In 2012, Manti Te’o's girlfriend died. Four months later, he found out she never existed.

Listen to this story being read by Brielle Burns, here. 

It was a September day in 2012 when Manti Te’o was told his beloved grandmother had passed away.

Just hours later, the American college football player was hit with more tragic news. 

His girlfriend, Lennay Kekua, had died from leukemia, after surviving a near-fatal car accident months earlier.

A rising Notre Dame football star, Te’o's devastating loss quickly made headlines around the country.  

Three days later, the athlete was hailed a hero when he bravely took to the field and led his football team, the Fighting Irish, to an incredible victory. 

At the time, Te’o was simply fulfilling a promise he had made earlier to Kekua, who he had been dating online for around a year. 

"Promise that you'll stay there and you'll play and you'll honour me through the way you play," the 22-year-old Stanford university student told him before she passed. 

But months later, it would be revealed that Kekua didn't die that September day. In fact, she never existed.

10 years on, the true story behind the scandal which rocked America's sporting world is being told in Netflix's new documentary, Untold: The Girlfriend Who Didn't Exist.

The two-part documentary, which features interviews with both Te’o and the person behind the hoax, tells the infamous catfishing tale that sent the football player's "life and career spiraling". 

Watch the trailer for Netflix's The Girlfriend Who Didn't Exist. Post continues below.

For Te'o, the first threads started unravelling in December 2012, when he received a phone call from a woman claiming to be Kekua.

"I get a phone call on December 6, saying that she [Kekua] is alive," he told Katie Couric’s Syndicated Talk Show.

The young athlete had no idea what to believe. 

"I don’t know what to do – like, what’s true? What’s not true? And I can’t tell anybody what’s going on. I mean, what would you think?" he said in the documentary. 

A month later, the sports news outlet Deadspin ran an exposé, after receiving an anonymous tip off, revealing that Kekua never existed. 

The article explained the profile pictures used by Kekua, who Te'o had never met in real-life, actually belonged to a 22-year-old woman named Diane O’Meara.

O’Meara had never met Te'o, nor did she have any idea she was being used as a part of a catfish. 

It was later reported that Kekua's real identity was actually a now transgender woman named Naya Tuiasosopo, who was known to Te’o. 

"My whole world changed and I'm questioning everything," Te'o said in the documentary.

Tuiasosopo was one of Te'o's childhood friends from Hawaii who had set up the fake profile to catfish the athlete after falling in love with him. 

"I didn't expect it to blow up so quickly," Tuiasosopo said in the documentary.

"I created this fictional character," she explained. "I totally felt fear, I didn't have courage to just be like, 'This is who I am.'"

Naya Tuiasosopo. Image: Netflix 

Over the course of nearly a year, Tuiasosopo would manipulate her voice and pretend to be Kekua.

Whenever Te’o wanted to FaceTime or meet up, she would always find a way to shut it down. 

Meanwhile, Te'o grew to care for Kekua more and more each day. 

"Te'o developed a nightly ritual in which he would go to sleep while on the phone with her. When he woke up in the morning his phone would show an eight-hour call, and he would hear Lennay breathing on the other end of the line," Sports Illustrated reported. 

But the illusion was shattered when Deadspin ran the story for the whole country to see. 

Suddenly, Te'o faced a wave of scrutiny from the media, with many questioning if he had been in on the hoax for publicity. 

Denying it, Te’o released a statement explaining that he was simply a victim of a "sick joke". 

"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," he wrote 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 realise that I was the victim of what was apparently someone's sick joke and constant lies was, and is, painful and humiliating."

Te'o said in hindsight, he "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."

Te'o's father also came to his defence. 

"People can speculate about what they think he is. I've known him 21 years of his life. And he's not a liar. He's a kid," his father told Katie Couric’s Syndicated Talk Show.

Manti Te'o answers questions from reporters in New York City in 2012. Image: Getty. 

Te'o later received an apology from Tuiasosopo. As did O'Meara - the girl whose photos she used to make the fake account. 

Recalling the apology in the documentary, Te'o said, "His exact words before anybody else found out: 'I just wanted to apologise.' And I said, 'What are you apologising for?'" 

Te'o didn't get an answer, and that was the last time the pair ever spoke.

Where is Manti Te'o now?

Over time, the athlete eventually moved on from the media scrutiny and went on to have a successful football career.

In 2020, he tied the knot with his now-wife, Jovi Nicole Engbino, in an intimate beach ceremony in California. 

"Yesterday I got to marry my best friend and the love of my life in an intimate beach ceremony," Engbino wrote in an Instagram post at the time. 

The couple later welcomed a baby girl named Hiro last year. 

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Manti Te'o (@mteo50)

10 years on, Te'o says the scandal still follows him today. 

"[My] challenge, every day, [is] that when somebody comes up to me and they say, ‘Manti, man, I’m a big fan of you,’ that I don’t think of the hundreds of people that said, ‘Manti, I’m a big fan of you, let me take a picture,’ and I took a picture with them, and they made fun of me," he said in the documentary. 

"If there’s anything I’m going to do, what’s what I’m going to do – every day, you know, I’m gonna rise above all that ... no matter how hard it is for me."

Untold: The Girlfriend Who Didn't Exist is streaming on Netflix. 

Feature Image: Getty/Mamamia.

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