T'eo's girlfriend death a hoax?

• thePITman

  

  Can someone please link me to a story where Te'o actually said that he met her?
  How about Te'o's parents saying Manti met her?
  Supposedly the parents never said THEY met her, but just that Manti had.
  
  I'd just like some sources of those quotes. Thanks
• Automatik

  

  The quote I'm referring is Brian Te'o saying Manti would visit her in Hawaii. It's in the this thread.
• Pick6

  

  thePITman;1368147 wrote:Can someone please link me to a story where Te'o actually said that he met her?
  How about Te'o's parents saying Manti met her?
  Supposedly the parents never said THEY met her, but just that Manti had.
  
  I'd just like some sources of those quotes. Thanks

  The deadspin article has those cited, I believe. His father said she came to Hawaii to visit Te'o. Never said if he met her or not. But would it make any sense at all to not meet your son's serious girlfriend who traveled to Hawaii, and I quote, "has a real chance of being our daughter-in-law"?
• raiderbuck

  I'm trying to find it, but the reporter who wrote the story for the South Bend Tribune originally said that Te'o's father Brian told him the story of how Te'o met Kekua at Stanford.
  
  edit...trying to find it from a credible source
  
  nevermind...found something:
  http://www.southbendtribune.com/sbt-what-dreams-may-come-20130116,0,4642827,full.story
  
  "They started out as just friends," Brian Te'o said. "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. But within the last year, they became a couple.
  
  "And we came to the realization that she could be our daughter-in-law. Sadly, it won't happen now."
  
  About the time Kekua and Manti became a couple, she was injured in an auto accident. There were complications during her recovery. And it was also during her recovery that it was discovered Kekua had leukemia.
  
  "That was just in June," Brian Te'o said. "I remember Manti telling me later she was going to have a bone marrow transplant and, sure enough, that's exactly what happened. From all I knew, she was doing really, really well." Quotes by Brian Te'o. These are also in the deadspin.com article.
• Pick6

  

  Te'o was advised by Notre Dame to spin the questions asked about his fake girlfriend leading up the championship game. What a joke! Come clean as soon as you find out if you are really the victim.
• Heretic

  

  Automatik;1368143 wrote:With all if the info that has been released so (true or not), how can anyone say with a straight face that they think he was duped, catfish'd, or whatever?
  
  The only image he knew of her was fake
  No skype?
  Direct quotes from himself and his father referring to them meeting in person
  Flowers to the funeral?
  She gets in a car wreck, no visit?
  On her death bed, no visit?
  
  Simple logic points to him bullshitting everyone.

  Yeah, that's the thing for me. I'd legit feel horrible for him if it was a dupe for the simple fact that there's virtually no way for him to win in the court of public opinion (by which I don't just mean people like us on message boards, but also people like NFL GMs and the like).
  
  It's like a few years ago when I read a story about Nigerian scammers and in it, it was mentioned that the wife of someone in government (congress...or maybe it was a lower-level like a state office somewhere) was duped. The only thing I could think was "how damn stupid does someone have to be to fall for those horribly written letters offering a large sum of money to a random person for helping them launder it across national borders".
  
  And that's where I'm at with this. Supposedly, he was deeply in love with a person he'd never met and apparently never felt a real desire to meet despite how there was that supposed love he felt combined with the way she was reportedly injured in a car wreck and then ill/dying of cancer. Supposedly, he said he'd met her, despite the fact she didn't exist.
  
  I was reading Pat Forde's column on Yahoo and it did mention things like how Mormons tend not to have relationships until they've reached the young adult phase in this way:
  

  It would take a remarkable level of naiveté to be sucked in by the perpetrators of this hoax, but Te'o could be that guy. At the risk of stereotyping, I'll offer this conjecture: Te'o is a Mormon, and there are a lot of LDS members who lack significant romantic experience when entering young adulthood. Courtship might have been a novel and/or highly idealized concept. Physical interaction might not have been at the top of his relationship wish list.

  But still, to believe his side, you have to basically put him in the absolute lowest level of common sense and intellect for never questioning or wondering if anything was up in considering the fact he was in a long-term relationship with someone to the degree his dad felt marriage was in the future...even though he never met the girl and only had communication with her through basic online sources that apparently never included live "personal" stuff like Skype. Where if I'm an NFL guy, I'm thinking this guy is too stupid to draft unless my franchise gives him 24/7 handlers so he NEVER has to interact with the real world without someone holding his hand and guiding him through every little bit of social interaction he might have.
  
