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[eerie music plays]
[man] Friday afternoon, a tip comes in.
I was an intern, which was unpaid,
and I was paid in sandwiches…
[chuckles] …and, like, an occasional bottle of booze.
Tips at Deadspin were mostly junk
or just like, "Hey, here's a funny picture I took of the weather broadcast
where the radar pattern kinda looks like a dick."
But occasionally someone would give you a story that at least you could check out.
And because I was still sort of the eager college student,
I thought, "I'll check it out."
Tip says, "Subject, Manti Te'o's nonexistent dead girlfriend."
"I know you guys get thousands of tips that are out-there or crazy."
"This is one that should really be looked into."
"I was born and raised a Laie boy on the North Shore of Oahu."
"While Manti Te'o is a loved native son here in Hawaii, he is also a fraud."
"The story about his girlfriend dying is completely made-up."
"Please use the actual reporting skills you have to find the truth."
"Much aloha, Chris."
[eerie music builds]
And I was like,
"Boy, that would be fucking crazy if it were true!" [chuckles]
I sent the tip to Tim Burke.
Tim is this sort of brilliant, eccentric master
of databases and analysis,
and he just had tools that none of us had
and that I would wager at that time maybe
a dozen journalists in the whole country had.
[Tim] Before I started working for Deadspin,
I traveled in some interesting online circles,
including with Anonymous, the notorious online hacker group,
and I developed a reputation as somebody who finds things.
[eerie music continues]
This tip is not like most tips. This tip is different.
I just googled "Lennay Kekua."
Every single result, a story about how she was
the dead girlfriend of Notre Dame linebacker Manti Te'o.
She physically did not exist
outside of being Manti Te'o's dead girlfriend,
which was the whole story to me.
["Your Sweet Love" by Lee Hazlewood plays]
♪ Stranger's arms ♪
♪ Reach out to me ♪
♪ 'Cause they know ♪
♪ I'm so lonely ♪
♪ Then my mind ♪
♪ Goes back to you ♪
♪ And your sweet love ♪
♪ Sees me through ♪
-["Your Sweet Love" fades] -[insects chirping]
[woman breathing deeply]
[camera shutters clicking]
[man 1] Welcome to the press conference
for the annual 78th Memorial Heisman Trophy.
Tonight, we will name the most outstanding college football player in 2012.
[man 2] Look right.
Look down at the cameras in front.
[Manti] At this point, I had got a call two days earlier
that the girl who I thought was dead is now alive.
[man 2] Straight out again.
[Manti] And I'm at the Heisman Ceremony in New York.
And I got a national championship game that I got to play in.
I don't know what to think. I don't know what to do. Like,
"What's true? What's not true?"
And I can't tell anybody what's going on.
I mean, what would you think?
So I just stuck to the script.
Manti, you're very resilient.
You lose your girlfriend as well as your grandmother
within the span of 24 hours. I'm just curious,
what made you wanna keep playing the game? Some kids could've taken time off.
Oh, you know, my faith, you know. I… I drew strength from my faith,
um, from Heavenly Father,
and the same thing that everybody should draw strength from.
To me, someone who recognizes what the Notre Dame football mythos is,
this was just another part of that.
Oh, Notre Dame star linebacker loses family members,
dedicates his season to them.
That's a Notre Dame football story.
[Dickey] Notre Dame football is built on these foundational myths,
Rudy, "Win one for the Gipper."
It's the nexus of football and… and, literally, religion.
The mysterious ways, uh, you know, faith is rewarded.
The thing that really helped me this year is my relationship with my Heavenly Father
and strengthening my spiritual side of my life,
and I think I attribute everything that I've accomplished this year to that.
Through the sports news media, there were millions and millions of people
who knew there was a Notre Dame football player
whose grandmother and girlfriend had died the same night
and that he dedicated his season to them.
One problem.
His girlfriend did not exist.
[whimsical music plays]
I started a Google Doc and sort of laid out
what I thought the natural progression of events ought to be.
The first one's obviously, like, "Does Lennay Kekua exist?"
[Dickey] "Where did she die? How old was she when she died?"
"Did she die before or after Manti's grandma?"
We did this exhaustive search
of all of the news coverage of Manti Te'o and Lennay Kekua.
We found conflicting information reported in major publications often the same day
that described events in wildly different ways.
You had Sports Illustrated describing
Manti Te'o's grandmother dying before Manti Te'o's girlfriend
and the other two publications reporting
that the girlfriend died and then the grandmother.
And that's a pretty important distinction.
I saw all of these newspapers, all of these magazines, ESPN,
reporting things that I, at that point, felt quite confident weren't true.
I thought, "This is a story
about how Sports Illustrated and The New York Times and ESPN
all fell for a hoax."
The opportunity to make ESPN look stupid?
Oh my God! That was what we were there for.
We wanted to make sure that we took every step to verify
that we were on the right track.
