Back to Blog
Manti teo gf5/15/2023 One scene shows Te’o explaining how he turned to a lawyer uncle for guidance after the purportedly dead Lennay called him in late December 2012 to announce that she was in fact still alive. The Girlfriend Who Didn’t Exist combs through this history while showing Te’o, today, to be what he probably always was: a fundamentally decent, hard-working young man of deep Mormon faith who was perhaps a little too naive for the age of internet weaponization. They just want to know.”), while one news report added some racism for good measure, describing the whole affair as a “weird Polynesian plot to embarrass” Te’o. A grubby undertow of homophobia accompanied the salaciousness with which Te’o’s trauma was covered, dissected, and gawked at (sportswriter Mike Florio told MSNBC’s The Ed Show, “Teams want to know whether or not Manti Te’o is gay. Literally overnight, he went from an athletic pin-up who graced the cover of Sports Illustrated, to a global joke.Īs the story reverberated across the internet, Teo’o was painted as both a fool ( Saturday Night Live showed Te’o telling a newscaster about the moment he found out Lennay was dead: “A couple of months ago she called me up and said, ‘Hey I have some bad news – I’m dead,’ and I said, ‘Oh no, do you need a ride to the funeral?’”), and, potentially, a liar: many pundits speculated that Te’o may have been complicit in the scheme all along as a way to gain national attention. In fact, Kekua, who purported to be a student at Stanford and with whom Te’o had pursued a purely online relationship, was the Facebook creation of a young man – also, like Te’o, of Samoan ancestry – from Seattle.įor Te’o, the transformation was both swift and brutal. There was only one problem, though, and in January 2013 that problem became international news: Te’o’s girlfriend, Lennay Kekua, was not real. An outpouring of national sympathy fired Te’o to new heights of excellence on the field, Notre Dame finished the regular season undefeated, and Te’o seemed destined to become a first-round pick in the 2013 NFL draft. As it’s framed in The Girlfriend Who Didn’t Exist, the romantic hoax at the heart of Te’o’s national humiliation was about much deeper and more interesting questions of identity, faith and belonging – for minorities in particular – in early 21st century America.Īlmost a decade after the story became meme-fodder, the basic outline of the Te’o scandal is still fairly common knowledge: Te’o, a star Samoan-Hawaiian linebacker at Notre Dame, claimed that his grandmother and girlfriend had died on the same day in December 2012. According to a new two-part documentary about Te’o’s ordeal, however, premiering this Tuesday on Netflix, the scandal needs to be understood as more than the simple tale of catfishing as which it’s often presented. But if Armstrong’s belated confession that he doped to win all seven of his Tour de France titles told a story about the rotten heart of American success that felt, four decades after Watergate, somehow traditional, the Te’o affair seemed to offer a warning about the dangers of the internet at a time when techno-optimism was still all the rage – before bot accounts, misinformation, and online harassment became features of everyday life. T wo sporting scandals dominated the American news cycle at the start of 2013: the disgrace of Lance Armstrong and the humiliation of college footballer Manti Te’o.
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |