Deadspin is saying Te'o's girlfriend's death was a hoax created for publicity

Hey Everyone,

I haven't participated in this thread yet, but have been reading stuff as it comes out, including parts of this thread. I wrote my thoughts up for an email over lunch, and figured I would share them here too. I'm sure most of what I have to say has probably already been said but I tried to summarize the way I'm seeing it currently:

First, at this point, both Te'o and Notre Dame are caught in multiple lies, concerning the dates they claim to have discovered the hoax, and public statements or actions they made AFTER those claimed dates, still pretending the girlfriend was real. Everyone is still speculating as to what really happened, but the inconsistency in their story is becoming undeniable.

Furthermore, ND won't release the details of their investigation, and what they have said publicly fails to address much of the information contained in the original Deadspin report, the report that came out several hours BEFORE they and Te'o made their statements. I'm sorry, but ND can't expect the public to take their word on their investigation if they won't make it transparent. There's a really obvious conflict of interest, because ND had so much invested in the girlfriend story prior to all this coming out.


Besides that, the entire mainstream sports media is looking like a bunch of fools, for not doing ANY checking whatsoever on the girlfriend story in the first place (or in some cases doing the checks, and then ignoring the fact that they couldn't find a shred of evidence for the girl's existence from day one). The transcript (released yesterday) of the original Sports Illustrated interview from September is chock full of what should have been seen as obvious red flags, including very questionable statements by Te'o that weren't published at that time, and the reporter's own half-baked attempts at fact-checking that turned up nothing.

It looks like Te'o was, at best, embellishing the facts for personal gain (or allowing them to be embellished), and at worst, outright lying. He's young so you can kind of forgive him, but what he did was wrong and there should be some consequences. Then there was the media, which gave him a complete pass, transforming what could have been a little white lie into a big brown smelly one. Why did they do that? Probably because they automatically hero-worship athletes, and possibly particularly ones who play for Notre Dame. Then, when it became known internally at ND that this was a hoax, I hate to say it, but it kind of looks like they were trying to cover it up. I'm not convinced it would ever have come out, if not for Deadspin, which was a relatively unknown website before Wednesday. In my opinion Notre Dame and the media are both more culpable than Te'o in this situation, but unfortunately he's primarily the one getting his name dragged through the mud at the moment. That may change though: the situation is also lending itself to a rather unflattering comparison with the Lizzy Seeberg case, which frankly is something that ND should be ashamed of. As much as I enjoy seeing a rival get beat by Alabama, this situation has gotten really ugly, really quick.

Even the "new story" today raises red flags. You couldn't pay me enough to sit and talk to someone for 8 hours a night and/or sleep on the phone while some dude listened in. No way one guy pulled this off himself and I still don't believe for one minute Te'o had no idea what was going on. This all started with the Uncle yesterday and still going today. The longer him and ND skirt around the issue to me shows that they both knew what was going on the whole time.

There's my daily post to the thread:cool2:

C'mon..........you don't really believe he made an 8-hour call, every night, do you?

Just like the rest of his side of the story: total BS, made up to make him out to be this really super special nice guy, that everyone should like.

Nope, hard to talk to a woman that doesn't exist. Just someone to take the fall for the great Te'o. Funny they forget to mention this dude also came to the USC game and was on the field courtesy of Te'o.

230kv_barehand said:

Nope, hard to talk to a woman that doesn't exist. Just someone to take the fall for the great Te'o. Funny they forget to mention this dude also came to the USC game and was on the field courtesy of Te'o.

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I must have missed that. Wow...sad that none of the networks have any sort of integrity aside from Stephen A. Smith, who is supposedly ripping into espn and te'o. I actually respect him a little now. I've stopped watching espn...I'll get better facts right here and on other forums talking about this.

Rattlehead82 said:

I must have missed that. Wow...sad that none of the networks have any sort of integrity. I've stopped watching espn...I'll get better facts right here and on other forums talking about this.

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I agree. Other than game scores, you won't get much from ESPN. They've become the sports equivalent of a combination of Weekly Reader and TV Guide.

Ah, but we now know she doesn't exist. What was Thamel's excuse, for biting on that one? Seriously, if you were a real journalist, and a guy you were interviewing threw that one out ..............you would take it, and move on?