Harassing Stanford to try and tell us
whether or not Lennay Kekua had ever been a student there
and calling every single funeral home in California
to see if they buried someone named Lennay Kekua.
[Dickey] Death notices, obituaries, articles about her life
that don't mention Manti Te'o.
Nothing in the databases that we were searching
that revealed that Lennay existed.
Then we started to wonder,
"Could Manti have been involved in any way?"
[Tim] Manti Te'o had an absolutely astounding senior year,
without question.
That's still not typically… the sort of season
that gets someone invited to New York as a Heisman finalist.
The Heisman Trophy is awarded every year
to college football's most outstanding player,
but the winner is chosen by sportswriters.
I don't think a person can deny
that the dramatic story of loss off the field
helped his Heisman campaign.
[man] Manti Te'o, the Fighting Irish, 12 and 0,
and headed for the BCS championship game against Alabama.
Folks, let's hear it for all of our Heisman Trophy finalists for 2012.
[Dickey] We did have a pretty good hunch
that he knew this thing had happened to him.
Manti, you're excellent at studying the nuances of the game.
When you look at the trophy, what do you notice about the player there?
[Manti] We're on stage at the ceremony,
and I remember I'm asked a question about Lennay on that stage.
There were a lot of cameras around you this year.
There was so much public sharing of very private moments.
Which shared moment will you never forget above the others?
[Manti] I remember vividly thinking,
"What do I say with what I know?"
I don't know what is going on.
I don't know what's real and what's not.
I should just answer their question,
see if you win the Heisman,
and we'll figure everything out.
I'll never forget the time when I found out
that, you know, my girlfriend passed away, and, uh,
the first person to run to my aid was my defensive coordinator, Coach Diaco.
Should I have said on a national stage at the Heisman that,
"Hey, I just got a phone call two days ago that
the person who said she was dead is now alive"?
Do I do that? And that…
You tell me.
[woman] And now,
the 2012 winner
of the Heisman Memorial Trophy is…
Johnny Manziel.
[audience applauding, cheering]
We start to figure out what we need to prove
that this tip is correct
and that all these stories out there were incorrect.
Jack took on finding the identity of the person behind it,
and I took on finding the identity of the person
who actually appeared in the images.
You have a mystery woman. Let's find her.
[Naya] I was losing it.
I couldn't share with anyone
how I was feeling, the pain that I was going through,
the guilt that I was feeling, how it was really eating me up inside.
Like, I couldn't share these feelings with anyone. It just ate away.
I lost sense of direction. I lost every piece of a moral compass.
I… I lost it all.
I remember thinking to myself,
"There's no more hiding, no more running, no more trying to cover up."
"I gotta come clean."
I sat my mom down first, and I remember sitting there just crying.
Immediately, she's like, "We need to talk to your dad."
I told him about everything, the life of Lennay and catfishing.
It was the first time that I had opened up about…
my sexuality.
[Manti] So after the Heisman, I was able to go home for Christmas.
I knew I had to tell my parents. I need somebody's help.
I told my parents exactly what it was.
I said, "Listen, I don't know what's going on, but I got a phone call,
and I'm not sure,
um, if Lennay is alive, if Lennay is dead."
They looked at me, and they were confused.
[hesitates] To me, he appeared like, "Dad, Dad, she's okay."
"She's… she's alive. She's this. She's that."
And I'm thinking, "What?"
We just thought, "What sick joke is someone trying to put on us?"
We called one of my uncles, um, who's a lawyer,
and we told him the whole situation.
My uncle immediately said, "I think you're getting catfished."
And that was the first time
that somebody ever brought up the term "catfish."
I didn't know what catfishing was.
Even when he explained what it was,
I still couldn't understand what that even entailed.
I told him, "You put our family in a bad light,
and you should have known."
Because he was my oldest and because he wears that responsibility,
he should've known.
Immediately, I'm just like, "Oh crap."
On December 26th, Manti shared the information
that he had learned about the woman he believed to be his girlfriend.
The initial response was total bewilderment.
And in some ways,
the most significant question for the university was,
"How do we handle this piece of information we have?"
An enterprise like a major university has a lot of outside consultants
and others who come in with advice,
and the consistent theme of the advice was,
we don't need to say anything publicly right now,
but we do need to find out what happened and be very, very careful.
This was not the busy newsroom from your famous journalism movies.
Jack Dickey was on winter break at his parents' house in Connecticut.
I was in my office in St. Petersburg, Florida,
and we really got into this workflow where he would just send me a text.
[Dickey] There were pictures of a woman,
so Tim sort of assembled all the pictures he found on the Internet.
[Tim] I had probably 20 photos,
and I start doing these Google reverse image searches.
It was a very frustrating process because there were so many.
But, on the last image, I got a hit,
and it linked to a Myspace profile,
and… [splutters] …there she was.
