Notre Dame’s Manti Te’o is called victim of Internet hoax

Facing a media throng just days before competing for a national championship, Notre Dame’s star linebacker, Manti Te’o, fielded a question about the death of his girlfriend and his ability to rise above the tragedy.

It was a benign question, one he had heard dozens of times before as Lennay Kekua’s passing had been woven so tightly into the narrative of his triumphant senior year. And he answered it as he always had.

But at that time Te’o — and university officials — knew there was far more to the story than platitudes about football and family.

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A week earlier, on Dec. 26, the Heisman runner-up told Notre Dame officials that his girlfriend did not exist and that he was a victim of an elaborate Internet hoax, the school said Wednesday.

“In many ways, Manti was the perfect mark,” Notre Dame Athletic Director Jack Swarbrick said, “because he is a guy who is so willing to believe in others and so ready to help, that as this hoax played out in a way that called upon those tendencies of Manti, it roped him more and more into the trap.”

Swarbrick outlined a bizarre story in which Te’o learned his girlfriend never existed more than three months after her reported death. The player received a phone call Dec. 6, while at an awards show, from what he believed was Kekua’s old cellphone number. The woman on the other end — in a voice he recognized as Kekua’s — told him that she wasn’t dead. She later tried to rekindle the relationship, Swarbrick said.

“Every single thing about this, until that day in the first week of December, was real to Manti,” Swarbrick said. “There was no suspicion it wasn’t. No belief 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.”

Swarbrick likened the hoax to the movie “Catfish,” in which a person creates a fake persona with someone else’s picture and then dupes another person into a romantic relationship. The film spurred a popular MTV show by the same name that investigates online relationships to see if the participants are real.

Te’o notified his coaches of the situation after discussing it with his parents over the Christmas holiday. Swarbrick said he met with the player twice and found his story about the exclusively online and telephonic relationship to be consistent. Te’o and Kekua never met face to face, Swarbrick said.

“Several meetings were set up where Lennay never showed,” he said.

Kekua’s purported passing came within 48 hours of the real death of Te’o’s grandmother, Annette Santiago. That double loss vaulted Te’o onto the cover of Sports Illustrated and, along with Notre Dame’s eventual undefeated regular season, into the Heisman Trophy mix. Te’o finished second in that voting to Texas A&M; quarterback Johnny Manziel, tying for the best finish ever by a pure defender.

The scam does more than just shatter a college football fairy tale. It also leaves a black mark on sports journalism, as many news outlets — including The Times — ran stories about Kekua’s passing without verifying her death. There was no published obituary for Kekua and no California driver’s license issued to anyone with that name (she supposedly graduated from Stanford). The Social Security Administration database had no record of anyone with the surname Kekua dying in 2012.

Te’o released a statement Wednesday insisting that he had been duped into having a long-term “emotional relationship” with an Internet impostor. Describing the situation as “painful and humiliating,” Te’o said he believed he maintained an authentic relationship with Kekua over the phone and via the Internet.

“To think that I shared ... 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,” the statement read.

Notre Dame hired a private investigator, who produced a final report Jan. 4, and the university shared the findings with the Te’o family the next day. The sports website Deadspin publicly exposed the hoax on Wednesday.

The independent investigation revealed online “chatter” among the alleged perpetrators, Swarbrick said, that demonstrated “the joy they were taking” in fooling Te’o. The pranksters even made sure that the player sent white roses in her honor and told him what time they planned to close her casket.

“There was a place to send flowers,” Swarbrick said. “There was no detail of the hoax left undone.”

However, the Deadspin story raises questions about Te’o’s involvement in the ruse. The site says that Kekua’s purported Twitter account was created by a California man with ties to the linebacker and his family. An unnamed source suggested the death was a publicity stunt hatched by Te’o and his West Coast counterpart.

At the very least, Te’o and his family have made the truth difficult to decipher because they all made references to Te’o meeting Kekua during their courtship. In October, for example, Te’o described her to ESPN as the most beautiful person he had ever met and his father told the South Bend (Ind.) Tribune in October that Kekua had traveled to Hawaii “every once in a while.”

When asked about rising above the tragedy in the days before the game, Te’o said, “I think whenever you’re in football, it takes your mind off a lot of things. You know this team is very special to me and the guys on it have been there for me through the good times and the bad times.”

Notre Dame acknowledged Wednesday that it did not encourage the player to set the record straight before the title game. Instead, officials sat silent while reporters blindly prepared stories about Kekua’s fake death, fake leukemia and fake Stanford degree.

“We encouraged him to try to focus forward and focus on the game,” Swarbrick said.

sports@latimes.com

St. Clair and Hamilton are reporters for the Chicago Tribune. Reporter Jennifer Delgado of the Tribune also contributed to this article.