Manti Te’o was beloved by those around him and on track for a full football scholarship at the University of Notre Dame. He was the golden boy in his Hawaii hometown, active in his faith, and easy to get along with.
Mormon by faith and from a humble background, he was focused on succeeding on and off the pitch not just for himself but for his family until he got catfished.
What it means to be Catfished?
Catfishing refers to when a person takes information and images, typically from other people, and uses them to create a new identity for themselves. In some cases, a catfisher steals another individual’s complete identity — including their image, date of birth, and geographical location — and pretends that it is their own.
Te’o would go on to get a friend request from Lennay Kekua on Facebook and a harmless friendship would go on from there. They would text occasionally and he would eventually find similarities between them that would endear her to him. Unbeknownst to him, Ronaiah Tuiasosopo was behind the account.
In fact, it was not the first time Ronaiah Tuiasosopo was using the fake account to catfish people, the only difference this time was the fact that it was intense to the point feelings were starting to develop and he couldn’t stop the deceit he had already started.
Te’o would go on to request to see “Lennay” but would be met with a series of excuses, to the point that “Lennay” was hospitalized due to an accident and eventually died of Leukemia because Ronaiah Tuiasosopo couldn’t keep up with the lies.
Did they have phone conversations? Of course, after the story broke out and Ronaiah Tuiasosopo was interviewed by Dr. Phil and he was asked to replicate the voice mails Te’o had released to prove it wasn’t an elaborate scam in which he was aware of and complicit, and he did, and he sounded like a girl there; was no mistaking.
Now the documentary which is a 2 part series on Netflix- Untold: The girlfriend who didn’t exist, to my amazement, the focus was on Ronaiah and how he was a closeted young man struggling with his identity. It almost felt like they were trying to justify his actions and paint him as the victim.
The media was brutal. The once loved sportsman became a caricature, an object of mockery and shame. He didn’t only let himself down for being naive and trusting, he also let his family down. Everyone was calling him a fraud and a closeted gay man trying to hide his sexuality.
A statement from his school went something like this;
“This was a very elaborate, very sophisticated hoax perpetrated for reasons we can’t fully understand”.
This is because catfishing wasn’t so popular at the time and it just seemed like it had to be some sort of grand scheme other than what Ronaiah claimed it was- someone looking to be themselves without being judged and meeting friends albeit with a fake identity.
The weirdest shit about this whole thing was after faking the death of “Lennay”, Ronaiah would come back via phone call to say that she was alive. Manti would ask for a picture with some specificities and he would go on to get it. It was after this he had to come clean to his parents about the whole situation because he was confused about someone who was supposedly dead being alive suddenly. The math wasn’t mathing.
I don’t know whether to call Manti naive, but this fictitious character was believable to him because he had asked people to validate the authenticity of “Lanney” and they did.
I feel like Ronaiah who now identifies as a trans woman, got away without any consequences and she cost Te’o his life and what could have been. His budding career, millions of endorsements, his identity as well as his sanity- faith, family, and football were important to him yet he lost the most important to him because of the actions of another. There should be more stringent forms of punishment for people who catfish so that they rethink their actions.
I hope that wherever he is he is doing great, and he’s able to rise about all of this because in everything he remained positive.
In the documentary Te’o said his therapist told him, “You have to forgive that kid. What happened to you is not your fault. It’s okay. Forgive that kid.”
Te’o, now a 31-year-old NFL free agent, said he takes heart from the support he received.
“You’re going to have hundreds and thousands and millions of people that tell you, ‘You ain’t worth nothing, man,’” he said, “but there’s going to be the one that’s going to say, ‘You’re worth the world to me,’ and I play for that person. I’ll take all the jokes, I’ll take all the memes, so I can be an inspiration to the one who needs me to be.”