But unfortunately, no name.
[Naya] Now, as a Christian, I firmly believe in the statement,
"What is done in the dark will come to light."
I didn't know what it was,
but I knew something… something was wrong, something was up.
I knew something was coming.
[Dickey] We found that there were some tweets
that mentioned Ronaiah Tuiasosopo
was connected to Lennay somehow.
[Naya] I started to see some tweets circulating.
These tweets are coming from individuals who were connected to Lennay's past.
And these individuals had started putting things together
and figuring out that Lennay wasn't who she said she was.
In fact, it just might be Ronaiah.
Once I started catching wind of this,
I was like, "This is about to hit the fan."
While Dickey's doing all that work,
I'm on a Myspace profile.
There's no name,
so I go through every single post over a decade,
and then I get to linking out to a Xanga.
And so I go to the Xanga,
and she had published her full name…
which I then plugged into Facebook.
And there she was, Manti Te'o's allegedly dead girlfriend.
I sent her immediately a very urgent Facebook message.
Understandably, she was very confused by this.
Working with her to try to piece how these images might have come out
really came down to one of those images,
because of those 20 images that I had,
19 of them were just taken from her social media profiles.
But one of those images she had sent to a single person.
And I say, "Who was it?"
And she says, "I don't wanna say just yet."
"I wanna… I wanna talk to him."
And while Jack Dickey is texting me with the name "Ronaiah,"
I say, "Is it Ronaiah?"
And she hangs up.
[interviewer] How did you get that photo?
I asked Diane to write on a paper, like, a certain sequence of letters and numbers,
and I said it was for a friend who was sick or whatever.
His cousin got in a car accident, and he needed me to send a picture
because he was gonna be inspired to recover.
Like, as horrible as it felt to do that,
it was kind of a relief knowing that I was able to validate,
still, a girl that wasn't even real.
[Dickey] And so from there, it was, "Okay, well, who is Ronaiah?"
Because Diane didn't really know Ronaiah that well.
There were people who said
Manti had a hand in the creation of the Lennay character.
We were trying to figure that out.
[Tim] We're trying to establish a link
between Ronaiah Tuiasosopo and Manti Te'o,
and we found a series of tweets
where they were interacting with each other.
We found people saying he and Manti were family or friends or something.
We couldn't get the story behind why that was.
[Manti] I thought I was talking to Lennay's cousin.
I wasn't gonna turn down an opportunity to help somebody
and give him some words of encouragement, and so I was more than happy to give it.
At that point, it became really evident to us that we had a major story.
[crowd cheering]
[announcer] Alabama and Notre Dame come together
on the football field for the first time in a generation.
The unique one-game season to decide the championship.
It's been called Alabama Dynasty versus Notre Dame Destiny.
Herbie, if you're like me,
about the only way we could describe Notre Dame being here
is Magical Mystery Tour.
At this time, I don't know what's going on.
I don't know what's true, what's not true.
All I know is I got national championship.
This is what you dreamed of.
This is why you came to Notre Dame is to play on the biggest stage,
and it doesn't get any bigger than the national championship.
This is what it's all about.
And so I try to push all of that to the side,
and I focused on ball.
[Herbie] He's so instinctive.
[Manti] It was an escape from all of that stuff.
[Herbie continues speaking indistinctly]
[crowd cheering]
[commentator] Game on.
Jones from the one-yard line.
To the middle and out to about…
He'll never say it affected his play,
but you could definitely see something was up.
[commentator] Yeldon will follow Johnson.
Johnson got blown out.
Yeldon with a second effort breaks free!
[Herbie] We've seen Manti Te'o miss a couple tackles,
something we've not seen all year.
That national championship game was really just devastating.
[spluttering] It was hard for me to watch that.
[commentator] Lacy. Bolts middle. Still going.
End zone! And Eddie Lacy scores the first touchdown…
I could only imagine how it was to him and his family.
[commentator] Touchdown Alabama!
Obviously, when you watch him play that game, he just wasn't there.
He's just all over the place.
[commentator] He's one of the most decorated
college football players ever,
and yet he'd probably trade all that hardware
for a 7-7 score right now.
I wish I could sit in front of you and say that I was a national champion.
I gave it everything I had.
And we… we just… we just lost to a really good Alabama team, man.
[somber music playing]
[Tim] At this point, Manti had been on this meteoric rise,
and then the whole team collapsed in the national championship game,
and now he's moving on to his pro career.
I'm obviously disappointed…
[Tim] And it's important that before you publish a story on someone,
that you call them for comment.
It's also important you put a reasonable limit
on how long you're going to wait for that comment.
People will try to get out in front
of what they perceive to be a negative story
with a much more sympathetic version of it, quickly.
We were engaged in conversations with Manti about,
"We… This has to be talked about."
"What's the plan?"
Manti was working on revealing the story.
