Manti Te’o admitted in an audio interview with ESPN Friday that he tailored his stories so people would think that he had met Lennay Kekua, the woman he believed to be his girlfriend, who was actually a fictional character created by Ronaiah Tuiasosopo and two other people.
“You know I even knew that it was crazy that I was with someone that I didn’t meet. And let alone people find out that this girl who died who I was so invested in, I didn’t meet her as well,” Te’o told Jeremy Schaap.
The defensive Notre Dame star also said “I kind of you know, tailored my stories to have people think that yeah ‘he met her’ before she passed away,” and that he did it so people wouldn’t think he was a “crazy dude.”
No. The crazy ones are the three fans who fabricated a woman in order to talk to their sports idol. People who continued to communicate through various Kekua “family members” after she had supposedly died.
People who told him, as Kekua, to send white roses if anything happened to her. *People who had him thinking he was talking to the woman he loved every night on the phone while she was in the pretend hospital after a pretend car crash not long before her pretend death from leukemia complications.
When he says “Never, ever would I be part of this,” you should probably believe him.
*In the interview, Manti said "I slept on the phone with her every night"
