Deadspin: Manti Te'o's dead girlfriend story was a hoax

Ah yes, Gerry Callahan, a real authority.

 

Gerry Callahan is an asshole for dragging his own political poutfest into this story.

 

But how much scrutiny did the Dead Kennedys' "Holiday in Cambodia" receive?(Obscure 70s punk reference du jour.)

 

I guess the SJ naysayers have to take the Gawker / Deadspin crowd a little bit more seriously now.

 

Does anybody know if Te'o responded to any questions about the girlfriend in the week leading up to the BCSNCG?

 

There's no chance he was duped. There is just WAY too much murky water here. The biggest red flags, for me, are:

The lack of an obituary: Te'o was never curious about his girlfriend's obituary? Never googled it? Never wondered why there wasn't one anywhere online? Never thought to maybe look up the online obituary of his online girlfriend? Not once?

Te'o's dad's quotes, particularly those made to the South Bend Tribune: just rampant weirdness here, including lines about bone marrow transplants and Hawaiian visits and how "she could've been our daughter-in-law but now sadly that will never happen." There are LOTS of very specific details in there - too many. In fact, I think it's likely - unless the Tribune piped parts of the story, which I guess is possible (their name shows up an awful lot in the Deadspin piece) - that Te'o's dad played a central role in this thing. Especially given his crazed reaction to the Star-Advertiser's "Bowled Over" headline.

This smells to me like a publicity-mad family executing a very intricate, very targeted public relations campaign -- albeit one based on a story that is almost entirely imagined.

 

No. Just because you do one thing right once in a while doesn't mean you are going to be right every time after that. To steal a line from the New York Times Managing Editor, just because you commit occasional acts of journalism, it doesn't make you a journalist.

 

And any decent PR guy would be telling them to come clean now with everything because it will come out eventually.

Can anyone find one of Te'o's past girlfriends?

 

http://www.thebiglead.com/index.php/2013/01/16/lennay-kekua-manti-teos-fake-dead-girlfriend-was-real-says-arizona-cardinals-fullback-reagan-mauia-who-claims-to-have-met-her/

I give up.

 

FWIW, my brother-in-law died recently and no obit. More common than you think. And if she were allegedly from a small town with a local paper that doesn't have much of an online presence ...

 

How was Stanford not all over this? This "student" has a relationship with a Notre Dame football player, dies, and no one from Stanford ever says, "Hey, we've never heard of her." No one at Stanford's student newspaper ever tries to run a piece on her?

 

Not that I can find in the week leading up to the game, via Google.