Not Buying It

               Like most people who call themselves Notre Dame fans, I’ve been watching with a combination of both wonder and repulsion the entire Manti Te’o saga play out in newspapers, TV and blogs over the last week. The fact it’s only been a week since the news that his tragic story of losing his girlfriend and grandmother on the same day (the grandmother was real, the girlfriend was bogus) was untrue is a bit startling. The story has so permeated sports media it seems like it’s been around a lot longer.

                In the end, no one was actually hurt here. No real crime was committed, no one was fleeced for money, and Te’o’s reputation is the one taking the worst beating. So why care? Perhaps because of the sheer sliminess of the entire idea of faking a dead girlfriend for sympathy. Perhaps the audacity of telling a string of such obvious lies and self-righteously expecting us to believe it. Perhaps also frustration with the press on its laziness in reporting the lies without doing even basic research. It makes you wonder what else it is just accepting at face value.

                There are several things to note from the past week, and none of them are good. Let’s start here: I am not objective on this. I am not even pretending to be.

  I do not believe his story that he was a victim. I do not believe it was news to him that his girlfriend did not exist. I confidently and completely believe Manti Te’o was in on this from the beginning. He was aided by a sadly compliant press and Notre Dame’s famous PR (aka myth-making, aka bullshitting) machine. He did it at first because he felt in the current national environment that he had to, and then later he or his “friend” Ronaiah Tuiasosopo had the hideous idea to play the dead girlfriend card for additional sympathy. This may seem cynical, but I have thought of this a lot and it is the only scenario that actually makes sense with what we know.

Let’s start from the beginning. For Manti’s story to be true, that he was fooled that the woman he had been “dating” and with whom he had fallen in love with, was actually a fictional person concocted by Tuiasosopo and his two cousins (one male and one female, we have to believe an awful lot of implausible things. What kind of things? Well, according to Te’o when talking to Sports Illustrated, he knew Lennay Kekua for four years, and just started dating her a year ago.

This is an important point the media reports have mostly whiffed on. Four years? Okay, maybe he was embarrassed about being in an internet relationship and lied about how long he’d “known” her. After all, part of Te’o’s own narrative is that he lied about meeting her at a party in California and his father lied about Kekua visiting the Te’o family in Hawaii. When your own spin on a story involves declaring you and your family has been lying, you’re already on pretty shaky ground when it comes to credibility. It makes me wonder why anyone in the press would believe a word this guy says, but we’ll get into that later. Again, we’re going with the idea that Te’o was the victim of a hoax here. Maybe he was fibbing about knowing her for four years. What we do know is Lennay Kekua had a Twitter account that began in October 2011, and started making public tweets back and forth with Te’o later that month.

So if this was all a cruel hoax perpetrated on Te’o, it went back a full year. Someone created a fake twitter and a fake Facebook page, took photos from a California woman who never met Te’o (Tuiasosopo, who knew the woman from high school, even got her to send photos that weren’t on the internet) portrayed a woman online and struck up a relationship with Manti Te’o. This was all allegedly done by Te’o’s friend Tuiasosopo.

If so, this prank was multi-layered and almost impossibly complicated and elaborate. First, there were multiple fake twitter accounts created, including fake members of Kekua’s family. There was also the matter of Te’o claiming he would spend hours and hours on the phone with Kekua during her “illness.” Te’o even said he would sometimes talk to her for hours, they’d fall asleep on the phone together, and wake up together in the morning, meaning the calls lasted up to eight hours.

This is where the hoax story starts to fall apart. Who did this? What female (Tuiasosopo says it was a female cousin of his on the other end of the line) spends an entire year talking to someone, then goes into overdrive and spends eight hours at a time several times a week talking to someone on the phone trying to trick them into believing you are a sick cancer patient? Was this her full-time job? Did her only activity in life involve tricking Te’o? Who has time and energy to keep that up as long as she would have had to? Meanwhile Tuiasosopo was putting out tweets from numerous fake people? All just to fool Te’o. Not to get money from him (the Kekua character was “killed off” before he signed his inevitable NFL contract). Not because of revenge as there are no claims Te’o ever harmed Tuiasosopo. He did it, well, “just because.”

Next, I have to ask how it is these people were able to fool Te’o using these pictures from an old acquaintance of Tuiasosopo. Again, if we are to believe Te’o’s story, he never laid eyes on Kekua in his life (despite several lies he and his family told to the contrary). These two were allegedly college students at major academic universities (Stanford and Notre Dame) with top-notch technology. At no point, not even once, did they have a talk on a webcam? No Skype? No Facetime? My parents are retired and they use Skype, for heaven’s sake. Of course if they had, Te’o would have seen the person whose voice was on the other end of the phone wasn’t the woman in the pictures. But how does he not push to see her? Conveniently for his story, that never came up.

