Notre Dame football player Manti Te'o's dead girlfriend never existed.

This later story says he was the victim of the hoax, not the perpetrator.

statement from Notre Dame:




just a bit more here:
http://www.businessinsider.com/notre-da ... oax-2013-1


And the backstory here:

Manti Te’o’s Dead Girlfriend, The Most Heartbreaking And Inspirational Story Of The College Football Season, Is A Hoax

http://deadspin.com/5976517/manti-teos- ... -is-a-hoax


very weird.

And... away we go!


Dana Houle ‏@DanaHoule

We've never seen Manti Te'o's girlfriend's long-form birth certificate


Shannyn Moore ‏@shannynmoore

Is the #GOP rushing to install a feeding tube in Te'o's girlfriend?

Chuck Todd ‏@chucktodd

So ND knew about this hoax since at least December? When did Te'o really know? ND's statement only brings more questions

Steve Weinstein ‏@steveweinstein

Why didn't Te'o's girlfriend just mint a Trillion Dollar coin? #mybrainhurts


Major Garrett ‏@MajorCBS

Can't wait for compare/contrast analysis from PR gurus re: Notre Dame on Te'o and Lance Armstrong on doping

Simon Maloy ‏@SimonMaloy

Right now some numskull is banging out a "media investigates Te'o's girlfriend but not Obama's transcripts?" blog post.

daveweigel ‏@daveweigel

RT @benpershing: How could Te'o be "victim of a hoax"? What about the story of their adorable meeting? Who did he meet? Makes no sense.


Derek Thompson ‏@DKThomp

There's no way Lance Armstrong created the Te'o hoax then sourced the expose in time to drop hours before his Oprah confession. Right?


And a gazilliion more.

You might wanna do a twitter search on Te'o. It's rolling fast.

people aren't buying the Te'o was a victim thing. And no wonder.

slate:



http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/ ... was_a.html

I admit I haven't followed this guy's career much, but the first reaction of the conspiracy theorist in me after reading this article was "he's gay and the girlfriend ruse was a cover-up."

It fits pretty well, actually. Religious player and school, needs to keep up hetero appearances, a vague girlfriend no one's ever seen that he can point to as the reason he doesn't date during college, her death as the reason he stays single...it's all there.

--sigdiamond2000, fark.com

Am I alone in actually being happy that some fucking glurge story turned out to be exactly the bullshit it sounded like?

I'm glad that it's not just nerds like me who have had imaginary girlfriends. Star athletes can have them too.

No, you're not. Lance Armstrong never killed a girlfriend to keep his story straight , pun intended

I was talking to my son a few minutes ago about this story and he said during college he had a "thing" going with a girl for over 2 months who turned out not to be who she said she was. He did admit he'd never actually met her face-to-face, but that he did have feelings for her after hundreds of hours on FB and the phone.

Dating was so much easier 30 years ago when we were just picking men up in bars.

Ha! I admit, happily, that I once walked into a bar when I was in the Navy, (I was young and gorgeous at that time in my life) I gazed upon a sea of men, pointed to one and said "I want that one". I got him of course, because as I said I was young and gorgeous at that time. As Sugar said, things were much simpler back then.

There's apparently more coming out about this story. It may be that he was, in fact, the victim of the hoax.

I think he was tricked. The only basis cited by those who say he was part of the conspiracy is their mere disbelief that something like this could even happen. That's not evidence, and I think that's also being naive in this digital age. Football star or not, he's a young kid, and the apparent hoaxster went to great lengths to convince him that "she" was a really cute girl at Stanford. Such relationship-based frauds have been documented before, including one story I remember being featured on 60 Minutes or some similar show.

When I was 20 or so, just as the Internet age was dawning, I "met" a girl online who lived in Southern California. We emailed each other constantly and talked on the phone for hours at a time. No pictures were ever exchanged though. For a while, I really thought we were into each other. But one day we figured out a way to meet each other, and let's just say the outcome was a story that gave my roommates years worth of laugh lines (after buying me beers to recover from the trauma).

It happens. It's not as unheard of as one might think.

Sometimes I feel so old.

I've seen twitter feuds over broken relationships. Romantic relationships where the people had never met. Nasty stuff. Emails posted and everything. And then other twitter people take sides.

It's all very strange to me. I don't like to say 'never', but I don't see myself having a romantic relationship with someone I'd never met.

Not that I'm looking.

On a sports website I frequent the theory is he was using this fake relationship to hide his sexual preferences. I tend to believe that and not that he was duped. From what he said his long distance "relationship" was, the other party would have had to have invested an enormous amount of time on the fraud. He also never sought to meet his long-distance paramour* for almost three years.

So, under Occam's Razor I think he was the perp not the victim.

*

I'm also going with the story that he's a perp as well.

Perhaps I am biased against sports dicks.

Frontline did an amazing special on "kids these days" living in the digital age. (link). This is tough love, but to put it bluntly, if you were born earlier than 1985 or so, you're basically a "digital immigrant" and nothing can ever change that. Digital immigrants have trouble relating to and understanding the world of digital natives. Although I like to pride myself on being updated on these societal trends relative to other friends of mine around my age, I'm still not a digital native and never will be.

As for my personal story, I learned a harsh lesson from that situation I recounted. One of those lessons was that nothing is real, including what we believe to be "feelings," until you meet a person in flesh and blood.

Unless more evidence comes out, I see nothing that convinces me that this guy was in on this hoax. The entire narrative that he faked it stems from his "friend" quoted in the Deadspin article, whose sole "evidence" is his "80% gut feeling that he had to have known." In other words, he just can't believe Te'o could have been tricked.

As someone born in 1969, but who has been online since shortly after the Internet, I consider most of this 1985 generation to be clueless fucking newbies. I've been online since they were shitting their diapers. They're the immigrants.

You're missing the point, old fart. Your having played Atari games doesn't mean you relate to society the same way these kids do. The world they're raised in, playing on iPads by the time they hit 2, talking to their favorite aunt on Skype by age 5, and being able to text message Mommy by age 7 (etc etc etc) makes their world completely different than the one you grew up in.

Yep, the kids were born in this world. We moved here. We may have assimilated well and all that, but we were not born here.

Our grandchildren are the Borg.

Disagree.

I've been here since this place existed.

Those who came here after me are the newbies.

This is my home.

Who do you think you are??? The NRA?????

Te'o is still just a kid. This is kinda cruel.

#Teoing

http://teoing.tumblr.com/

I have no opinion on Manti's level of involvement in this truly weird story, but Internet relationships do happen. Look how we Fogbowzers tend to trust and rely on each other, sight unseen.