The Back Alley Archives

While the American public and the media sure felt duped, one of Te’o’s teammates wasn’t surprised, telling PepperOnSports.com that the players on the Fighting Irish football team smelled something fishy back in September 2012.

The Notre Dame football player, who asked for anonymity, told Pepper On Sports, “No we all knew he had only seen her once. But when the media was saying how he went through both deaths we knew,” said the source, referring to the back-to-back deaths of Te’o’s grandmother and girlfriend Lennay Kekua, who allegedly died of Leukemia.

In defense of the Heisman Trophy candidate, the source said he believes the lie may have indeed started with somebody duping Te’o using a phony twitter account, and eventually, faking their own death.

Early in my conversation with the source, the Notre Dame player said, “He lied, but the media blew it up.” In response to my follow-up question asking if the source thought that Te’o kept the story going because of the media attention, the player replied, “Yeah. Right after the Michigan [State] game. He should have never brought her in the media. His grandma passing was enough.”

Notre Dame’s victory over Michigan State and subsequent media explosion appears to have been the turning point for the source and many of his teammates.

The source said while the players discussed their suspicions amongst themselves, they never confronted Te’o.

“We would never bring it up. But we would look at him when he would get all emotional during media about his girl,” the player said.

When asked if he thought Te’o was a good actor, the player replied, “Very good.”

So many tears for a fake dead girl, but none for a real one. The death of Notre Dame football star Manti Te’o's beautiful, brave girlfriend Lennay Kekau – widely reported by Sports Illustrated, CBS and many other media outlets — was all an elaborate hoax. So in response, my alma mater held the kind of emotional press conference for the fake dead girl that they never granted for the real one. As I’ve reported before, evidence that the University of Notre Dame covers up for sexual predators on the football team in hopes of winning some games has been mostly ignored. “Who can know?” my fellow alums asked, on their way to snap up some more “Play Like a Champion Today” tee-shirts ahead of the big game. But evidence that the school kept mum after learning that that the story of Te’o’s imaginary girlfriend, who as she lay dying urged him to fight on to victory anyway – gosh, just like the Gipper — was concocted from start to finish? Now that’s a national story, and a real gut-punch to fans, involving important matters like the pursuit of the Heisman Trophy. At a minimum, Te’o embellished the truth of his relationship with a woman he’d never actually met, and there are many questions yet to be answered. But even if turns out that ND officials were in some respects the victims in this weird story, their casual airbrushing of the truth will hurt them more than their quite deliberate disinformation campaign about Lizzy Seeberg, the Saint Mary’s freshman who committed suicide in 2010 after accusing a Notre Dame football player of sexual assault. No, we won’t tolerate having our feelings manipulated, even if outlets like S.I. were so eager for a piece of the mythmaking that their hokum-detectors either never sounded, or were disabled. Seeberg was ignored and threatened in life and purposefully lied about in death, but a story implicating those who run ND was for many of my fellow alums – and fellow journalists, too – just too uncomfortable to want to know about. But the one about auto accident victim and leukemia patient Lennay Kekua was too good to check, even as it just kept getting better. In a cover story for SI, Pete Thamel wrote that Kekua’s relatives told Te’o that in the hospital where she was supposedly dying, “at her lowest points, as she fought to emerge from a coma, her breathing rate would increase at the sound of his voice.” And when he sang the fight song, her eyelids fluttered? Last night I spoke to one of the Deadspin reporters who broke the story that it was all a ruse, on a tip just last Friday from someone in Hawaii, where the Notre Dame player is from, who said many people there were aware that the “dead girlfriend” had never lived. “I don’t see that there’s enough in it for him to make it up,’’ Deadspin’s Jack Dickey said of Manti. “But I also don’t think he couldn’t have known.’’

Dear Malcolm:

I'm writing this on Wednesday night, roughly three hours after discovering that Manti Te'o's deceased girlfriend was 78 percent nitrogen and 21 percent oxygen. Let me open by saying I totally saw this coming. All season long, after every Notre Dame win, I would turn to my wife and casually remark, "The Irish truly have a great defense — except for all their fake relationships with nonexistent leukemia victims. That's gonna cause problems when they face somebody from the SEC."