Given that he had a high-powered agent and had the resources of Notre Dame,
we hurried because we didn't want, uh, to get beat on the story.
I called Ronaiah probably eight times.
Someone from Deadspin actually texted my phone,
and I was just kinda like, "No, I don't… No, this is not how we're gonna do this."
It just wasn't anyone else's place but my own.
[Manti] I get a phone call from Lennay's cousin, Ronaiah,
and he just starts apologizing.
And he just says, "Hey, man, I just…"
His exact… his exact words, "Before anybody else found out,
I just wanted to apologize."
And I said, "What are you apologizing for?"
He's like, "I just wanted to apologize, man."
[Naya] I don't remember if I hung up, they hung up.
I just remember that was that.
And I would never have any communication or contact with Manti again. Mm-hmm.
We called Brian and Manti,
I want to say somewhere maybe one o'clock or two o'clock in the afternoon.
I was actually at work, and I got this message on my voice mail.
It was a man. I can't remember his name. He said he was from Deadspin,
and I didn't pay him any attention. I just ignored it, went back to work.
He didn't call back, and so I called Manti's number.
As far as Deadspin is concerned, I…
There was so much coming at one time that I didn't know what to do.
At that point, we had the story put together.
We had talked to everyone who would talk to us,
and it wasn't worth it for us to delay the story any further.
We weren't going to wait to publish until we knew every little thing,
because someone's gonna beat you to it.
An hour after that, we hit publish.
[birds chirping]
[Manti] After the national championship game,
I flew to Florida to prepare for the Combine.
I get a call from my agent. He's like,
"I need you to go to your apartment and lock yourself in there,
and I'll call you."
I say, "Wait, what… what's going on?"
He's like,
"It's gonna be a long ride, bro."
And so I went on my Twitter at that time, and… the Deadspin article just leaked.
And I saw everything
just on the feed, just racking up, everything everybody had to say about me.
And that's when I read it.
But I still couldn't understand.
[sniffles]
[Naya] I got a call from my dad, and my dad was like, "Come straight home."
"When you come home, walk straight in the door. Don't answer no questions."
[Manti] My agent called me when he was outside of my apartment.
He's like, "We're gonna move you."
So I packed up all my bags. I jumped in the car.
As we approach, as we made the turn down the road that the front gate is on,
he told me to recline my chair.
And so I remember I… I'm laying in the car,
and as he starts to make the turn, I kinda, like, look up a little bit,
and I see all the news trucks in the parking lot across the street.
And I asked him, I was like, "Is that all for me, man?"
And he's like, "That's all for you."
As we're going closer to our house, like,
I could see the news trucks pulling in one by one, stacking.
They had, like, huge satellites set up outside our house.
People were, like, taking pictures over our backyard fence.
-[man] Is that Ronnie? -[woman] We're late for a flight.
[man] Did you create Lennay?
[Manti] Against their advice,
I left my apartment the next morning to go to training, right?
And I walk into the cafeteria,
and everybody's just talking, talking about whatever.
And I turn into the cafeteria, and it goes silent.
And I looked at everybody,
and everybody kind of just looked at me and looked down,
and nobody was really talking anymore. And I'm like, "Okay."
And I sat by myself,
and that said everything
that needed to be said about what my world was like from then on.
And that was just the beginning.
I made the case the university had to speak before the end of the day.
This was a very elaborate, very sophisticated hoax
perpetrated for reasons we can't fully understand.
I don't think anyone can fully appreciate how big a story it became.
It just swept the news.
And a bizarre story out of college football is blowing up
across the Internet today.
It does not get any stranger than this one.
Notre Dame football star Manti Te'o is at the center of a giant hoax.
[reporter] The story of the hoax broke on Deadspin,
a popular sports website that's reporting the girlfriend doesn't even exist.
The girlfriend never even existed.
It turns out that girl apparently never existed.
That's right. There was no woman by that name.
It was baffling.
It does rank among the most wild off-field items we've seen
in recent times in college football.
I think one of the first questions that everybody asked is,
how could he be so naive?
And then, I think, the second question everybody started wondering is,
was he complicit?
The question tonight is, is Manti Te'o in on this elaborate hoax?
Was he complicit? Where was the transparency at Notre Dame?
It seems odd to me
that he would tell the story about his girlfriend so often
but never mention that he had never actually met her.
It just was like a huge tidal wave, and I was drowning.
You can't feel anything, taste anything, smell anything, nothing.
I remember people talking to me, and I was just nodding like, "Yeah."
"Thank you. Yeah, okay."
And, in all honesty, I don't even remember what they were saying.
I could never really remember if they even asked a question.
I was just numb.
I spent the next 36 hours
after we published that story almost exclusively doing live television.
[reporter 1] Timothy Burke is the reporter from deadspin.com who broke this story.
-Timothy, good morning. -Morning, Matt.
Shows that had nothing to do with sports at all, all wanted to talk Te'o.
