One of the assumed masterminds behind the Manti Te’o fake girlfriend hoax Ronaiah Tuiasosopo had apparently admitted to duping the Notre Dame football star back in November according to ESPN’s Outside the Lines. Tuiasosopo reportedly admitted the cruel joke when he “called a church friend in early December crying and admitted to duping the Heisman finalist,”.
The only trouble with this is it leads to more quotes from unnamed people (something that’s right up ESPN’s alley) which become a common theme of this whole mess in case you haven’t noticed.
She says Tuiasosopo gave her the tearful confession and account of how he played, what he said was at first a game, on the unsuspecting Te’o. And, she says, he told her that it wasn’t the first time he had done it.
“He (Ronaiah) told me that Manti was not involved at all, he was a victim. … The girlfriend was a lie, the accident was a lie, the leukemia was a lie,” said the woman. “He was crying, he was literally crying, he’s like ‘I know, I know what I have to do.’
“It’s not only Manti, but he was telling me that it’s a lot of other people they had done this to.”
But it doesn’t stop there… of course. Tuiasosopo has apparently pulled this similar hoax with other people… that stinker!
OTL also interviewed two other people who said they have a cousin who had the same online hoax pulled on them by Tuiasosopo.
J.R. Vaosa, 28, of Torrance, Calif., and Celeste Tuioti-Mariner, 21, of Whittier, said that in 2008 their cousin began an online romance with a woman who portrayed herself as a model. Vaosa said the cousin showed Vaosa a picture on MySpace of a woman from a Victoria’s Secret catalog that he said was Kekua. Vaosa said that the online Kekua would agree to meet his cousin at certain places. Vaosa said he went with the cousin to meet her.
“When Lennay said she was gonna be at this park one day, we’d go to the park and Ronaiah pops up and then we go to the gym in Orange County where the kids have volleyball tournaments, Ronaiah’s there,” Vaosa said.
Finally, the family convinced Vaosa’s cousin that something wasn’t right and he needed to cut things off not only with Kekua, but Tuiasosopo, whom they were convinced was the real Kekua, Tuioti-Mariner said.
Funny how ESPN got a hold of this unnamed friend yet allowed Deadspin to break the door open on what will quite possibly be the biggest college football story of the year.
Maybe Deadspin just taught them a lesson in some real investigative reporting.
h/t: ESPN, The Big Lead