Deadspin blew the lid off the story, writing that Te’o had been the sufferer of catfishing — using a social media account designed to lure somebody right into a relationship utilizing a false id. The girlfriend, Lennay Kekua, was the social media creation of Ronaiah Tuiasosopo, who has since come out as a trans lady and goes by Naya Tuiasosopo.
Now, in a two-part Netflix documentary referred to as “Untold: The Girlfriend Who Didn’t Exist” that debuted Tuesday, Te’o and Tuiasosopo clarify their sides of how a story that started so sweetly took such a weird flip, making Te’o the butt of jokes and besmirching main retailers resembling Sports Illustrated, ESPN and the New York Times.
Timothy Burke and Jack Dickey laid naked the story on Deadspin, together with a headline calling the story a hoax. “The opportunity to make ESPN look stupid?” Dickey mentioned in the documentary. “That’s what we were there for.”
Te’o went on to have a seven-year NFL profession spent with the San Diego Chargers, New Orleans Saints and Chicago Bears regardless of coping with anxiousness and being the topic of jokes on a nationwide stage. To cope with that anxiousness, he consulted a therapist, who suggested him to forgive himself. In the documentary Te’o mentioned his therapist informed him, “You have to forgive that kid. What happened to you is not your fault. It’s okay. Forgive that kid.”
Te’o, now a 31-year-old NFL free agent, mentioned he takes coronary heart from the assist he acquired.
“You’re going to have hundreds and thousands and millions of people that tell you, ‘You ain’t worth nothing, man,’” he mentioned, “but there’s going to be the one that’s going to say, ‘You’re worth the world to me,’ and I play for that person. I’ll take all the jokes, I’ll take all the memes, so I can be an inspiration to the one who needs me to be.”
In September 2012, Te’o was a gifted younger participant from a Honolulu household that emphasised religion and soccer. His breakout season at Notre Dame made him a nationwide star with an inspirational backstory of how, in a six-hour span, he realized of the dying of his grandmother after which Kekua.
Te’o helped lead the Fighting Irish to a 20-3 upset of Michigan State that week. He appeared on ESPN’s “College GameDay” to speak about letters he had acquired from Kekua, and the South Bend Tribune described how the couple had met after a soccer recreation outdoors Palo Alto, the place Kekua attended Stanford.
Sports Illustrated described how the connection intensified, with Te’o saying he responded to Kekua’s values. When she was purportedly hospitalized with leukemia, Te’o mentioned she would reply to his voice over the cellphone and he would keep on the road along with her by way of the evening.
They primarily exchanged texts, cellphone calls and messages. But there have been no data, based on Te’o’s household and buddies in the documentary, that Kekua existed, not to mention attended Stanford, and the story crumbled. They had met on social media, with Tuiasosopo utilizing a photograph of a lady from Facebook and sending a pal request to Te’o. Te’o mentioned in the documentary that he verified her by way of mutual acquaintances, and catfishing wasn’t as well-known again then.
Te’o’s rationalization on the time was that he was in a contemporary relationship. “This is incredibly embarrassing to talk about, but over an extended period of time, I developed an emotional relationship with a woman I met online,” he mentioned in an announcement. “We maintained what I thought to be an authentic relationship by communicating frequently online and on the phone, and I grew to care deeply about her.”
Tuiasosopo explains in the documentary that she created Kekua partly as a result of she was “hurting” and struggling along with her id. “It was a black hole that consumed my life,” Tuiasosopo mentioned. “I didn’t care who I was hurting.”
Now, Tuiasosopo nonetheless feels “horrible” and needs “that everything had been undone. But then also another part of me was like, I learned so much about who I am today and who I want to become because of the lessons I learned through the life of Lennay.”