
OK so I’ve read this absolute shit storm of a story about 3 times now so let me try to break this down for everyone. I’ll pick up the story on the day of Manti’s grandmother’s death.
– September 11, 2012 Manti Te’o receives a call that his grandmother dies and shortly after, receives a call that his girlfriend Lennay Kekua has also died from complications from Leukemia. Previous to this day, no one had ever met Lennay but knew of the relationship. Manti says that Lennay had told him she wanted him to play in his game no matter what happened so Manti honors her wishes and even gets 2 interceptions plus a game ball from head coach Brian Kelly which is dedicated to Lennay.
– Lennay Kekua’s death now becomes much bigger than anyone would have thought and donations pour in from around the country as the story breaks outside the sports world and into the mainstream media world.
– A special story runs the morning of the National Championship game about Manti and Lennay’s relationship as well as their touching story. Deadspin reporters cannot find one record of Lennay’s death through Stanford (where she was supposedly a student), the Social Security Administration, or any other state records. Red flags go up all over the place.

– Deadspin uses an image matching program to track down the girl in the photo and to their surprise, she has no idea what’s going on, says her name is not Lennay Kekua, and has never even met Manti Te’o before. Here’s where it gets interesting! A kid she had gone to school with a year earlier had asked her to take a picture of her holding a sign that he could give his sister who had been in a car accident. The girl does without asking questions and that was basically that.
– The kid who asked the girl for the picture is Ronaiah Tuiasosopo, a family friend of Manti Te’o. Family members told Deadspin that Ronaiah created the character Lennay Kekua in 2008 and tried to carry out an online relationship with another person before everyone became suspicious and it was declared a prank. They also said that Manti’s relationship was also a prank but grew too big, too quick.
– A close friend of Ronaiah says he’s 80% sure that Manti was in on the prank because he thinks he wanted the publicity or else he wouldn’t have lied about meeting Lennay. Also, there was no way Manti could be that dumb to maintain a relationship with someone he had never met and there are apparently a ton of photos with Ronaiah and Manti together that have since been deleted.
So overall, this is a long Maury Povich version of the MTV show “Catfish”. And what can we take away from this? Well, there’s a couple possibilities.
1) Manti Te’o could be telling the truth and just really be dumb/embarrassed.
2) Manti Te’o could be IN on this whole thing and was doing it all for publicity but when the story got out of hand, it got to the point of no return.
3) Manti Te’o is carrying on some twisted gay relationship with this Ronaiah guy and we haven’t even scratched the surface of this scandal.
Either way, Notre Dame has got to be embarrassed as all hell and time will tell how this Hollywood movie will end…