Notre Dame Vice President/Director of Athletics Jack Swarbrick makes statement on Manti Te'o Girlfriend Hoax Allegations
Manti Te'o's ascendancy to national star and Heisman Trophy candidate was jet-propelled by the personal backdrop of a girlfriend tragically lost to leukemia in September.
Except that girlfriend never existed.
And so the former Notre Dame linebacker and Heisman runner-up has plunged into a morass of controversy and confusion, with a Deadspin story reporting that the woman known as Lennay Kekua was a hoax -- and Notre Dame confirming that later Thursday in an official statement.
"On Dec. 26, Notre Dame coaches were informed by Manti Te’o and his parents that Manti had been the victim of what appears to be a hoax in which someone using the fictitious name Lennay Kekua apparently ingratiated herself with Manti and then conspired with others to lead him to believe she had tragically died of leukemia," the school's statement read.
"The University immediately initiated an investigation to assist Manti and his family in discovering the motive for and nature of this hoax. While the proper authorities will continue to investigate this troubling matter, this appears to be, at a minimum, a sad and very cruel deception to entertain its perpetrators."
In a news conference Wednesday night, Notre Dame athletics director Jack Swarbrick detailed what he described as "a very elaborate, very sophisticated hoax perpetrated for reasons we can't fully understand but had a certain cruelty at its core."
Swarbrick said that Te'o was contacted while in Orlando, Fla., for a Dec. 6 college football awards show from a phone number he associated with the woman he knew as Lennay Kekua.
"When he answered it, the person sounded like the same voice he had talked to, who told him that she was in fact not dead," Swarbrick said. "Manti was very unnerved as you might imagine."
It wasn't until the morning of Dec. 26, Swarbrick said, that Te'o contacted Notre Dame coaches about the call. Swarbrick said Te'o wanted to discuss the issue face-to-face with his parents over a holiday break before bringing it to the staff's attention, and on Dec. 27, Te'o and Swarbrick met to discuss the details of the relationship.
Swarbrick said Notre Dame then engaged an independent investigative firm which produced a final report on Jan. 4, a report then discussed with the Te'o family on Jan. 5 during the run-up to the BCS championship game vs. Alabama. Swarbrick said he believed the Te'o's were poised to release the story next week before the Deadspin article ran Thursday.
To Notre Dame's estimation, Te'o was the victim of "Catfish"-ing, a scheme that begins with an initial reaching-out, a slow build-up of a relationship and then a tragic event.
The independent investigation revealed online "chatter" with the alleged perpetrators, Swarbrick said, that demonstrated "the joy they were taking, the casualness among themselves referring to what they accomplished and what they had done."
"There was a place to send flowers," Swarbrick said, alluding to the funeral arrangements for Lennay Kekua. "There was no detail of the hoax left undone."
Swarbrick said the school did not approach law enforcement early on due to concerns about possible extortion or game-fixing, as well as a belief "that was the victims' decision to make, and Manti was the victim here."
Swarbrick said the relationship between Te'o and the person claiming to be Lennay Kekua was exclusively an online and telephone relationship, which conflicts with an anecdote reported in the South Bend Tribune on Oct. 12 that the two met, face-to-face, on the field after Notre Dame's game at Stanford in 2009.
Of that discrepancy, Swarbrick said: "I'll let Manti provide the details. When Manti took me through the entire story start to finish, when he first described the contact, he used the word 'met,' and for him the fact that they met online was consistent with using that verb."
Swarbrick said emphatically that he did not believe Te'o was complicit in the scheme.
"Every single thing about this, until that day in first week of December, was real to Manti," Swarbrick said. "There was no suspicion that it wasn't, no belief that it might not be. The pain was real, the grief was real, the affection was real. That's the nature of this sad, cruel game."
It was the week of the Michigan State game in September in which the story unfolded: Te'o lost his grandmother, Annette Santiago, and then Kekua, his purported girlfriend, in a 48-hour span.
That double-loss vaulted Te'o on to the cover of Sports Illustrated and, along with Notre Dame's eventual undefeated regular season, into the Heisman Trophy mix. Te'o would finish second in that voting to Texas A&M quarterback Johnny Manziel, tying for the best finish ever by a pure defender.
Early Wednesday evening, Te'o released a statement acknowledging never having met Kekua:
"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," Te'o said in the statement. "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. To realize that I was the victim of what was apparently someone's sick joke and constant lies was, and is, painful and humiliating.
"It further pains me that the grief I felt and the sympathies expressed to me at the time of my grandmother's death in September were in any way deepened by what I believed to be another significant loss in my life.
"I am enormously grateful for the support of my family, friends and Notre Dame fans throughout this year. To think that I shared with them my happiness about my relationship and details that I thought to be true about her just makes me sick. I hope that people can understand how trying and confusing this whole experience has been.
"In retrospect, I obviously should have been much more cautious. If anything good comes of this, I hope it is that others will be far more guarded when they engage with people online than I was.
"Fortunately, I have many wonderful things in my life, and I'm looking forward to putting this painful experience behind me as I focus on preparing for the NFL Draft."
bchamilton@tribune.com
Twitter @ChiTribHamilton
