New college football documentary: Notre Dame's Manti Te'o: The Girlfriend Who Didn't Exist

[Gophers1992]

He had a solid NFL career. Like 7-8 years where he started more than half the games.

It is possible he was just a good but not great player who was overhyped in college because he played for unbeaten notre dame


They beat
8-5 Navy
6-7 Purdue
7-6 Michigan state (who was top 10 when they played early in the season and built the hype)
8-5 Michigan
7-5 Miami
12-2 Stanford (clearly their best win) In OT
8-5 BYU
10-3 Oklahoma but it was a pretty average big 12 that year
6-7 Pitt
2-10 Boston college
5-7 wake forest
7-6 USC


A lot of solid teams on the schedule but only two really good wins.
If Stanford had beaten notre dame in overtime and lost to Oregon in overtime. Notre dame is a 1 loss team rated 8th instead of number 1 in the country.


They clearly deserved to go, but Manti teo was probably a good but not great college player who was hyped because he was the best player on an unbeaten notre dame team

Yeah I agree, though I'd say it's more like he was a great college football player who didn't have the measurables to be an NFL star. You can only get so far on instincts and grit and IQ, all of which he had in spades, but he wasn't an elite NFL caliber athlete. He did pretty well to last as long as he did in the NFL, and earned upwards of $10M. Not in any way excusing what the catfisher did, but I'm not sure I buy the idea that this totally derailed his potential NFL career.

 

[Dano564]

I don't want to sound insensitive but... how does an extra ordinary man fall in love with someone he's never met face to face? Was there no one on campus that was attractive enough? I remember when it started getting out, that I assumed he was in on it because seriously, how does this even happen? The fact that he wasn't involved just makes it worse that he would allow it to happen to him.

I wondered that back when this occurred, but they had many conversations and the recording, the catfisher does sound like a female to a surprising level.

The oddest part is that he never got skeptical when they tried to do a video chat that it wouldn't work.

The fact the relationship developed like it did based on trust and only 20 pictures or so is quite surprising.

 

[Bob_Loblaw]

Wow, that sounds very unusual. Any chance that @Bob_Loblaw or another Gopherhole lawyer could speculate on what happened here or discuss how unusual this actually is?

You can't really bring surprise witnesses (both sides are given the opportunity to prepare) and it's incredibly useless to put an attorney on the stand. In theory, you could call a surprise character witness but it still seems bizarre that would have been a dealership attorney. Nearly everything they do is covered by attorney-client privilege and therefore it would be illegal for them to disclose most things. It's not even a privilege the attorney could waive, it's the client's privilege (in this case the dealership's privilege), so even if the attorney wanted to disclose more information, they legally could not.

I have no idea what happened here, I've honestly never seen anything like that in my nearly 15 years in litigation. That said, you always hear stories about bizarre things that you can't quite wrap your head around.

Now the affair was likely relevant to the case because I'd guess it was a violation of the employment agreement. The dealership would argue "we had to fire him because what he did was reckless and in violation of the employment agreement".

 

[Bob_Loblaw]

I think they gave the Catfisher a very soft portrayal, but I think it was really needed to try to understand how someone could decide day by day to take this to the extremes the catfisher did.

Still disgusting and wrong on so many levels, but it was the only way to present the story to try to provide the viewer some empathy for how this became as bad as it did.

When this hit, I had no idea how Manti couldn't have known, but the story does a good job of explaining this.

Really shitty people have been doing this type of stuff for years regardless of their gender identity. They made an entire 15 season show on MTV about these kinds of people.

Most of the people who do this kind of thing have one thing in common, they physically want to look like someone else. They typically aren't classically good looking or they are trans, or whatever other reason they choose to selfishly choose to circumvent their victim's consent to intimacy.

A lot of the people on Catfish were obese. Several of them were pretending to be other genders (or they were trans). I don't think her transness explains WHY she did it anymore than someone's obesity explains why they did it. It might explain why they felt like they needed to do it. But they did it because their wants and desires took absolute priority over their victims' consent and humanity.

Trans people should be disgusted by this kind of a show aiming for empathy for this kind of behavior.

 

[Ogee Ogilthorpe]

In no way was I trying to downplay what that person did. Catfishing should be a crime and should get jail time in extreme instances like this. I just found it interesting to get the catfisher's perspective. I always thought it was someone or a group just playing a sick joke on someone. It was more complex than that.

I get what you're saying here, at least in regards to how it may have began for Ronaiah and why. But the problem is, it went about 873 miles beyond that.

- stealing an innocent and unwitting young woman's identity/likeness
- lying to Manti about their identity
- lying about being in a tragic car accident and being laid up in a hospital for a long period of time, on life support essentially
- lying about having cancer, Leukemia
- lying about DYING from leukemia
- renewing the lie to Manti after he had already dealt with their "death" a first time
- lying to the young woman who's images he had stolen in order to get her to provide the verification photo
- sending that photo to Manti to jump start the lie
- and honestly did they ever REALLY show that much remorse at all? I just never got that impression at all.