That said: This is perhaps the goofiest "non-sports" sports story we've experienced since Tonya Harding. It's such an aggressively modern scandal. I would guess a sizable chunk of the college football fan base doesn't even understand how faking an online identity is possible (it appears the only real winner here is Nev Schulman). What's interesting to me is how everyone seems vaguely outraged, but no one seems particularly angry. But — then again — what is there to be angry about? If we don't classify Te'o as the victim, there's no victim at all. I suppose some people might feel "betrayed" for having been tricked into caring about Te'o's unreal romantic hardship, but that doesn't make much sense; the public's intangible, mediated relationship with Te'o isn't that different from Te'o's intangible, mediated relationship with a woman who wasn't there.

I suppose we should start with the obvious: To what degree do you believe Te'o's version of the events? It seems like there are three potential scenarios:[INDENT]1. He was completely fooled all season (only realizing the depth of the deception a few days before reporting it to Notre Dame authorities on December 26).
2. He was initially fooled, yet continued to perpetuate the hoax even after he realized he'd been duped (either for the benefit of public relations or to hide his own humiliation).
3. He was totally complicit the whole time.


[/INDENT]
The first scenario seems remote. The last scenario is not unthinkable, but still improbable (the risk of such a lie outweighs its potential reward by a factor of 20 — it's not like Te'o doesn't become a Heisman finalist if his backstory only contains one dead grandma). My gut assumption is that the second scenario is what happened: He was tricked by someone with cruel, unclear intentions. He was willfully naive, and he made the massive mistake of talking about his love for a woman he'd never actually met. But people (and particularly the media) adored the story, so he just kept telling it, even after the realization that it was a hugely problematic myth. So this is the real question: Why did he keep going?

[UPDATE: OK, so now I'm watching the Notre Dame press conference led by Jack Swarbrick, the vice-president/director of Notre Dame athletics. He's taking an inflexible "pro-Manti" stance and making an OK case for his innocence … although it's difficult to understand how Manti Te'o could travel to Hawaii to visit his "girlfriend" without actually seeing her, unless he's just a profoundly confused person. Going to Hawaii to see a girl and then merely texting with her (the whole time you're there) is the equivalent of taking the Wonderlic Test and scoring a negative 36. I feel like I have opinions about this case, but it seems wrong to express them … it's just too early in the process to make any rational judgments. To me, the most interesting (and the least credible) detail from the original Deadspin story was the unnamed source who claims to be "80 percent sure" that Te'o was complicit with the hoax (and complied for publicity motives). What a strange percentage to select. I mean, if you know someone is involved with a scandal, you say you're 100 percent (or perhaps 99 percent) certain. If you think they were involved (but you have no evidence or firsthand insight), you probably say it's 50-50. But what does "80 percent" represent in speculative terms? Does it mean that he has no proof (but still wants to suggest that his theory is true)? Does it mean he's looking at the evidence objectively and has concluded that there's an 80 percent likelihood that Te'o knew what was happening? Did he just pick a percentage at random, perhaps because the reporter kept asking him to quantify his suspicions in mathematical terms? There is something here that feels fake, and it's not just the girlfriend.]

So what is so fantastic about the Manti Te'o story? It is all three narratives, all in one. It's Love Story meets Icarus meets inspirational outsider. It wasn't enough that Manti's love affair be doomed, that his girlfriend had leukemia, and that he drew from her death the inspiration to go out and get 12 tackles in the crucial defeat of Michigan State. She also had to be severely injured in a car accident. It's a combo platter! It's so over-the-top I am in awe. You couldn't be more right that this is an "aggressively modern" scandal. Why would anyone in the 21st century settle for just one played-out story line?


What's not modern, though, is the made-up part. "Billy," Knute Rockne's son? Totally healthy back home in South Bend.

Malcolm:


That was not the e-mail I expected to receive. Are you suggesting that lying about dead people is some kind of Notre Dame tradition?

And by the way, pretending that your own son is deathly ill in order to take down Georgia Tech is an offense a thousand times worse than making up a story about a dead Internet girlfriend, if in fact that is what Te'o did.

Late Thursday evening, an independent baseball team, the Florence (Ky.) Freedom, announced it would have "Manti Te'o Girlfriend Bobblehead Day."

As part of the promotion in late May, the first 1,000 fans will get an empty bobblehead box, there will be a pretend kiss cam for fans to kiss their imaginary friends and there will be an imaginary food fight in the kids' area, as well as an air guitar contest.