Now we all know Kekua never existed. But the storyline of her accident stated Te’o sent flowers to her. He claimed he did, anyway. Where did those flowers go? What florist was used? Was this a lie too? If so, I ask again why should we believe anything that comes out of Te’o’s mouth? By his own timeline, Te’o continued to push the dead girlfriend storyline after he’d “found out” she was fake, so we know he’s both a good actor and a most likely a pathological liar. Why didn’t he even attempt to visit her in the hospital? Or make any reference to attempting to do so? And how convenient the funeral was on game day so he could “bravely” play through it instead of saying good-bye to the girl he allegedly loved.

 I’ll state my case right now: I do not believe there were long phone calls in the middle of the night. According to ESPN "spreadsheets" were provided. Phone records don't come in spreadsheets. The evidence provided to ESPN couldn't be independently confirmed either. Imagine that.

 I also do not believe any flowers were sent anywhere. I do not believe any of it. I believe Manti Te’o, along with Tuiasosopo, invented a fake girlfriend for Te’o. I believe they eventually decided for whatever reason to end the charade and then one or the other decided the best way to play it was for sympathy and perhaps a few more Heisman votes. Cynical? Yes. But it makes a lot more sense than a hoax theory that’s being pushed by Te’o and Notre Dame PR.

Seriously, what is more likely? That Te’o and his friend put out a bunch of tweets for people that didn’t exist and made up a dramatic story that an idol-hungry sports press was eager to re-print, or Tuiasosopo found accomplices willing to spend spectacular amounts of time and energy over the course of an entire year of their lives making hundreds of hours of fake phone calls to play a prank on someone they’ve never met, had no reason to do something mean to and to do it without any possible reward for doing so whatsoever?

The former scenario involves no phone calls, no flowers to fake patients and little time or energy, just some fake tweets. That’s it. Twitter accounts are a breeze to create and require no verification if you’re not trying to impersonate anyone famous. Then just lie about the other stuff. That’s all it would have taken.

The latter scenario (the one where Te’o is the victim) involves multiple people devoting a year of their life to doing almost nothing but fooling Manti Te’o, without any of them getting bored with it (hours upon hours a week on the phone and internet impersonating Kekua, who could really keep that up?) or getting a conscience about doing something cruel to someone who had never harmed them and without any hope of benefitting from doing it? That seems insanely unlikely.

I think Te’o and his friend were in on this from the start. I do not, however, think they had the cancer storyline in mind from the beginning. I think that came later when he saw how much sympathy he could get from sportswriters who weren’t interested in doing much research. I believe all of this at first was to create the idea of a girlfriend for Te’o. The tweets would show some public interaction without him having to be seen with anyone. Conveniently she was a student way out in California, so no chance of her showing up in South Bend (the old “Breakfast Club” thing, “she’s from Canada, you wouldn’t know her”). 

The question of course is why would a football player want to fake having a girlfriend? Well, if he’s a Mormon going to a religious university, you would fake having a girlfriend…if you have a boyfriend. This theory came to me along with a couple of friends the very afternoon the story hit. It has been floated a few times in other forums such as Grantland.com and it makes the most sense to me. If Te’o is in the closet, he’d want to distract people from that of course in the heavy testosterone world of football. There has never been an active team-sport athlete come out as openly gay in the United States (only a small number of people have come out after their careers were over so obviously gay players must still feel they’d be walking into a prohibitively hostile environment). So the easiest way to do that is have a girlfriend…but not one on campus where he’d have to play the part constantly. Instead, he and his friend (and possibly significant other although I have no proof of that) decide to invent a long-distance girlfriend using pics stolen from another woman and some fake tweets. That’s it.

Now he’s been busted.  Deadspin.com had the story pretty much nailed. Since then of course Notre Dame has gone into its traditional cover-up mode (it must be a relief for them to deal with a fake dead person instead of an actual dead one, since it’s the same machine that spun the death of a student filming practice and glossed over a woman who committed suicide after alleging she was raped by a football player). The university’s lapdog, the South Bend Tribune, dutifully cut and pasted the PR release in disguise as an article. ESPN, with more money invested in college sports than anyone else, sent a reporter who went on SportsCenter and said he believed Te’o partly because – wait for it – he shared Bible verses with the fake girl. Tuiasosopo is a loud and proud Christian, who is also a known liar, but Te’o, who again is admitting to multiple lies just to keep this victim story going, must be telling the truth since he’s thumping his Bible, right? What a joke. Pathetic reporting allowed this lie to continue as long as it did and pathetic reporting will allow the spin to continue to cover for Te’o and the sport from which they make so much money.

I want to see the phone records. Real ones this time that show all the alleged calls he was making. If there is a number with hours of calls on it, I bet it was Tuiasosopo on the other end of the line and not some female cousin. Then, for whatever reason, they decided the Kekua character was played out, and instead of just having her “break up with him” they concoct a publicity grabbing idea of him valiantly playing through his girlfriend’s death. I bet we never see those phone records though. I bet we never see a credit card receipt from a florist. I bet ND’s PR hacks keep covering for Te’o like they did the coaches who allowed a kid to die on a lift when they should have been watching out for his safety. I bet they cover for him like they did for the football program after a St. Mary’s student said she was assaulted.

All of this are making it very hard for me to get behind the team I’ve loved my whole life. I also bet I’m not the only one.