Now we're learning the identity of the woman
whose picture Te'o apparently believed was the girlfriend.
[reporter 2] Inside Edition has identified her as Diane O'Meara.
She said she had no idea her image was being used
and that the man many say is behind the hoax
has now called to apologize.
Ronaiah has called
and not only confessed, but he has also apologized.
But I don't think there's anything you can say to me that would… fix this.
If Lennay Kekua was not a real person,
who was Manti talking to
in these phone conversations he was having?
A lot of what you write centers around this mysterious guy…
Ronaiah Tuiasosopo.
The man who was allegedly behind it all.
The next shoe to drop is really gonna be when Ronaiah,
who's allegedly the perpetrator of the hoax,
if he comes out and speaks, that will explain a lot.
My first impressions in meeting Ronaiah
was how immature, naive, and vulnerable he presented.
We spent, uh, many hours here,
uh, the day we did the interview before the interview actually started.
It got pretty bizarre at times.
Going into my interview with Dr. Phil and preparing for that,
of course I want to speak the truth, of course I want to talk about everything
and be transparent and be honest, but during that time it was very critical,
because that's when Manti was preparing for the Draft.
I didn't want to say too much,
but I also didn't want to lie.
A part of me felt like I still needed to protect him.
As twisted and as confusing as it may be,
um, yeah, I mean, I cared for this person.
Um, I did all that I could to help this person become a better person.
It's very painful to even talk about, but, you know,
the truth of it is, is that happened.
I grew feelings. I grew emotions
that, um, I… sooner or later, I couldn't control anymore.
Were you in love with him?
I mean, yeah. If… if I had…
We were doing our interview, and everything was good.
Then, um, his interview came out.
Today, Manti speaks
in his first television interview since the scandal broke.
[Manti] As far as that crisis management period,
I'm gonna be 100% honest. I was just going with what they told me.
I didn't know who to talk to. I didn't know who I should talk to.
You know, honestly, I didn't wanna say anything.
Did you have any involvement in creating this scam?
No.
I… I… I did not.
One of the theories, many theories, Manti, making the rounds is
somehow you created this whole scenario
to cover up your sexual orientation.
-[Manti chuckles] -Are you gay?
No.
Far from it.
Far from that.
-[Manti chuckles] -[audience laughs]
[Manti] That interview that I did didn't sit too well with me.
Was it embarrassing for me? Yeah.
But it made me more angry because my parents were there.
I was angry because I was being protective.
The hardest part of this whole experience is seeing my family go through it,
all because of something that I did.
He's not a liar. He's a kid.
He's a 21-year-old kid, and I love him.
I really do.
I asked if I could watch the interview in a separate room
and if I could watch it with privacy.
I just wanted to be there and to listen to whatever it was that Manti had to say.
You have no idea who the voice on the other end of the phone was
for all those months.
Mm-hmm.
Do you think Ronaiah could've been playing the role of Lennay?
Do you think that might've been a man on the other end of the phone?
Well,
it didn't sound like a man.
And then… Manti released the voice mails.
[Lennay] Hey, babe, I'm just calling to say good night.
I love you. I know that you're probably doing homework
or you're with the boys or grubbing. What a fatty.
But I just wanted to say I love you and good night, and I'll be okay tonight.
I'll do my best. Um…
Yeah, so get your rest, and I'll talk to you tomorrow.
I love you so much, hun.
Sweet dreams.
The damn voice mails! I was like, "Bro, why did you do that?"
'Cause, like, when… once he posted those voice mails…
I mean, I get it. You know, I mean, you needed to get the public
to kinda see where you're coming from.
How could you not think this was a female?
Get it. But it was, like, the voice mails that, like…
Not only was I having to answer for this. Now I was, like, having to validate that.
So I contacted the private contractors for the FBI and the Secret Service.
They said the chance that you are the person
on that voice mail is like one in ten million.
Yup.
That it is not you,
not even possible.
I think it's important for people to see the voice control
and see you speak in the female voice.
You can read something,
but I think people need to see you speak in that voice.
-What's the easiest way for you to do it? -No. I can't, even if I tried.
There's a whole lot that went into
pushing me to do something like that, to go to that extreme.
It was like a method actor.
He said, "For me to get into character,
I had to be in a dark room,
in this mind space where I morphed into this character."
[Naya] He had me laying on this little sofa thing,
and I'm looking at him like, "Dr. Phil, I don't got no little itty bitty body."
"I'mma need a little bigger… Let me get, like, a real bed."
Hey, babe. Um, I'm just calling to say good night and I love you.
I know you're probably doing homework or with the boys or grubbing.
[chuckles] What a fatty. But I just wanted to say I love you
and good night, and I'll be okay tonight.
I'll do my best.
Um, yeah, so get your rest, and I'll talk to you tomorrow.
I love you so much, hun. Sweet dreams.