"There's not a lot to do to get attention in January," Freedom general manager Josh Anderson said. "You have to find some way to get the buzz."

Though nobody comes off looking good here, at no point does Te'o explicitly mention a face-to-face meeting. It's always on the phone, or through emails, with a large amount of that communication going through Kekua's "brother."


Thamel spoke to Te'o's teammates, coaches, even chaplains about Kekua, and they all seemed to believe she was real, though none of them said they had met her. Thamel noted he found some "red flags" in the story. (He's not the first duped reporter to say that today.) Here he explains the steps he took to verify the details about Kekua.

SI:Your girlfriend's funeral was yesterday?
TE'O: I talked to [her family yesterday]. I cried. I cried at 12 noon yesterday. At 9 a.m. California time.
SI: She was buried in California?
TE'O:She was always in California. Her family is from Hawaii but they live in California.
SI: Where did you meet her in California?


TE'O:She actually came to one of the games. She saw me at one of the games.


SI: October 15, I assume is USC?


TE'O:That was in November. But she saw me at the USC game of my sophomore year. We were still just friends, we were acquaintances.
SI: Where did she live then?
TE'O:Carson.
SI: The funeral service was in Carson? At 9 a.m., a closed casket?
TE'O: Yes. The family was telling me, what the plans were and at 9 they closed the casket and stuff like that.

Don't cry for me, Manti. I'm going to be your guardian angel, looking down on you from above. I'm going to protect you and watch over you and live through you.

So no, don't cry for me. Live for me! Carry on my legacy. Do all the girl stuff I loved to do, like buy Lisa Frank notebooks and talk about horses a lot and dot my 'i's with hearts and read Baby-Sitter's Club books. And Sweet Valley High. Even Boxcar Children. Because those are the things that I, a girl, loved. I hated climbing trees and looking at bugs and reading Goosebumps. That boy stuff all stinks when you're an IRL girl, like me, which I am. Was. About to be was. Because I am dying.
Indeed, please forgive me for the blood spots on the paper. I coughed them up as I lay here dying from cancer of the body. They are definitely blood and not buffalo sauce, because my body is sick with a myriad of cancers. Lukemia (sp?), tumor cancer, brain disease, canker sores, AIDS: the works. All those types of cancer. There's no hope for me now, as I will soon be dead and unable to do Skype with you, and Facetime too. I know how badly you wanted to do those things and kept asking me over and over and over, "When are we going to Skype?" and "When can I meet you?," and I'm sorry we can never make those things a reality. In fact, my doctor, Dr. New Man, said I shouldn't talk to anyone on the phone or accept any visitors because it will only make me sicker.
Dr. New Man also said that the cancer spread to my voice and made it sound weird, so that must be why you said it sounded like I was talking through a Talkboy that made my voice all high-pitched those times we talked on the phone before. I am sorry that you could not hear my beautiful voice before it was ravaged by the cancer I got from that darned car accident.
Let's see, what else? Oh, I'm not going to have a funeral. I put it in my will for my body to be given to scientists who study the effects of car accidents on the common cancer. So they're just going to wheel my body into their lab once I kick the bucket. And I'm not going to have an obituary either, because they said rival scientists might see it and try to steal my body. So don't be on the lookout for that stuff.
But that's OK, because I know you, my darling, love of my life, will carry on the name of Lenny Kekua long after I have shuffled this mortal coil. No, wait. Lennay? Lennay. Lennay Kekua. That is a real name that exists, and it is my name. The name that will linger on your lips for all time, God willing.
That doesn't mean that I don't want you to move on, though. I want to be remembered, but I don't want to hold you back. I want you to find someone to love, someone who makes you just as happy as you make me. Actually, I have a friend, Femsley Kromnor, who I think might be perfect for you. I can give her your ICQ handle, but she is very shy, so don't expect her to feel comfortable meeting you or going on Skype or talking on the phone or giving you the last four digits of her social security number or anything. In fact, she is exactly like me in every way, except less able to independently confirm her identity or verify her existence as a girl. Also, unlike me, she doesn't have cancer, ha ha! Anyway, you can expect to hear from her on ICQ after I die.
So in conclusion: I love you, I'm a girl with boobs and periods and stuff, and I'm going to die and disappear from this world forever. Please remember how much I loved you, and go Fighting Irish!
Love,

Lennay