  I mean, it IS possible for him to be that easily deluded, since other people have been before. It's just near-impossible for me to conceive how a person could be that that dumb. It's like night and day from how remotely normal people think.
• Heretic

  

  Pick6;1368178 wrote:Te'o was advised by Notre Dame to spin the questions asked about his fake girlfriend leading up the championship game. What a joke! Come clean as soon as you find out if you are really the victim.

  Yeah. And that's another thing. Your school and your key player were victimized by a horrible, cruel hoax. So you react by keeping your mouth shut and diverting any questions concerning the girl...until someone actually does some digging and you have to handle this issue.
• sleeper

  

  It's been reported that Te'o is now a 2nd round draft pick and plummeting. "His character is toxic and questionable; mental stability an issue," said one GM.
• FatHobbit

  

  Automatik;1368143 wrote:No skype?

  There's no way he didn't know about skype. I was in a long distance relationship for a while and skype was awesome.
• Automatik

  

  FatHobbit;1368185 wrote:There's no way he didn't know about skype. I was in a long distance relationship for a while and skype was awesome.

  And you've only seen ONE image of her?
• thavoice

  Heretic;1368182 wrote:Yeah. And that's another thing. Your school and your key player were victimized by a horrible, cruel hoax. So you react by keeping your mouth shut and diverting any questions concerning the girl...until someone actually does some digging and you have to handle this issue.

  I could see how it would be better for this to come out after the NC game. You dont want this type of distraction before the biggest game. Sure.....he personally was dealing with it, if indeed he was fooled or even if he was in on the hoax, but when it comes public....well you see how big and crazy it gets. He and ND just were trying to get past the NC game so it wouldnt be a team distraction.
  
  
  Hell..maybe they shoulda let it come out before..maybe it does something to the team to get them to play better...who knows
• Pick6

  

  thavoice;1368191 wrote:I could see how it would be better for this to come out after the NC game. You dont want this type of distraction before the biggest game. Sure.....he personally was dealing with it, if indeed he was fooled or even if he was in on the hoax, but when it comes public....well you see how big and crazy it gets. He and ND just were trying to get past the NC game so it wouldnt be a team distraction.
  
  
  Hell..maybe they shoulda let it come out before..maybe it does something to the team to get them to play better...who knows

  So um..why did they not release the info soon after the NC game instead of waiting for somebody to break the story before opening their mouth?
• Heretic

  

  FatHobbit;1368185 wrote:There's no way he didn't know about skype. I was in a long distance relationship for a while and skype was awesome.

  Yeah, I have a mid-50s co-worker who isn't particularly tech-savvy and he knows about Skype and regularly uses it to talk to his one daughter who lives in England now. If he knows about Skype, it's amazingly difficult to comprehend how an early 20s college guy in a long-distance relationship (a) doesn't know about it OR (b) wouldn't be somewhat suspicious if she was super-resistent to the thought of using Skype to communicate long-distance with him. More stuff that doesn't add up.
• Heretic

  

  Pick6;1368192 wrote:So um..why did they not release the info soon after the NC game instead of waiting for somebody to break the story before opening their mouth?

  Yeah. The NC game was over like a week-plus ago.
• sherm03

  

  FatHobbit;1368185 wrote:There's no way he didn't know about skype. I was in a long distance relationship for a while and skype was awesome.

  I've learned from watching this Catfish show on MTV that there are tons of people who fall for someone online without ever seeing them on Skype or Facetime. Some of the people on the show have said they are madly in love with someone they have never even talked to on the phone because the other person would make up excuses about their phone being turned off or broken or whatever.
  
  Every time I see that, I think that those people are completely naive, messed up somewhat in the head, gullible as hell, and downright stupid. I think all of those same things about Te'o. I always ask myself watching that show where the friends are of the people who fall for this sort of thing. I asked myself that same thing about this situation with Te'o, and that's why it makes sense to me that he would lie and say that he met her.
  
  I can overlook the lies of meeting her if he was really stupid and got duped. You're an idiot for falling for it, but the lies make sense.
  
