If you've been following the story of Notre Dame football star Manti Te'o and his fake dead girlfriend, you probably know that Te'o has been pretty adamant—during the limited interviews he's given—that he was the victim of a terrible internet hoax. But in his first televised interview since the fake dead girlfriend story broke the Internet's mind, Te'o admits to Katie Couric that he "briefly" lied about the situation—"briefly," as in, for several weeks. Check out a clip from the interview below.
Couric, who got the interview over the likes of Oprah and Dr. Phil, pressed Te'o on whether or not he deceived people after discovering on December 6th that his "girlfriend" Lennay Kekua hadn't actually died of cancer (because she was never real). "Katie, put yourself in my situation. I, my whole world told me that she died on Sept. 12. Everybody knew that. This girl, who I committed myself to, died on Sept. 12," Te'o said during the interview, which will air Thursday on Couric's syndicated talk show.
"Now I get a phone call on Dec. 6, saying that she's alive and then I'm going be put on national TV two days later. And to ask me about the same question. You know, what would you do?" Te'o's father Brian also defended his son to Couric and critics, saying he didn't manipulate anyone: "People can speculate about what they…think he is. I’ve known him twenty-one years of his life. And he’s not a liar. He’s a kid."
As Deadspin, who broke the story, points out, Te'o talked about his fake dead girlfriend on at least five different occasions in the press after he found out she wasn't and had never been a real person. Te’o’s acquaintance, Ronaiah Tuiasosopo, is said to have admitted to creating the fictitious girl, with whom Te’o knew for four years. They "dated" for the last year or so of that time before she "died" of leukemia in September, the same day his real grandmother actually died.
Te'o, who did not go the funeral of his fake dead girlfriend he was in a committed online relationship with despite her dying of leukemia, DID send flowers— the Daily News received a copy of a receipt from 1-800-FLOWERS.com which lists "Kainoa Kekua" as the recipient of "36 stems of premium white roses" sent by Te'o in September. It also included this message: “My dearest Lennay, although our time together was brief, I feel like I’ve known you all of my life. Till we meet again. I love you, Manti.”
Te'o is not the only one under the microscope in the wake of the fake dead girlfriend hoax: according to the Times, it seems ESPN had a shot at breaking the story days before Deadspin, but they were reluctant to go through with it without an on-camera interview with Te'o. Despite having "enough material to justify publishing an article," and having been tipped off to the hoax by Te'o's agent, ESPN stuck to their journalistic guns.
Oh yeah, they have no problem publishing tons of unaccredited, anonymously-sourced reports every day, but not on the one story they had handed to them in a bow. “If I had my druthers, we would have run with it,” one executive told the Times. “We’ve had a bunch of discussions internally since then, and I don’t think it will happen this way again. I wonder sometimes if perfection is the enemy of the practical.”
On the plus side, The Onion reports that Te'o is getting over his fake dead girlfriend with the help of his new totally hot fake girlfriend, who has "Scarlett Johansson's head on Jenny McCarthy's body."
