Manti Te'o did lose his grandmother this past fall. Annette Santiago died on Sept. 11, 2012, at the age of 72, according to Social Security Administration records in Nexis. But there is no SSA record there of the death of Lennay Marie Kekua, that day or any other. Her passing, recounted so many times in the national media, produces no obituary or funeral announcement in Nexis, and no mention in the Stanford student newspaper.
Nor is there any report of a severe auto accident involving a Lennay Kekua. Background checks turn up nothing. The Stanford registrar's office has no record that a Lennay Kekua ever enrolled. There is no record of her birth in the news. Outside of a few Twitter and Instagram accounts, there's no online evidence that Lennay Kekua ever existed.
The photographs identified as Kekua—in online tributes and on TV news reports—are pictures from the social-media accounts of a 22-year-old California woman who is not named Lennay Kekua. She is not a Stanford graduate; she has not been in a severe car accident; and she does not have leukemia. And she has never met Manti Te'o.
Originally Posted by Cliffs of Deadspin original article
Lenny Kekua is not a real person
The photographs identified as Kekua are pictures from the facebook of a California woman who is completely unrelated.
Nov. 28, 2009: Te'o and Kekua meet after Stanford's 45-38 victory over Notre Dame in Palo Alto.
Brian Te'o (Manti's father)"Every once in a while, she would travel to Hawaii, and that happened to be the time Manti was home, so he would meet with her there."
Early 2012: Te'o and Kekua become a couple. They talk on the phone nightly.
Some time in 2012: Kekua has a car accident somewhere in California that leaves her "on the brink of death"
Sept. 10, 2012: Kekua is released from the hospital; Manti's father, Brian, congratulates her "via telephone"
Sept. 12, 2012 (morning): Te'o is informed of his grandmother's passing (Sports Illustrated).
Sept. 12, 2012 (afternoon): Te'o is informed of Kekua's passing by her older brother, Koa
It was around this time that Te'o's Heisman campaign began in earnest, aided in part by the South Bend Tribune. He appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated's Oct. 1 issue, above the headline, "The Full Manti."
Manti Te'o was the victim of a "very elaborate, very sophisticated hoax with a certain cruelty at its core."
The school had known about the hoax Dec. 26.
Swarbrick said that he met with Te'o on Dec. 27 and 28 to discuss the hoax, then presented the issue to other Notre Dame officials. Te'o answered questions from those officials, as well.
Notre Dame commissioned a private investigation of the matter. The findings of that investigation indicated that a number of individuals were involved in the fraud, and that online chatter among them proved their collusion in perpetrating it. On Jan. 5, he presented the findings of the investigation to the Te'o family and allowed the family to further pursue the matter. Swarbrick said he believed the Te'os planned to release the story next week.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Empire Man
roses are red
clovers are green
Kekua is dead
without having been
domes are not gold
Lennay had no pigment
Manti was bold
or he fapped to a figment
rosebuds are red
in the pink cheeks of Te'o
god help this thread
if Manti is gayo
SI: How did you meet her? TE'O: We met just, ummmm, just she knew my cousin. And kind of saw me there so. Just kind of regular.
SI: How long were you dating? I know that can be a complicated question.
TE'O: Oct. 15 was the official date. Of last year. I've known her for four years. So we've been friends.
SI: How old was she when she passed?
TE'O: She was 22.
[B]SI: What did she do?
TE'O: She actually just graduated from Stanford. She worked at Clark's Construction Company, I think. She replaced her dad after her dad passed.
SI: When did her dad pass?
TE'O: In October. She took that mantle for him.
TE'O: .... And my girlfriend was just someone who was so loving and caring and cares for others. She really loves my parents and my parents love her. She called and she offered her condolences on behalf of her and her family and she was telling them that she loves him and how they're thinking and praying for us....
SI: How did it happen?
TE'O: It was just so sudden. I don't know the details of it. It was just a surprise.
SI: What was her older brother's name?
TE'O: Koa.
SI: What did he have to tell you?
TE'O: I kind of felt it. He was just crying and crying and crying. I just had to calm him down. I was like, "You have to speak clearly, I need to know what's going on." That's when he told me, Lala is gone. That's what they call her. They call her Lala. SI: You would literally sleep with your phone on with her on it?
TE'O: With her on it.
SI: When you woke up?
TE'O: She's be on it.
SI: What would the phone say?
TE'O: Like eight hours. Lucky she had AT&T so it was all free or my family would kill me. SI: When did you start talking to her all night?
TE'O: When she got in her accident?
SI: So starting in April?
TE'O: Yeah and you know, she was in a coma. I would try, and you know.
SI: Hit by a drunk driver. What were her injuries?