Man, woman or trans, it's just impossible for me to see Ronaiah as anything but a worthless POS. People have committed suicide as a result of this kind of catfishing, as well as deep depression, loss of trust in people around them, inability to enter into future relationships, et al

 

[GophersInIowa]

I get what you're saying here, at least in regards to how it may have began for Ronaiah and why. But the problem is, it went about 873 miles beyond that.

- stealing an innocent and unwitting young woman's identity/likeness
- lying to Manti about their identity
- lying about being in a tragic car accident and being laid up in a hospital for a long period of time, on life support essentially
- lying about having cancer, Leukemia
- lying about DYING from leukemia
- renewing the lie to Manti after he had already dealt with their "death" a first time
- lying to the young woman who's images he had stolen in order to get her to provide the verification photo
- sending that photo to Manti to jump start the lie
- and honestly did they ever REALLY show that much remorse at all? I just never got that impression at all.

Man, woman or trans, it's just impossible for me to see Ronaiah as anything but a worthless POS. People have committed suicide as a result of this kind of catfishing, as well as deep depression, loss of trust in people around them, inability to enter into future relationships, et al

I agree with everything you said here. I just think it was important to hear the story from both sides. Doing so helped verify Te’o as the clear victim.

 

[Plato]

Manti was/is very inexperienced in having a relationships with women and the person who manipulated him took advantage of that.
From my perspective that was a very evil thing to do.
It was like pulling the wings off of a fly.

 

[Ogee Ogilthorpe]

I agree with everything you said here. I just think it was important to hear the story from both sides. Doing so helped verify Te’o as the clear victim.

I don't dispute that, it was good to hear both sides. Kudos to the group that put that together for getting some fairly solid input from so many of the key players involved.

Not sure what to make of the Deadspin angle. I've never really looked at Deadspin, don't know that much about them. A brief discussion about it on a sport podcast I heard the other day was pretty critical of Deadspin for apparently (what they perceived) publishing the story without getting "all of the information". No doubt Deadspin gave the interviews to cover their ass and paint themselves as positively as possible, so I don't know how warranted that criticism was.

 

[RealU]

I don't want to sound insensitive but... how does an extra ordinary man fall in love with someone he's never met face to face? Was there no one on campus that was attractive enough? I remember when it started getting out, that I assumed he was in on it because seriously, how does this even happen? The fact that he wasn't involved just makes it worse that he would allow it to happen to him.

I've never understood this take. You have a young man whose identity is rooted in religion, so he has a lifelong history of putting faith into people that may or may not have existed. That's an aside to the fact that he verified her "existence" through multiple people. Additionally, he started talking to Ronaiah in October 2011, after he had been on campus for over 2 years. How do you know he didn't have multiple relationships prior to developing this "connection" to Ronaiah?

 

[Gopherchase]

Yeah I agree, though I'd say it's more like he was a great college football player who didn't have the measurables to be an NFL star. You can only get so far on instincts and grit and IQ, all of which he had in spades, but he wasn't an elite NFL caliber athlete. He did pretty well to last as long as he did in the NFL, and earned upwards of $10M. Not in any way excusing what the catfisher did, but I'm not sure I buy the idea that this totally derailed his potential NFL career

 

[Dano564]

Really shitty people have been doing this type of stuff for years regardless of their gender identity. They made an entire 15 season show on MTV about these kinds of people.

Most of the people who do this kind of thing have one thing in common, they physically want to look like someone else. They typically aren't classically good looking or they are trans, or whatever other reason they choose to selfishly choose to circumvent their victim's consent to intimacy.

A lot of the people on Catfish were obese. Several of them were pretending to be other genders (or they were trans). I don't think her transness explains WHY she did it anymore than someone's obesity explains why they did it. It might explain why they felt like they needed to do it. But they did it because their wants and desires took absolute priority over their victims' consent and humanity.

Trans people should be disgusted by this kind of a show aiming for empathy for this kind of behavior.

I agree with you.

I was just pointing out that if they had more harshly interviewed Roniah -sp, we would not have been able to comprehend how someone could justify in their mind to take these actions, step by step, each step along the way.

None of these actions are justifiable in any means, but it did a good job of getting inside the head of someone that messed up.

Perhaps it makes some more sympathetic to the catfisher to make them think it wasn't wrong, but it was definitely very wrong.

The amount of damage to Manti, his career, his personal life, and his professional life outside of football is beyond measureable.

 

[Go4]

i am surprised the woman in the pics never found out it was her in the pics with how public they were at the time.

 

[Cedar Rapids Gopher]

Yeah I agree, though I'd say it's more like he was a great college football player who didn't have the measurables to be an NFL star. You can only get so far on instincts and grit and IQ, all of which he had in spades, but he wasn't an elite NFL caliber athlete. He did pretty well to last as long as he did in the NFL, and earned upwards of $10M. Not in any way excusing what the catfisher did, but I'm not sure I buy the idea that this totally derailed his potential NFL career.

I believe it moved him from 1st round to the 2nd. And that alone cost him millions.

 

[GopherVotary]

I hate Notre Dame as much as anyone, and couldn’t stop laughing about the story when it first broke. But after a couple of months, I started to fell sorry for Te’o. After watching this, I feel even worse for him. But still, how do you “fall in love” with someone you never met?