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

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Wasn't it Auburn who hired a private investigation firm to look into its football players' off-field activities? You can argue that it wasn't to the athletes' benefit, but they were still being treated as a seperate class.

I don't know about the school contacting the agent. Maybe there's something in the rules to allow it for emergencies or personal safety reasons? Like, for example, if some crazy fan made a death threat against a player?

 

Ok, we've seen suggestions that maybe he's gay.

Perhaps he's just a prolific masturbator?

(And if a sperm is wasted, what does Mormonism say?)

 

At this point, sifting through all of the available evidence, this is what I'm fairly confident happened:

• For some time, Manti Te'o believed that he developed a close online friendship with a young woman named Lennay Kekua.
• Lennay Kekua was a creation of Ronaiah Tuiasosopo.
• Te'o may or may not have believed he had met this young woman after a Stanford game, perhaps in Tuiasosopo's presence. It is possible that Tuiasosopo created the online persona soon after Te'o commented about a woman he saw or met after this game. This part is foggy. I'm not sure if Te'o believed he met her after the Stanford game.
• Tuiasosopo and at least one or two collaborators planned all along to, at some point, kill off Lennay Kekua. Perhaps they wanted to mess with Te'o. Perhaps they just wanted a way out of the scheme. They were bored with it, perhaps, and had grown disinterested.
• The perpetrators finally killed her off the week of the Michigan State game. For whatever reason, but probably not coincidentally, this was timed to coincide with the death of Te'o's grandmother.
• 
  Somehow it began to trickle out that Te'o had lost a "close friend" that week, along with his grandmother.
• As the attention grew, loving attention, as anonymous teammates are begging to say, he fed the story, beginning with the South Bend Tribune feature and next to Pete Thamel, writing a Sports Illustrated cover story.
• I think that Te'o believed that most of the events were true - Kekua's existence. Her car accident. Her death from leukemia.
• I don't think that Te'o ever considered Lennay Kekua his girlfriend. That was something he concocted after the fact, to feed the media hype machine.
• Brian Te'o added color to the story, as well, making it worse. Because, according to some of what's trickling out there, that's what Brian Te'o likes to do. He's a storyteller. It is unclear to me how much Brian Te'o made up and how much he heard directly from his son. Also unclear: When he heard things from his son, who may have filled in the gaps of the relationship to his father after her supposed death, as well.
• I think that Te'o found out definitively on Dec. 6 that Lennay Kekua was a hoax. I believed he received that phone call in Orlando.
• I don't think he was particularly upset about it. Perhaps surprised.
• I believe he was more than happy to continue to sponge off of and promote the narrative.
• But I believe that something happened between Dec. 6 and Dec. 26 that spooked him, that made him realize that this could all come crumbling down.

 

Yeah. I guess it unraveled after his ex-fiancee's mother ran the photo through a Google image search, which he didn't know you could do. She called him to come over, and she very gravely told him to sit down and do this search. Immediately, the photo of a Middle Eastern model came up. He then ran the name of the model through a Google image search, and every photo he had ever seen of his "girlfriend" flooded his screen.

He said the police won't help him, and that he wonders - not without some merit - how differently they might treat it if he were a woman being harassed by a man.

 

I just read that Brian Teo is the RB coach at Punahoa HS.

One thing we've learned from all this is not to believe stories from anyone associated with
Punahoa HS.

 

The issue being that he's wasn't allowed to HAVE an agent before the NCG (my understanding, at least). That would make him ineligible. Even worse if ND knew it & allowed him to play (hypothetically).

 

Isn't there some loophole where an agent can be a "family adviser" or something, but not an agent yet? It's a dumb distinction, but I think it might exist.

 

Are those mutually exclusive?

 

A caller to Steve Somers program on WFAN:

Caller: "My theory is that Teo is gay"
Somers: "Let me ask you something , are you gay?"
Caller: Ahh , ahh, no
Somers:"From hear on I am going to ask all callers who say that Teo is gay if they
are gay first.

It's probably you had to be there to fully appreciate, but it made for pretty funny radio.

 

Not that clear on the regs. My only NCAA experience is from a D-3 perspective.....agents weren't exactly an issue. I don't think it's a stretch to believe that the private investigator had as much to do with this sort of question / ND's exposure, as it did with helping Te'o.

 

As Dick said, an athlete can have an advisor, and it often seems these advisors become the agent.