Untold: The Girlfriend Who Didn’t Exist
How Manti Te’o’s story inspired me
Photo courtesy of Netflix
Carter Willis, Sports Editor
Take a step back to 2013 when Notre Dame University football player, Manti Te’o, was dominating news cycles. Teo’s incredibly successful senior season at Notre Dame drew the media toward him. His season was also backed by a feel-good, inspirational story: he had dedicated his season to his grandmother and girlfriend’s deaths that occurred on the same day. There was just one problem—his girlfriend didn’t exist. Naya Tuiasosopo (formerly and at the time known as Roniah Tuiasosopo) catfished Te’o.
When I heard this I thought: well, that just took an interesting turn, soon followed by thoughts about Te’o. What kind of star football player is so lame that he had an online girlfriend that catfished him? How could this guy be so dumb that he believed he was dating a girl online whom he had never met?
Besides a few interviews when the story broke, Te’o was quiet and never really told his side of the story. That was until Te’o’s NFL career came to an end in early 2021, and he decided to do a documentary about his catfishing scandal with Netflix. Te’o undoubtedly did this documentary to heal. When I came across the documentary, I only knew the basic facts, and, like most people, I had a skewed perception of what had happened. I went into the documentary expecting a dumb jock explaining how he believed his girlfriend died because he was catfished.
Instead, at the start of the documentary, I saw a now confident man presenting on screen his decision to attend Notre Dame, which is when I first gained respect for him. This was because he was choosing between the University of Southern California (USC) and Notre Dame for college football. The decision made me feel like Te’o was a unique character because, if he went to USC, he would be one of the dozens of Hawaiian football players to have gone there. However, I felt that he could be the first Manti Te’o at Notre Dame. I admired his willingness to be different even if it involved risks. He subsequently described his early years at Notre Dame as a fish out of water story. I truly felt his pain during that time, too, since he was a Polynesian, Mormon kid with a funny name at Catholic university thousands of miles from his home. The documentary showed that choosing Notre Dame clearly had a downside of loneliness. That was when it seemed as if the director of the documentary saw the loneliness and framed the response to the loneliness as Te’o’s connecting with a girl online, Lennay Kekua.
Of course, Kekua is the infamous fake girlfriend of Te’o. When Kekua entered the documentary, I expected all the credibility to be lost for Te’o. However, as Te’o began to describe his loneliness and how he connected with Kekua online, I felt sympathetic for him. He began online messaging a girl who shared his culture when he needed that connection more than ever. The documentary is clearly supposed to make you feel pity for him, and it worked, but I still couldn’t understand how someone could fall for this. The documentary showcases that there were actually several reasons. First, online messaging was the foundation of the relationship, and there wasn’t anything inherently suspicious about that. Second, when he would call Kekua (voiced as Roniah), his voice would sound exactly like a woman's voice, and when Roniah went on Dr. Phil, he said that the chance that a man made that voice was an incredibly small percentage. Dr. Phil ultimately concluded that the two voices were the same. Third, Te’o was even tricked into meeting Kekua’s “family” after her death which was just Roniah and his relative. Lastly, Te’o was a young college student who was naive and fell for an incredibly well-thought-out, deceptive plan.
At the end, I was both fascinated and sad about the story. Nevertheless, the documentary ended with what I thought was an inspirational anecdote by Te’o. His story about seeing a therapist captivated me because, ever since the incident, he could not get his life straight. He said that he just felt off and that his career in the NFL was not going as he hoped it would. That was something that I thought was relatable, even though most people aren’t NFL players. Then, the therapist asked Te’o if he’d forgiven Roniah, and Te’o says that he has. The therapist then asks him if he has forgiven himself. Te’o’s initial reaction was one of disbelief, which is understandable (I would have reacted the same way). Why would he have to forgive himself? Wasn’t this all Roniah’s fault? The therapist then said that someone like Te’o who always puts pressure on himself, and always succeeds, deep down blames himself in part for what happened. What I found inspirational about this is that it was the turning point in Te’o’s life, and the documentary emphasizes that. After that therapy session, he looked at life from a different perspective. He needed to forgive himself for what had happened. What happened was a terrible thing, but Te’o, from then on, acknowledged that bad things could shape him into whom he wanted to become. He was now able to forgive himself and others. Now, he doesn’t remember the countless times when fans asked for a picture with him just to take the photo with the fan and have the fan laugh at him, he remembers the thousands of fans with leys in the crowd at the Notre Dame games cheering him on. That, to me, is the real story, not the catfishing. What I got from the documentary is that learning from our mistakes and self-forgiveness are qualities that are bigger than any story the media will ever tell.