NO! You grill him to death. It is absurd, on some many levels. Any one of which could have tripped him up, if you pressed hard enough.

What little I read, of that transcript, Thamel comes across as nothing more than a glorified stenographer.

Rattlehead82 said:

I must have missed that. Wow...sad that none of the networks have any sort of integrity aside from Stephen A. Smith, who is supposedly ripping into espn and te'o. I actually respect him a little now. I've stopped watching espn...I'll get better facts right here and on other forums talking about this.

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Well I did read it wrong, he met with the dude at the USC game though and talked to him on twitter as well.

cuda.1973 said:

Ah, but we now know she doesn't exist. What was Thamel's excuse, for biting on that one? Seriously, if you were a real journalist, and a guy you were interviewing threw that one out ..............you would take it, and move on?

NO! You grill him to death. It is absurd, on some many levels. Any one of which could have tripped him up, if you pressed hard enough.

What little I read, of that transcript, Thamel comes across as nothing more than a glorified stenographer.

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Agreed. Thamel tries to make this look like he was right at the time, but at the time of that transcript he was drooling so hard at being able to interview Te'o he never even thought anything was up like the others. He's just trying to save face now.

Although I'm sure it's already been discussed ad nauseum in the previous 69 pages that I don't have time to read through, the Thamel Sports Illustrated interview eliminates the 0.001 % chance I reserved for the possibility that Teo was the victim.

The thing about a pathological liar is that they can never keep dates and facts straight and tend to overlap impossible circumstances.

My favorite part of the interview below. HOW do you as a journalist not attempt to verify or at least add some detail from the medical personnel or family for an article like this before publishing? There are like 4 medical miracles alone in the few passages below.

TE'O: She didn't get out. She went from there. Remember she got in the accident and she was in a coma. We lost her, actually, twice. She flatlined twice. They revived her twice. It was just a trippy situation. It was a day I was flying home from South Bend to go home for summer break. It was May. Mid-May. That was the day where they said, "Bro, we're going to pull it. We're going to pull the plug." I remember having this feeling like everything is going to be OK. They were telling me, "Say your goodbyes." From April 28 to around mid-May, I was always talking to my girlfriend who was on a machine.SI: She couldn't communicate?
TE'O:No. She could only breathe. One of the miraculous things was when I talked to her and she would hear my voice her breathing would pick up. Like quickly, and then she would start crying. But her breathing would quicken, and she would start crying. So her brother was in the room with the nurse. They were monitoring her. She said, "Who is she on the phone with?" Her boyfriend. She was like, "That's amazing. She doesn't do that with anybody else." So that happened. And then she flatlined and we were losing her.
The day I went home, that was the day they were going to pull it. They were saying their goodbyes and all that. I said, "Babe, I'm never going to say goodbye to you. If you really want to go, she really missed her dad, so I said, "If you want to go, be with dad, go. Just know that I love you very, very much." I had this very positive feeling that everything was going to be OK. I landed in Hawaii. By the time I said my goodbyes. Not my goodbyes, my I love you, I'll see you later, that kind of thing, I jumped on the airplane to go to Hawaii. They were scheduled to pull the plug while I was in the air.
So right when I landed, I was expecting to get a voicemail saying she's gone. So I landed and I had a voicemail from her brother saying, "Brother, call me back right now." So you can imagine what's going through my head. I was like, "What am I going to do? How am I going to take this?'"And so I called him back, the doctor came in and he saw something and he wants to try some treatment on her to see if it works. From there she slowly started to get better. Slowly. Eventually she came out of her coma and she started having memory problems and she couldn't remember because of the accident. That's how much damage she had to her frontal lobe. She had memory problems. I was actually the first person that she talked to. She was breathing, breathing. When I talked to her, I would say, "Babe, do you know who this is?" I knew she knew who it was because her breathing would pick up. I was like, "Relax, chill. Breathe slowly. Breathe slowly." And then, that was when she first started to speak was that conversation. I was like, "Babe, I love you. I love you." Very slightly she said, "I love you."
SI: Was that right when you got back?
TE'O:Then she started to make progress.
SI: This is unbelievable.