  I cannot overlook the lies if he was in on it from the beginning. In that case, you're the lower than shit.
• karen lotz

  

  http://www.tmz.com/2013/01/17/manti-teo-ronaiah-tuiasosopo-scandal-hoax-notre-dame-photo-girlfriend/
• sherm03

  

  As far as the news not coming out right after the NC game...I'm sure they wanted to keep this quiet until after the draft.
  
  Yes, it would have been a huge distraction for the team. But look what happened when it did come out. There's a lot of people questioning whether or not they want to take a chance on Te'o now. Even if ND or Te'o comes out after the championship game and says Manti is an idiot and fell for this...that hurts his draft stock. Right or wrong...I have to think that's why they wouldn't say anything about it.
• Automatik

  

  I haven't seen the MTV show, but I have seen the documentary. It's obvious the main guy/creator knew the girl was a fake at one point, but just kept pursuing it further for pure shock value and to benefit the documentary.
  
  He figured it out rather easily. Te'o going this far in and still having no clue? Sorry, I don't buy it.
• karen lotz

  

  sherm03;1368199 wrote:As far as the news not coming out right after the NC game...I'm sure they wanted to keep this quiet until after the draft.
  
  Yes, it would have been a huge distraction for the team. But look what happened when it did come out. There's a lot of people questioning whether or not they want to take a chance on Te'o now. Even if ND or Te'o comes out after the championship game and says Manti is an idiot and fell for this...that hurts his draft stock. Right or wrong...I have to think that's why they wouldn't say anything about it.

  http://sports.yahoo.com/news/ncaaf--sources--manti-te-o-s-representatives-passed-on-chance-to-release-story-about-fictional-girlfriend-175521027.html;_ylt=AjFQ9NB65R1Y9V4C_EsrK3ALcykA;_ylu=X3oDMTFoZnA0Y2I3BG1pdANCbG9nIEluZGV4IGJ5IEF1dGhvcgRwb3MDMQRzZWMDTWVkaWFCbG9nSW5kZXg-;_ylg=X3oDMTFrODdzYXZuBGludGwDdXMEbGFuZwNlbi11cwRwc3RhaWQDBHBzdGNhdANhdXRob3IEcHQDc2VjdGlvbnM-;_ylv=3
• sherm03

  

  Automatik;1368200 wrote:I haven't seen the MTV show, but I have seen the documentary. It's obvious the main guy/creator knew the girl was a fake at one point, but just kept pursuing it further for pure shock value and to benefit the documentary.
  
  He figured it out rather easily. Te'o going this far in and still having no clue? Sorry, I don't buy it.

  I haven't seen the documentary. But I watch the TV show every week. Surprising how these people truly believe they have met their sole mate through Facebook or Twitter and have never seen anything more than profile pictures.
  
  One dude on that show thought that he was actually involved with Kari Ann Peniche (who was a Miss USA Teen winner, model, and was on Celebrity Rehab and Celebrity Sex Rehap on VH1). It turned out to be a girl that the guy knew running a fake profile...but it was done to even fool the guy that did the Catfish documentary.
  
  Long story short...there's a lot of stupid people out there that fall for this sort of thing. If you don't believe that people could be that stupid, you either don't want to believe that people can be complete morons, or you are extremely naive.
• thavoice

  Pick6;1368192 wrote:So um..why did they not release the info soon after the NC game instead of waiting for somebody to break the story before opening their mouth?

  I was kind of more talking about now someone said that ND told him to deflect the questions about his GF in the days/weeks before the NC game.
  If it came out afterwards, so be it.
• Midstate01

  

  Karen defending manti is hilarious. No nd player, coach, or university as a whole would ever sin!! Perfect people there at nd.
• Midstate01

  

  A lot of the hawaiian people here think he wouldn't do this because he's Mormon....
• Pick6

  

  Midstate01;1368227 wrote:A lot of the hawaiian people here think he wouldn't do this because he's Mormon....

  People who claim to be religious do not have premarital sex, according to Karen. No exceptions. He is Mormon, no way he would sin.
• karen lotz

  

  Midstate01;1368216 wrote:Karen defending manti is hilarious. No nd player, coach, or university as a whole would ever sin!! Perfect people there at nd.

  
  
  posting links to more of the story is defending him? I have no idea what he knows/knew or when he knew it. At the very best he is extremely gullible and lied/embellished about his relationship. Please link where I said he was perfect and no one would sin. Thanks.