I brought in, uh, world-class experts that do voice analysis and all,
and that was him speaking to Manti Te'o all of this time.
The plot has apparently thickened
in the already bizarre dead girlfriend hoax.
Since news of the Manti Te'o love hoax broke,
the story has been bringing more questions than answers.
I did not believe that this guy, Ronaiah, could… could actually do
a woman's voice passably for so long on the phone, but then when you hear it,
to me, it sounded identical. What do you think?
It was alleged to us in the days after we published
that there were multiple people involved
in the construction and operation of… Lennay Kekua.
People underestimate how elaborate it was
in terms of creating this impression, uh, that they were able to create.
I legit became a computer myself.
It became so automatic. It was like second nature where…
You know, like tying your shoes.
Like, the moment my phone rang, and I saw, you know, his name come up,
I would just literally be like, "Okay, let me walk away." Boom.
There have been many conversations that I had during that time
where the phone was passed to somebody.
I spoke to a young man.
-You spoke to a young man and young lady. -And a young lady.
So, there are two people that at least spoke to us.
If it is Ronaiah alone, then, I mean, he deserves to be in Disney.
I mean, the amount of voices, the… the amount of cell phones.
It was just crazy shit.
No, there was never no other outside influence outside
or like a helping hand in any of this.
It was 100% me the entire time.
-[camera shutters clicking] -[indistinct chatter]
The hardest part for me was going in public.
And which once was, "That's Manti Te'o!"
Now was… [whispers] …"Hey, that's Manti Te'o."
"That's the guy that got catfished."
Your whole world changes.
Te'o, talk us through the moment you found out your girlfriend was dead.
Well, a couple months ago, she called me up on the phone,
and she was like, "Hey, I have bad news. I'm dead."
[audience laughs]
And I said, "Oh no! Do you need a ride to the funeral?"
[reporter] Fans entering tonight's Florence Freedom game
were given a voucher for a bobblehead of Manti Te'o's girlfriend.
We removed Lance Armstrong from the front page.
It blows Lance Armstrong outta the water. I'll say that.
Oh boy. You know what? This is the best thing that ever happened
to Lance Armstrong. You are so right.
Now Lance Armstrong looks like a Girl Scout compared to this guy.
[audience laughs]
There was an article that came out,
but the title was "The Most Hated Athletes in the World."
Tiger Woods,
Lance Armstrong,
and Manti Te'o.
I was like, "What am I doing on that list?"
There was this sort of notion of fallen heroes going on, right?
[splutters] Lance fed into Manti, in that regard.
I don't think he had any concept of how much the media will build you up
and then how quickly they will tear you down.
You gotta be awfully dumb not to think that this is gonna blow up in your face.
I mean, anybody who has had an imaginary girlfriend for three years,
I mean, it just… it boggles your mind.
The aftermath of the story was instructive
in that we had no idea
how little control we'd have over how people responded to it.
Maybe he was trying to keep his personal life extremely private.
[reporter] "If a football player wanted to hide being gay,
a fictitious girlfriend is a good way to do it."
It's hard to be a Mormon at Notre Dame,
who's a liar and probably gay.
The jump to that… frankly shocked me a little bit.
There wasn't a whole lot of interest in trying to understand
the… the real complexity of this story.
Was he gay? Like, I… I think all of these questions
were things people just wanted to discuss.
Did you ever think, Tim, in a million years,
that the motivation behind this whole thing
was because Ronaiah was in love with Manti Te'o?
To me, this was a story
about how the most powerful media companies in the world
didn't fact-check things that they published,
and Deadspin, a blog with eight employees, did.
He was caught up in an online hoax--
[Tim] But it became something else that I really did not see coming.
Every single person I talked to said,
"I think he's gay and covering it up." What do you think?
The Deadspin mission was
to make the mainstream sports media look… foolish.
I don't care what Manti Te'o… like, what his sex life is.
I don't care what Ronaiah's… sex life is.
Like, I… I think… that wasn't our… that wasn't our motivation at all.
If anyone cared about that stuff, they were wrong to care about that stuff.
-[camera shutters clicking] -[indistinct chatter]
-[Manti] It's a lot of cameras. -[man] Questions?
[reporter] Manti, what's up? How are you feeling?
I'm kinda tired right now.
We, uh, had a long day of, you know, just exams, medical exams.
Um… It's all part of the process.
Prior to the NFL Draft, I met with 22 teams.
Every one of them asked me about getting catfished.
Oh yeah, I mean, for me… you know, I hopefully…
I'm just looking forward to getting ready… you know, getting straight to football,
and I understand that, you know, people have questions,
but, you know, I think I've answered everything I could,
um, and for me, I… I'd really like to talk about football.
I'm totally aware
there's this huge thing across my forehead that says,
"This is the guy who got catfished." And I was afraid this was going to affect,
uh, my NFL future as far as me being drafted.
