don’t set up a fake person. I don’t think that ever crosses their minds.”

The hoaxer, Ronaiah Tuiasosopo, knew that Manti, being a traditional Hawaiian-Samoan, would trust anyone who came with the blessing of a close friend or family member. When Lennay first contacted Manti, she mentioned her connection to two people—a cousin and a football acquaintance—Manti knew and trusted. Both vouched for Lennay (even though, as it turns out, they’d met her only on Facebook).

That Manti never actually laid eyes on Lennay makes sense. Throughout most of their “relationship,” they were just casual friends. The actual romance lasted less than a year—during which Manti had only two opportunities to visit the West Coast. One of the opportunities fell by the wayside when Lennay abruptly canceled; Manti canceled the other. His parents had wanted him home, and Samoan sons do not disobey their parents.

“Our kids are raised to be obedient,” says Ephraim Te’o, Manti’s uncle. “They’re not raised to be skeptical. When you’re asked to do something, there’s very little to discuss.”

At great length, they describe the degree to which Lennay infiltrated not only Manti’s life but their own. On multiple occasions, they received calls or texts from her and/or one of her many siblings. After Lennay supposedly died, her “older brother” cried to Ottilia, “I don’t know how I’m going to handle this!” Notwithstanding Tuiasosopo’s claim that he alone perpetrated the hoax, the Te’os remain certain that they were hearing the voices of three distinct people.

“I talked to Lennay several times,” says Manti’s friend and former teammate Roby Toma. “She’d be talking to Manti on speakerphone, and she’d say, ‘How’s it going, Roby?’ Her voice was definitely female-sounding. I didn’t doubt her for a second.” He adds, “She called me to tell me Manti’s grandmother had died. I guess one of Manti’s family members had texted her. So she told me to go find him.”

so handsome

MARY!

[post redacted because linking to dailymail.co.uk clearly indicates that the poster is either a troll or an idiot (probably both, honestly.) Our advice is that you just ignore this poster but whatever you do, don't click on any link to this putrid rag.]

Lovers hugging...

I was molested!

The funniest sports scandal ever

I'm alive!!!!

Gurl!

Miss RuNaya's voice really does sound like a girl.

It's hard to believe they were both quarterbacks.

Lindsey Graham found a new girlfriend! It's Lennay!

Can I have Lennay's phone number?

FFS WHO NEEDS TO SEE THIS?

What does he do now?

[quote] What does he do now?

Not sure what Manty does, but Ronaiah is now a tranny living in the Seattle area, and working at Lowe's!

R24 Samoan men can pass as Samoan women quite easily.

R21 Shitflix is hard up for content, after strangers things they have ……crickets……

Here's "Naya's" dance crew, R24.

I don't know. Some of them are passing, but some.... not so much.

.....

Haven't watched it yet but it's going to take a lot to convince me he didn't know

Oh brother the Catfish they are trying to make look sympathetic with a sob story

He's def grown into his looks. He's very handsome now. He's a bigun'

R28 Not sure why it would take "A lot of convincing" unless you genuinely don't want to be. This was catfishing before it was even labeled as such. Intricate and downright diabolical IMO. I can't imagine spending THAT much time and effort deceiving someone without getting ANYTHING out of it. Not sure who I felt sorry for more.

Imagine speaking English as a first language and watching Netflix in this day and age.

😂😂😂

Shitflix has the scoop!

Really makes you think, brehs…

well smell you r31, if it is too lowbrow for your delicate sensibilities. Netflix has had some great original series, you are missing out.

R30 Facial hair is good at hiding the ugly in most men.

R30 A girl I was friends with in college was catfished by someone, and when I found out that was my reaction as well.

Weirdly, I also went to Notre Dame, though several years before this guy AND the dude who catfished my friend is a tranny now too.

TRANNIES!

Has he come out of the closet yet?

Naya is such a troll.

I'll bet she's a top, too.

Mantie definitely looks like a hungry bottom.

All fat trannies/seacows are trolls and sex pests.

Made sense that he opted for a long distance relationship hoax or not so there will be no intimacy and can stay in the closet

Always the trannys doing this mad shit.

R41 Why are so many trannies fat? Is it hormones?

R42 FAT bottom loons become trannies because they are always ignored by tops . They mistakenly believe tranny chasers will show them more interest.

You got to get up pretty early in the morning to fool r40!

Fat bottom seacows/trannies get ignored by tops constantly on grindr. The only time someone replies back to them is when they catfish straight men (gay tops can spot a catfish a mile away) That is why seacows always claim straight men treat them better than gay men.

The roommate from Notre Dame sort of pings.

R46 They were a package deal recruiting wise. Manti was a five star recruit while his friend was barely 2 star recruit. But Manti would not consider any school that wasn’t offering his friend/future roomate a scholarship as well. Notre dame offered them both, USC and Alabama would not.

FB links are dead. What's the catfishing trans name?

Big Samoan Tranny.

[quote] They were a package deal recruiting wise. Manti was a five star recruit while his friend was barely 2 star recruit. But Manti would not consider any school that wasn’t offering his friend/future roomate a scholarship as well.

Like Brick and Skipper!

R35 That's crazy!!

I don't understand. Why do people think Manti is in the closet? Or is this the typical "He's gay" bullshit from the DL ancients?

R30 Sorry but no. The truth is he used the girlfriend story to get sympathy, even if it was a catfish he used a non existent woman to gain popularity

R53 "Sorry but no" What?

I mean...really? He was not some manipulative Kardashian media star looking to get clicks. He was a dumb, dogmatic footballer who thought the girl he was TALKING to had died on the same day as his grandmother and used that for inspiration when he played his dumb football game. Which is typical football fashion. He was already EXTREMELY popular.

WHY the cynicism? Besides the obvious

R54 He talked about the girlfriend, he talked about the death of the girlfriend when he knew there wasn't any girlfriend

R53 I agree. I went through a rough time during my freshman year of college. I opened up to a friend and he stopped speaking to me, even though I had been extremely supportive when he was going through a breakup. I later found out that he used my personal problems to look like a good guy in front of others, including a girl that he had a crush on.

When I told others in our circle, he spread a rumor that I was "in love with" him. Which wasn't true. I wasn't attracted to him at all (he looked like an uglier Jesse Eisenberg), I just wanted to be friends like we had been.

My comment was meant in response to R54

I'm watching this now. Teo is a total lunkhead. The tranny is obviously getting off on his scheme and shows no remorse at all.

I'm watch the show now (episode 1) and Lennay seems too giddy recounting his/her exploits. Manti seems kind of excited at times to have the spotlight on him again. Sometimes it seems more like a performance. I don't know, the vibe is weird. Manti's parents and his best friend seem more believeable.

I wonder how much he got paid to relive this experience

[post redacted because linking to dailymail.co.uk clearly indicates that the poster is either a troll or an idiot (probably both, honestly.) Our advice is that you just ignore this poster but whatever you do, don't click on any link to this putrid rag.]

He is starting to look like Hootie

I bet he’s still a virgin

[quote] I bet he’s still a virgin

His ass isn't a virgin.