So this college senior was duped by an Internet scammer into having a fake relationship with a woman who didn't exist? Really? That's what Manti Te'o and Notre Dame are saying tonight, but in this video from last October, he clearly lays out a story about the death of his "girlfriend", Lennay Kekua, that sounds like he knew her pretty well and that the phone call about her death came from her brother? So he talked on the phone to her brother, but never to her? Or did he talk to a woman who claimed to be Kekua?
None of this makes any sense unless Te'o knew she didn't exist from the beginning, but kept the hoax up for some yet unknown reason. Likely it started with an innocent question from a reporter: "Do you have a girlfriend?" A name was blurted out (likely a combination of names of girls he knew from high school) and a brief story of how they met after the Stanford v. Notre Dame game in 2009 (The South Bend Tribune has suddenly pulled the article about the couple's first meeting, but it still shows up in their search results . . . for now.) And then there were more questions: where was she? Why isn't she here with you? Why don't you go visit her? So more lies have to be developed, more complications to explain their relationship, but at some point she had to go.
The real question is why? Some online are speculating that Te'o may be gay and trying to hide that from his family and fans. We'll have to wait for an official answer on that since there are no openly gay NFL players at this time, but this has to be one of the strangest sports stories we've ever covered.