Manti Te'o's poor performance
at the BCS championship game
together with this weird Polynesian plot to embarrass him
has reportedly given some NFL scouts second thoughts about drafting him.
[Mike Florio] Teams want to know whether or not Manti Te'o is gay.
They just want to know.
I think he's gonna really be hurt by this,
because one of the main attributes he was supposed to have
was his leadership.
You know, people would follow him.
He's this inspirational story, Jack, you've been talking about.
The guys are not gonna look at him as a leader now.
[man] And welcome, everybody, to the 2013 NFL Draft.
[crowd cheering]
Manti makes a choice that he's gonna spend the Draft in Hawaii.
He's gonna surround himself with his family.
They're not gonna deal with any of the circus.
It is somewhere over my shoulder here in one of these beach houses
where the Te'os are sitting, waiting to watch the Draft.
We had everybody there, and, you know, it was…
We were all… we were all excited.
My agent was telling me, "We're gone the first day."
Like, "You're getting picked. It's just a matter of where and when."
Manti Te'o, as we all know, uh, was in the news in January.
He jumped from the sports page to the news page.
There are many people out there interested in his, uh, status for tonight's Draft.
Where will he wind up?
I really believe, Mooch, that he's gonna get out of it tonight,
heading somewhere on a plane with a big smile on his face.
With the first pick, the Kansas City Chiefs select Eric Fisher.
The Miami Dolphins select Dion Jordan.
Lane Johnson.
Jonathan Cooper.
Eric Reid, defensive back.
I remember we were going through the Draft,
and I knew that the Giants really liked me,
but…
I…
I just wasn't sure.
-The New York Giants select Justin Pugh. -[man] There you go, Coach.
They didn't pick me up, and I'm like, "Oh man. I'm not gonna get picked."
And the Ravens were the last pick.
So now it's up to, uh, the Ravens to wrap this puppy up.
And the commissioner comes up.
[reporter] Here it is, the final first-round selection
of the Draft in 2013.
I remember they said, "With the 32nd pick…"
With the 32nd pick in the 2013 NFL Draft…
"…the Baltimore Ravens select…"
…the Baltimore Ravens select…
"Ma…"
And my whole family went… [gasps]
…Matt Elam. That concludes the first round of the NFL Draft.
I was shocked.
I thought Manti could go anywhere from 15 down to the Ravens at 32.
Is it possible that you looked at him
and you said, "I don't want the drama"?
I don't think a lot of people would've guessed back in December
that Manti Te'o would not be a first-round Draft pick,
but certainly a lot has happened between then and now.
But even Manti has to be surprised, because he truly believed
that by the end of today, he would know where he was going to be playing.
Not only are the optics bad
of sliding from the first round into the second round of the NFL Draft,
but maybe more importantly,
the money and the contracts change pretty drastically.
So now, this incident had cost him
not only, in some ways, his dignity but millions and millions of dollars.
I walked down to the beach, and I just started bawling.
I had a decision, man. I was like,
"You can pout, but you got a whole family over there celebrating you, dude."
Like, "Go spend it with them."
So I walked back over there, hugged all my family.
We were like, "Man, we're gonna get picked up tomorrow."
With the 38th selection in the 2013 NFL Draft,
the San Diego Chargers proudly select
Manti Te'o, linebacker, Notre Dame.
[crowd cheering]
[commentator] And there it is!
Manti Te'o, the last guy, Todd, you had as a first-round grade.
Mel, your best available…
Man, when they announced my name, oh man, that was…
I was so happy, man.
[all cheering]
After this whole life as Lennay had ended,
I couldn't give Lennay any more of my time.
And I remember telling myself,
"You want to be a girl, so be a girl."
I actually moved back home to American Samoa.
It was there where I got in touch with the LGBTQ community.
And in Samoa, there really is no terms that specifically identify transgender.
There's a huge community known as fa'afafine.
You can dress like a woman or dress like a man.
It's more widely accepted.
I put myself on the back burner for all those years,
so moving forward, I just had to start living my life.
[serene music playing]
And I wanted to be able to live my life as trans.
I used to think I'm never gonna be able to show my face in public again.
And then I was like, "Why wouldn't I?"
Someone out there needs to hear my story,
and someone out there needs to know that there is that light of hope.
I still feel horrible,
and sometimes I wish that everything had been undone.
But then also another part of me was like,
I learned so much about who I am today
and, you know, who I want to become
because of the lessons that I learned through the life of Lennay.
[crowd cheering]
[Manti] I never will forget my first preseason game.
When I stood on that sideline…
and I looked across the field,
my… my feet just started to go numb.
And it slowly went up my legs till everything was tingling.
And I remember my… my fingers started to sweat,
and everything just started to go numb.
[commentator] Te'o did a nice job of reading…
[Manti] Numb.
First three years with the Chargers were like that.
Three years.
