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A new documentary coming out on Netflix on Tuesday explores the decade-old catfishing scandal involving Notre Dame linebacker Manti Te'o.
The story starts in December 2012, after the Samoan-Hawaiian college footballer announced that his grandmother and girlfriend had passed away on the same day. He received an outpouring of support from fans and sympathetic media attention nationwide. Te'o finished the regular season expected to be the first-round pick of the NFL 2013 draft. However, in January 2013, Te'o found out his girlfriend, Lennay Kekua, was not a real person.
As the documentary "The Girlfriend Who Didn’t Exist" notes, Kekua, who pretended to be a female Stanford student while engaging in a romantic online relationship via Facebook, was actually a young man at the time from Seattle named Ronaiah Tuisosopo.
Tuiasosopo, who has recently come out as trans and goes by the name Naya, maintained a months-long relationship with Te'o by mimicking a female voice over the phone and using stolen photos of a high school classmate and friends on Facebook. The documentary explores the gender struggle and confusion of Tuiasosopo that led to the catfishing incident.
"The Lennay profile was not necessarily a way out but a way to something else," Tuiasosopo says in the documentary. "At that time, I knew for sure there was something inside of me that just wanted to scream out and be like, ‘Why am I different?’ There were a couple of encounters online where it was like, ‘This guy’s cute. Let’s see where this goes.’ I knew what was right and wrong, but I was too far in love with being looked at in this way. It was completely selfish, but it was what made me happy. It was what I wanted to be a reality."
Overnight, Te'o went from a beloved up-and-coming college football player to the subject of mockery and jest as the story became internationally famous. The documentary tells the perspective of Te'o and Tuiasopopo, but the pair never meet in person and have not spoken since the scandal broke.
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"When we started filming, they hadn’t been in contact since the scandal broke. They hadn’t talked, they hadn’t seen each other," Chapman Way, one of the documentary's executive producers, told the NY Post. "And so it was a really interesting way of making this. They haven’t been in contact. They haven’t been in communication."
Manti Te'o is the focus of a new Netflix documentary that sheds light on his infamous 2013 catfishing scandal. (Getty Images)
"But I think kind of what made these interviews so powerful is they were drawing on memories from 10 years ago. Memories that have stayed with them. Very powerful memories. Very powerful emotions. I think both of them are still working through kind of what this whole scandal was and how it affected them individually."
Te'o would eventually recover from the scandal by signing a two-year deal with the New Orleans Saints in 2017 before switching to the Chicago Bears practice squad in 2020. The 31-year-old is not currently signed with an NFL and is a free agent.
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In 2020, he married the fitness enthusiast Jovi Nicole and the couple share a baby daughter.
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