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Manti Te’o and Ronaiah Tuiasosopo: The movie

Thu, 31 Jan 2013 18:24:00 +0000

No doubt the strange affair of Notre Dame star linebacker Manti Te’o and his imaginary dead girlfriend will provide fodder for a movie somewhere down the line, whether cheesy and lesson-oriented, sleazy and exploitative or arty and sensitive (or perhaps all three at once). But with the recent confirmation that Te’o’s acquaintance Ronaiah Tuiasosopo created and maintained the female persona of Lennay Kekua because he was "deeply, romantically in love" with the studly football hero, it came to me that this story already is a movie.

Various commentators have already pointed out the similarities between the Te’o affair and other information-age scams, from the film-turned-TV show-turned-verb “Catfish” to the story of JT LeRoy, a purported transgender teen genius from Appalachia who turned out to be an adult female New York writer named Laura Albert. And it’s not as if Tuiasosopo was the first man in history to pose as a woman in order to seduce another man – or, on a more theoretical level, to blur the boundaries of sexual orientation. Just looking at recent culture, you have “M. Butterfly” and “The Crying Game,” not to mention the profusion of transgender or “shemale” pornography, which deliberately confuses heterosexual and homosexual desire and is primarily consumed by nominally straight men.

Ronaiah Tuiasosopo “deeply, romantically in love” with Manti Te’o

Wed, 30 Jan 2013 22:30:00 +0000

The Manti Te'o saga enters its third week today.

After Deadspin first broke the story on Jan. 16 that Notre Dame linebacker and Heisman runner-up Manti Te'o's girlfriend -- who had supposedly died earlier in the season -- wasn't real, the media began chipping away at an elaborate online hoax that left the media wondering whether Te'o was part of the scheme, or whether he really was somehow duped into falling in love with a fake woman.

Last week, Te'o spoke with Katie Couric to tell his side of the story, maintaining that he was the victim of an online hoax perpetrated by a man he believed to have been the fake girlfriend's cousin, Ronaiah Tuiasosopo.

This week, Ronaiah Tuiasosopo will speak out in his first televised interview since the story broke. In this preview, released today, Dr. Phil reveals that Tuiasosopo had fallen "deeply, romantically in love" with Te'o. "Are you then therefore gay?" asks Dr. Phil. Tuiasosopo responds, "When you put it that way, yes," adding, "I am confused."

Dr. Phil interviewed Ronaiah Tuiasosopo, man allegedly behind Manti Te’o hoax

Fri, 25 Jan 2013 21:52:00 +0000

Manti Te'o, the publicly humiliated Notre Dame linebacker who claims to have been the target of a complex online hoax, has told his side of the story to ABC's Katie Couric (and he insists that he's not gay). Now we're about to hear from Ronaiah Tuiasosopo, the man who allegedly created the identity of the woman Te'o thought he fell in love with, Lennay Kekua. TMZ reports that the apparently grief-stricken Tuiasosopo sat down with none other than professional soul-cuddler Dr. Phil in an "emotional and deep" interview yesterday.

Ronaiah Tuiasosopo’s cousin may have been the voice of Lennay Kekua

Fri, 25 Jan 2013 16:30:00 +0000

Who was behind the voice of Lennay Kekua?

This question, which is just one of the many surrounding Notre Dame linebacker Manti Te'o and the discovery that his dead girlfriend was fake, has taken on a life of its own: After Deadspin uncovered the hoax last week, reporting that Manti Te'o's girlfriend never died of leukemia because she had never even existed, a man named Ronaiah Tuiasosopo came forward as the orchestrator of Kekua's social media account. A teary-eyed Ronaiah Tuiasosopo allegedly admitted to setting up the hoax, and on Wednesday, his lawyer told the Daily News that he was also the man behind the voice of the woman, too. Then Manti Te'o released three voicemails from Kekua, aired Wednesday during an interview with ABC's Katie Couric; voicemails that sounded like they were left by a woman. Incredulous that Te'o could have been talking to a man for so long, he told Couric, “If he somehow made that voice, that’s incredible, that’s an incredible talent to do that. Especially every single day." On the same day, TMZ claimed to have confirmed that the voice was indeed that of Ronaiah Tuiasosopo's.

Manti Te’o to Katie Couric: “What I went through was real”

Thu, 24 Jan 2013 22:00:00 +0000

Americans were hoping for answers to the many questions raised by the increasingly bizarre "catfish" hoax Notre Dame football star Manti Te'o claims to have been ensnared in, attempting to understand how someone with such high visibility could have gotten into a relationship with a woman who had never even existed. Was Te'o part of the hoax? Was it a publicity stunt to propel him towards the Heisman Award? Did he concoct the story with a man named Ronaiah Tuiasosopo to hide his sexuality (that he's gay)? Or is Manti Te'o just really, really that gullible?

His first televised interview, hosted by Katie Couric, gave few definitive answers. The explanation Te'o's sticking with is the latter, though: he said that he's a man of faith, and had blinding faith in this woman. Te'o's parents joined him and Couric towards the end of the show to say they were proud of their son for how he treated Lennay Kekua, the girlfriend Deadspin uncovered as fake, whom they all believed to be real and in serious pain (Kekua's tragedies included the death of her father, a diagnosis of leukemia and a coma resulting from a car crash). "What I went through was real," Te'o told Couric. “It was very real, Katie. It was very very real.”

What did Manti Te’o know about Lennay Kekua?

Thu, 24 Jan 2013 17:10:00 +0000

Sports reporters have been in a frenzy trying to determine to what extent, if any, Notre Dame linebacker and Heisman Trophy runner-up Manti Te’o was in on the hoax that's become one of the most confusing scandals in recent memory. The football star will give his first televised interview at 3 p.m. ET today with Katie Couric. This should catch you up on everything known so far about Manti Te'o and the death of his fake girlfriend:

The background:

Manti Te’o's success was one of the biggest college sports stories of 2012. He won eight postseason awards as a linebacker for Notre Dame, becoming one of the most decorated college football players of all time. He was runner-up for this year's Heisman Trophy, the most coveted individual prize in NCAA football and was projected to be a first-round NFL pick.

Until recently, Te'o was also living the life of a media darling. A devout Mormon, he identifies himself as family-oriented and religious. Sports Illustrated’s Pete Thamel, who wrote a cover story on Te’o in October, describes his celebrity appeal: “Te'o graduated from Barack Obama's high school, practices Mitt Romney's religion and has post football career goals similar to Tim Tebow's.”

The coverage of his football heroics was all the more adoring for the tragedies he overcame to achieve them. The story went that his grandmother, Annette Santiago, and his leukemia-stricken girlfriend, Melelengei “Lennay” Kekua, died within six hours of each other in September shortly before he delivered a dominating performance against Michigan State.

Last week the world learned that college sports’ most inspirational story was a fiction: After receiving an anonymous tip, Deadspin broke the news on Jan. 16 that Lennay Kekua did not die, because she had never existed in the first place.