TE'O: I don't know. She had a lot of different injuries.
SI: How long was she hospitalized?
TE'O: She was in that hospital for about two months. SI: Wow, did she get out?
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.
Leading Theories
Quote:
Originally Posted by Bill Simmons
this was either:
(a) a phenomenal hoax pulled off on someone who was phenomenally naive
(b) a snowball-type story in which Te'o got catfished, found out in the August-September range, then decided to keep embellishing the story and making things worse over just coming clean
(c) the handiwork of one of the greatest pathological liars who ever lived, and someone who was involved in the hoax the whole time
(d) the workings of a closeted football star who invented a fake girlfriend to throw everyone off the scent, never imagining that his career and team would take off, and that the ensuing level of scrutiny ended up trapping him within this spiderweb of lies that just kept getting worse and worse.
Fearful for her family's safety, she anonymously said Ronaiah Tuiasosopo gave her the tearful confession and account of how he played what he said was at first a game on the unsuspecting Te'o. And, she said, he told her that it wasn't the first time he had done it.
OTL also interviewed two other people who said they have a cousin who had the same online hoax pulled on them by Tuiasosopo.
"I just knew that my cousin would invite her to certain events and Lennay would always say she would go to those things, but she would never end up going and instead of her going we would see Ronaiah,"
Ronaiah said he and his two cousins, one boy and one girl, were the three responsible running the hoax.
This week, we got in touch with a woman living in Torrance, Calif. We'll call her Reba, to protect her identity. She was initially confused, then horrified to find that she had become the face of a dead woman. "That picture," she told us over the phone, "is a picture of me from my Facebook account."
In before Te'o reveals his 2p2 sn and that he's been posting in BBV4L since 2009.
This week, we got in touch with a woman living in Torrance, Calif. We'll call her Reba, to protect her identity. She was initially confused, then horrified to find that she had become the face of a dead woman. "That picture," she told us over the phone, "is a picture of me from my Facebook account."
Quote:
All of those photographs—with one important exception—came from the private Facebook and Instagram accounts of Reba, whom we found after an exhaustive related-images search of each of Lennay's images (most of which had been modified in some way to prevent reverse image searching). We sent her a number of photographs that had appeared on Lennay's Twitter account, which is now private but apparently still active (see this retweet, for instance). One picture in particular brought Reba to a start. It had been used briefly as @LoveMSMK's Twitter avatar and later in the background of the page (we've blurred out the face, at Reba's request):
That photo hadn't appeared on the internet—at least, not to Reba's knowledge. She had taken it in December 2012 and sent it directly to an old high school acquaintance. The two hadn't talked since graduation, but the classmate, whom Reba remembered fondly, contacted her on Facebook with a somewhat convoluted request: His cousin had been in a serious car accident, and he had seen her photos before and thought she was pretty. Would she be so kind as to take a picture of herself holding up a sign reading "MSMK," to put in a slideshow to support the cousin's recovery? (He didn't explain what MSMK meant, and Reba still doesn't know.) Baffled but trusting, Reba made the sign and sent along the photo.
And now here it was on a dead girl's Twitter profile. After googling Lennay Kekua's name, Reba began to piece things together. She called up the classmate. He expressed alarm, Reba told us later, and "immediately began acting weird." "Don't worry about it," he told her. Moments after the phone call, Reba's picture was removed from the @LoveMSMK Twitter profile. Then, in a series of lengthy phone calls, Reba told us everything she knew about the classmate, a star high school quarterback turned religious musician named Ronaiah Tuiasosopo.
Quote:
Was this Lennay Kekua? We spoke with friends and relatives of Ronaiah Tuiasosopo who asserted that Ronaiah was the man behind Lennay. He created Lennay in 2008, one source said, and Te'o wasn't the first person to have an online "relationship" with her. One mark—who had been "introduced" to Lennay by Tuiasosopo—lasted about a month before family members grew suspicious that Lennay could never be found on the telephone, and that wherever one expected Lennay to be, Ronaiah was there instead. Two sources discounted Ronaiah's stunt as a prank that only metastasized because of Te'o's rise to national celebrity this past season.
Quote:
A friend of Ronaiah Tuiasosopo told us he was "80 percent sure" that Manti Te'o was "in on it," and that the two perpetrated Lennay Kekua's death with publicity in mind. According to the friend, there were numerous photos of Ronaiah Tuiasosopo and Te'o together on Tuiasosopo's now-deleted Instagram account.
Lotta Deadspin commenters suggesting the whole thing was set up to provide cover for Te'o and Tuiasosopo's homosexual relationship. No real evidence for that, but as a theory it passes the sniff test, at least.