And I remember praying,
"Don't mess up, bro. Just please make a play today."
"Just make a play. Just make a play."
[commentator] …just misses Andrew Luck.
[Manti] Every time I stepped on that line, that anxiety would build up again.
[commentator] Players from solid programs…
[Manti] Right, it's just like, "Don't mess up, bro."
Like, "Don't mess up."
"Don't miss tackles. Are you sure you know what you're doing?"
And it was such a huge contrast to that kid at Notre Dame.
The football field, that was my domain, you know.
Like, when I'm on the football field, I feel like nobody can beat me.
And I played free, and I played fast, and I played physical.
And that was what made me great.
Now I got to the NFL…
and I'm questioning everything.
[commentator] We're keeping our eye on Te'o.
[Alex] I do remember covering games
where he would come outta the tunnel and people would heckle him,
and it just became something he could never escape.
What happened was what happened, and what I'm here to do is play football,
and, um, hopefully, you know, guys saw that.
He changed so much.
He withdrew himself.
Then the memes started coming out.
The paper in San Diego came out
with a cartoon of him with his arm around nobody.
Every day was just trying to figure out how to get rid of this anxiety,
how to get rid of this numbness, this tingling, right?
I'm trying to figure out all these ways to reprogram myself.
Right? [spluttering] I'm watching inspirational talks,
I'm watching old film of me,
I'm trying to rediscover who I was before everything.
I started calling my agent up, and I told my agent,
"Tom, like, I need to see somebody."
I was like, "I don't know what I have, but it's something new, and I need help."
My agent sent me to see this therapist, and we're just talking in the lobby,
just getting to know each other, and I'm… I'm kind of laying down.
"What's going on?" In the back of my head, I'm like,
"Nobody has a cure for this, man. This guy, he's not gonna help me."
And at the end, he says, "Let me ask you a question."
"Have you forgiven him?" I said, "Who are you talking about?"
He said, "Have you forgiven Ronaiah for what he did to you?"
And I said, "Yeah, I did." He said, "Okay."
"Let me ask you a second question."
"Have you forgiven yourself?"
I looked at him. I was like, "What do you mean, forgiven myself?"
He's like, "Have you forgiven yourself?" I said, "Forgiven myself for what?"
He's like, "Somebody like you who's always been so confident,
who's never questioned anything he's done,
and all his success has been based on him trusting in him,
for you to go through what you went through,
deep down inside, you're questioning yourself."
"You have to forgive that kid."
"It's okay, uce."
"What happened to you is not your fault."
"It's okay."
"Forgive that kid."
["Waiting" by Alice Boman playing]
The key is this. There's always gonna be that little kid
that's gonna come up to you because he loves you.
But if you look at that little kid like the way this dude just treated you,
you're gonna ruin that little kid.
That is my challenge every day.
When somebody comes up to me and says, "Manti, I'm a big fan of you,"
that I don't think of the times that hundreds of people said,
"I'm a big fan. Let me take a picture,"
and I took a picture with them, and they made fun of me.
If there's anything that I can do, that's what I'mma do every day.
You know?
I'mma rise above all of that, bro.
No matter how hard it is for me.
I'mma look at all these people who made fun of me
and the people who actually believed in me… [choking up]
♪ Haven't had a dream… ♪
I have to take a second to be like, "They actually love me, man."
"They love you. They don't wanna make fun of you, bro."
Treat them nice in a world that's just spit on you.
Remember all those people in the stands that had the leis on.
Because you're gonna have hundreds and thousands and millions of people
that tell you, "You ain't worth nothing, man."
But there's gonna be one that's gonna say, "You're worth the world to me."
And I play for that person.
♪ I'm waiting ♪
I'll take all this crap.
I'll take all the jokes. I'll take all the memes
so that I can be an inspiration to one who needs me to be.
That's the whole reason why I'm doing this.
And I want everybody to know…
that if Ronaiah ever watched this, that I forgive him.
And I hope and pray that him and his family is cool,
'cause that's all that I can wish for him.
Allegations against one basketball ref
of betting the outcome of games is rocking the NBA.
[man 1] Man, did I fuck my life up.
[tense music playing]
Just like the feel-good hit of the summer, the Manti Te'o story isn't real.
[man 2] A cruel, twisted hoax.
It was the longest winning streak in the history of sport.
[man 3] This is the finest day in the history of Australian sports.
[man 4] AND1 was making millions of dollars,
but did they respect us?
[man 5] AND1 basketball, baby!
[man 6] Shut your fucking mouth. Keep it between us.
Stick to the fucking story.
[woman] Does not get any stranger than this one.
[reporter 1] Donaghy is under investigation by…
[reporter 2] It's front-page news all over town.
She physically did not exist outside of being Manti Te'o's dead girlfriend.
And I was like, "Boy, that would be fucking crazy if it were true!" [laughs]
[tense music fades out]