Netflix doc revisits Te'o girlfriend story

I thought the Netflix doc was pretty good. My biggest issue was how much airtime they gave the scammer. I get that it was important to hear her talk and sort of explain her motives, but that is all I needed to hear. She spoke to the camera as much or more than Manti, it felt like.

 

In fairness, she's a whole lot more interesting than he is.

 

He has a very real wife and child with another on the way, so if he's deep in the closet he's really committed to it.

 

That's literally how the Mormon church instructs members to deal with same-sex attraction. It's OK to have those feelings, but get "treatment" and don't ever act on them. And instead, you should force yourself to marry a member of the opposite sex and have children, like doctrine dictates. If Te'o ever confessed to clergy about being gay/bi/questioning (a big if), this is what he would have been told to do.

 

I was going to say, no gay person has ever gotten married and had kids and still kept it all a secret. Has happened quite a bit over time, right? I mean, who knows what his sexuality is, and it may or may not play a role in any of this craziness, but being married to a woman doesn't exactly mean a man is not gay.

 

It doesn't mean he is, either. Why does he have the burden of proof?

 

re: one of the points above, some of y’all have clearly never seen Mad Men.

 

As the guys from Deadspin pointed out, the question wasn't Te'o's sexuality, it was the complete mishandling of the story by the national news sources.

 

This is where I landed too. I enjoyed it but felt like the crew leaned too heavily on Te'o and Naya.

They're big 'gets' that make the doc worth doing, but there could've been more context from friends, those around Naya at the time and even writers/broadcasters who got had.

 

I would have loved to have heard from a couple journalists who just ran with this story. It may have been tough to get them on camera. I know that I wouldn’t talk if I was in their shoes. It still would have been interesting to me (although I don’t know if many people outside the industry care about the journalists who screwed up).

 

Absolutely. While watching it I had been wondering what happened with the national media? How did they just run with it and not look for an obit of Lennay or something like that. Hindsight is 20/20, but I am a little surprised no one tried to look for even a little more info on Lennay just for the purpose of providing some more background to the story. As the doc explains, this was at a nascent time of social media and doing research on the internet wasn't quite as easy I guess.

 

That's definitely crazy. Went on for almost the entire football season. His family said they questioned the car crash, but then that didn't go any further. Maybe because everyone was actually talking to a person at some point? The doc brought up several times that all involved didn't know what catfishing was in 2012. Didn't things like that happen on a pretty known level well before that? Just looked up the MTV series and it started that year, so maybe not a ton, but my foggy memory seems like it had been around since like the mid-to-late 2000s.