The Girlfriend Who Doesn’t Exist: The Football Hoax That Shocked.K1

Why did the Manti T’eo dead girlfriend hoax last so long?
Because when an athlete tells us his girlfriend is dead, even sportswriters aren’t skeptical enough to think he’s lying about it.

Manti Te’o is a quarterback for the Notre Dame football team. He is widely considered one of the best college football players of the year, a Heisman finalist, and a likely first-round pick in the upcoming NFL draft.

Part of what makes Manti Te’o so appealing is his backstory. Te’o has overcome adversity — specifically, losing both his grandmother and his girlfriend (Lennay Kekua) on the same day in September. The girlfriend’s story is particularly remarkable, because she was suffering from leukemia — Te’o and those around him tell vivid stories of her having leukemia and him calling her every night to help her sleep, and her last words before she died being “I love you.” The story is that Te’o was a great football player and an even better person. What’s not to like?

The cracks began to appear when one of the photos, supposedly of Kekua, was identified as someone else’s photo, taken from her Facebook account. Sports site Deadspin began digging deeper and discovered that virtually ALL of Kekua’s photos were from this woman’s account (Deadspin only identifies her as “Reba”). But the next link in the chain was a photo of Kekua that never appeared on Reba’s Facebook, but that Reba had sent to a high school acquaintance, Ronaiah Tuiasosopo, via private email.

Now, when people started digging, they found no record of Lennay Kekua, and certainly no one died in the location and time period that matched Te’o’s account. And some aspects of Kekua’s life start to match Tuiasosopo’s — she says she was in a location, and it turns out Tuisasosopo was there too. Tuiasosopo got into a car accident around the same time (about a month) that Kekua is said to have gotten into a car accident. So it seems like Tuisasosopo may be impersonating Kekua.

But then… Ronaiah Tuiasosopo and Te’o have some kind of relationship, though the extent of it is still part of what needs to be clarified. They’re on Twitter, there are photos of them together on Tuiasosopo’s Instagram account, Tuiasosopo’s family was a guest at the Notre-Dame-USC game, though someone else may have invited them. So now, the guy who seems to be the driving force behind the fake girlfriend knows Te’o on some level. And more importantly, he erased all evidence of their relationship from social media.

Now, you have to make a choice about what you believe. Te’o has now come forward and said that he met Kekua online and the online component was real — he believed he fell in love with a girl who had leukemia and believed she was dead — and then realized he was the victim of a scam but was embarrassed to speak out. But the other option is that he and Tuiasosopo did this together to gain publicity for themselves, to improve their chances of winning the Heisman or the NFL Draft… in which case, he’s a pretty despicable human being. EDIT: The third emerging theory, put forth by Outsports, is that perhaps Te’o is gay, something that neither the Mormon faith nor football culture approves of, and the fake girlfriend was just a cover for that.