Biggest thing for me, who has a 3 year "online" relationship and NEVER meets up in person.....oh wait they did after the Stanford game.....or did they.....he was probably banging Dog the Bounty Hunter! Aloha Brah!!!!
We're also ignoring the possibility that there actually WAS someone he was talking to and interacting with - just someone that was also involved in the prank. If that's the case, he could still have been duped at the point of the "death" and then found out sometime between then and December. On the flipside, looking back, the idea that he would go to a football game over a grave (at this point, the likelihood of ND being a national title contender was not in the picture, so one game wasn't that big a deal), and then never going out to visit her grave, or her family, etc is just bizarre. I saw this online somewhere and I think it's a good summary of the questions needing to be answered: How real was Lennay? Did she have a fake address? Fake parents? A fake roomate at Stanford? Did she have a hometown? How deep was this lie? One would have to think that Manti couldn't have become involved in such a serious relationship with someone, someone who his dad called a potential daughter-in-law, without knowing intimate details about her life. When he heard she died, who told him? A fake doctor? Her fake mother? Did he call and offer condolences to any fake relatives? To whom did he send those white roses? If he had disobeyed her alleged wish for him to play if she'd died, where would he have gone for the funeral? Did he never think to visit her grave or contact her parents?
If he said they broke up then most people would expect for him to go on the prowl and pick up some of the women that are throwing themselves at him. By saying that your girlfriend died you call tell others you're still grieving as the reason why you're not going after women.
Asking a kid that young about to enter the NFL (with much acclaim and fanfare) to carry the flag for the gay community is unfair. If he is gay, I don't expect him to Royce White all over the place about it, nor do I want him to. He shouldn't feel pressure to become some kind of example or beacon for gay athletes. That's just too much to put on someone.
I don't want him to run across the field wearing a rainbow sticker or anything. I just want him to say, "I'm gay and I don't like to talk to anyone about it." That's a HUGE start.
You're right. Somebody coming out and being like "hey, I'm gay, get the f*** over it. now excuse me while i go kick some ass on the football field." would be a refreshing thing to see.
Didn't he say his brother called him to tell him? If this was supposedly an online only friend of his, why would his brother call him to tell him? Does not compute.
Yeah, the Te'o family has said they never met her. I interpreted the quote from the father as Manti left to see her while they were in Hawaii.
I kinda feel the same way. If he comes forward and says he did all this because he is gay, then I think a lot of people would understand. I don't know what's going on with this guy, but I hope it doesn't have a tragic ending.
On the one hand, I think "how is another girl going to want to be with him after this?" but on the other hand, "he'll still be drafted high, make millions, and shawties will flock to him." On my total recall 3rd hand, "he's gay."
He also said they stayed on the phone every night and would fall asleep that way while she was in pain and dealing with her treatments. If that's a lie, he's a bit of a psycho. If that part is true, there's probably multiple people on the other end of this (at least one female), so one could theoretically have played the role of her brother. It's also possible that the pranksters realized their relationship was out of control and needed to kill her off - and had no idea it would become a national story, since this was a non-story up to that point. Lots of messy, unanswered questions.
The middle ground is that maybe he was hoaxed, but also embellished a little bit, and was not really that attached to the on-line girlfriend. He could have been getting a lot "on the side", and the girlfriend angle was more of a cover for his Mormon family that he was in a steady, non-sexual relationship. Also, a cover to tell girls that he has a one-night stand with that he has a girlfriend, so stop calling. The next phase of the story will probably be a hoard of women (and men) coming out of the woodwork to sell their story that they had a relationship/sex with Te'o, just like happened with Tiger Woods.
This is a little morbid, but seeing all these people mocking him and making fun of him, I'm worried that this snowballing and blowing up in his face (whether or not he perpetrated it)... is going to result in a headline in a few days that reads "Manti T'eo found dead from apparent suicide"
