Te'o said he lied briefly about his fake girlfriend after she died, according to a Jan. 23 CNN report. In an interview with Katie Couric, Manti Te'o, Notre Dame star linebacker, admitted that he lied after learning that the saga and death of his fake girlfriend Lennay Kekua was a huge hoax.
For a time, Manti Te'o, actually believed that Lennay Kekua had died from leukemia after a serious car accident. However, on Dec. 6, the Heisman Trophy runner-up found out that the entire situation was a hoax, but he did not admit it. He continued to tell untruths about the incident because he was embarrassed about the situation where he had obviously been fooled.
Te'o said to Katie,
"Now I get a phone call on December 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?"
What would you? Some people may go ahead and admit the truth -- that they had been fooled. However, others probably would not. As for the real emotions he felt between September 12 and that December 6 phone call, Te'o said,
"What I went through was real. You know, the feeling, the pain, the sorrow -- that was all real, and that's something that I can't fake."
Diane O'Meara is the woman whose picture was used on the fake Lennay Kekua account. A man named Ronaiah Tuiasosopo created the fake Lennay Kekua account, and he perpetuated the situation with Manti Te'o.
This is actually an awful thing to do. People do often become very invested in online friendships, so to purposefully pose as a fake person to somebody else is truly terrible. Have you ever been fooled by someone online?
Comments