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So, we are to believe Te'o was a victim of a hoax. This hoax made everyone think Te'o was the most wonderful guy in the world and almost got him a Heisman trophy. Yea, that really sounds like someone trying to do him in. Almost all the information about Lennay was coming from Te'o and his family so they were the ones driving the story. When asked how he met Lennay, Te'o said she knew my cousin. Only an idiot would believe he and his family were not a willing party in this hoax.

Tider@GW_Law said:

The thing about a pathological liar is that they can never keep dates and facts straight and tend to overlap impossible circumstances.

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very nicely put.

TE'O: She didn't get out. She went from there. Remember she got in the accident and she was in a coma. ... Blah, blah, blah... "Babe, I love you. I love you." Very slightly she said, "I love you."
SI: Was that right when you got back?
TE'O:Then she started to make progress.
SI: This is unbelievable.

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If Te'o wasn't involved then he should have no problem with releasing his phone records.

I think he also got the months mixed up in that interview as well. I can tell you what was wrong with my wife EVERY time I've taken her to the hospital and she didn't flat line 15 times like Te'o mentions. Yet after all those miracles he still had no idea was the main cause of her problems were other than cancer. Yea right!

Now they are showing his new girlfriend all over twitter that did seem to be real. This was supposedly AFTER he found out about the hoax. This is almost too funny to read!

The only thing not funny about this whole thing is that the networks will do their best to give him, No Dame and themselves a pass and bury the facts.

Rattlehead82 said:

The only thing not funny about this whole thing is that the networks will do their best to give him, No Dame and themselves a pass and bury the facts.

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Of course they will!

cuda.1973 said:

So what if he is the victim? He perpetuated the myth, and parlayed it into celebrity status.

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I just can't see him being a 'victim'...That requires you to suspend your belief at some of the information thats already out there and well known, and asks for too much of a leap of faith from Teo' to get there.

Gr8hope said:

ESPN is reporting that a woman at church with the girlfriend of supposed perpetrator (Tuiosopopo) says she told her he came and confessed the whole hoax to her and said Teo was not involved. Perhaps ESPN should verify the hearsay presented by a woman that has not been vetted before they present them as fact. Haven't they already been trolled by taking someone at their word in this matter? It maybe they would like this to all go away because they look so inept after building the story up to the BCSCG.

Thoughts are not my own, taken from another site, but I agree.

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This is a bit absurd, they are allowing hearsay from an anonymous source after all this lying?
A: Notre Dame players knew this made up girlfriend wasn't really Manti's girlfriend and that he was playing it up.
B: Manti kept lying about it.

You'd think ESPN would at least have the journalistic integrity at this point to not run a story like this unless they got it from Tuiosopopo himself, or followed the multiple sources rule. They are doing their best to make this go away...

bamafaninOhiO said:

I just can't see him being a 'victim'...That requires you to suspend your belief at some of the information thats already out there and well known, and asks for too much of a leap of faith from Teo' to get there.

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Agreed.

If we was hoaxed, that still involves him receiving external facts, which he can rely on and would remain the same in his memory no matter how many times others asked about them.

A pathological liar, on the other hand, only has internally manifested "facts," which, existing only as imagination, tend to dissipate like those of a dream (e.g., when you have a dream and can remember what happened but can't recall the faces of any involved). So, like a good detective does, when they are asked the same questions repeatedly, you will notice that the details change a bit each time they regurgitate the lies.

As I said above, if the facts came from an external source, whether they were hoaxing him or not, they wouldn't be changing every time he laid them out there.

It's time for the Teo apologists to go away.

Tider@GW_Law said:

It's time for the Teo apologists to go away.

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Oh, but ESPN has an unnamed source that went to church with the sister of a guy who made this all up! We have proof Manti didn't do anything wrong! Of course ESPN has as much or more proof that bigfoot is real, aliens have visited us here on earth, we didn't actually go to the moon, 911 was an inside job, and that I am a trillionaire (because I'm saying it, right here and now and I'm not even anonymous).

I alluded a few times about the lengths the media might go to try and cover for him... I even made a comparison, which wasn't allowed but was also spot on in my mind in that we've seen other people get away with stuff that their own words implicated them in. If the media wants to, they can make a guy in a wheelchair walk.