Open Friday Manti Te'o Thread: What would convince you that Te'o was duped? [New info]

Dan Tudesco, a 2006 graduate who now works in public relations in New York, set up an online account at fundraising website indiegogo.com on Jan. 9 to solicit $5,000 for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society Inc. The initial pitch said donations would go to the society in memory of Lennay Kekua and in honor of Te'o, "two individuals who have been an inspiration to us through an iconic season."

Tudesco said he and three friends got the fundraising idea after seeing a video that went viral of Te'o holding his head in dismay during the Irish's 42-14 loss to Alabama in the national championship game.

The goal was to turn the loss -- and the player's sudden popularity -- into something positive.

"I think we were all kind of disappointed in the result of the game ... and the Manti story was very inspirational," Tudesco told The Associated Press on Thursday.

Notre Dame took notice of Tudesco's tweets about the fund drive and sent a university videographer to shoot an interview with him. The video was posted on the Notre Dame athletics YouTube channel Tuesday.

Tudesco said he didn't believe Notre Dame was aware of the hoax when it promoted his fundraiser.

"It would surprise me that Notre Dame would want to promote this if they knew something like this was going on," Tudesco said.

Link

The university is letting this continue even after the title game despite knowing about the hoax on the 26th. Everyone is full of shit. 

*Sorry I tried blockquoting but couldn't figure it out. 

Why didn't Te'o attend the funeral? Or did he? Was it a closed casket?

Of all the "Return to Glory" years since 1988, this one is by far the most entertaining.

theory: this story started to implode during the runup to the heisman ceremony. i posit that the heisman committee wanted to fly in te'o's family and probably the family of his dead girlfriend for the ceremony (you often see large family contingents at these events) as it would have been a heartwarming story (especially if he had won).  committee either reaches out themselves or asks teo to get in touch. thats when everything unraveled.  the "mystery phone call" from his dead girlfriend's number on dec. 6th was probably a fabrication to deflect attention from what really caused this to come to light

If he had a 3 year record of electronic communications with a "Lennay Kekua" that would be pretty compelling. The records could even be heavily redacted as long as it demonstrated a sincere communication with Lennay.

If Teo is telling the truth he has the evidence to prove it.

When ND produces the aliens who fogged his brain, and they explain how they did it, I will believe he was in the dark.

The big question for me now is how long did the ND administration, athletic and otherwise, know about this canard? The confluence of forces here suggest that we have something like the Penn State scandal with regard to the higher-ups. Not as large or harmful as the PSU scandal for sure, but of the same species (lying and coveringup for something deemed too big to criticize or discipline).

There is a ton of information out there and the narrative seems to shift around a bit. I have also seen a number of stories which seem to quote other stories where the information gets slightly altered. 

I can only assume Pete Thamel has not altered his notes from his SI piece on Teo and his girlfriend since he should have a record of it. The amount of detail is staggering considering this person did not exist. Back to knowing her for 4 years, starting to date in Oct 2011, details of her life, etc, it is simply hard to comprend the extent of the lie that Teo promoted and his current explanation of being duped. 

Yes, the guy did not commit a crime, but to manufacture such an elaborate tale involving severe injury, cancer and his heroic involvement requires a pretty twisted mind. After reading the detailed notes, there should be no further questions regarding what he did, only why the "high character guy" was such a fraud.

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/college-football/news/20130117/manti-te...

if somebody (or a group of somebodies) came out of the woodwork and explained how and why they duped MT in great, believable detail. 

then, sure.

otherwise, he clearly was in on it.

We need to get one of those FBI or CIA human lie detector people to analyze all of those taped interviews.  I saw we have him analyze the Swarbrick press confernce as well.

...I found out that he accidently gave himself a frontal lobotomy with a spoon while eating a bowl of cereal.

I would believe he was duped, if he took both a polygraph and an I.Q. test.  The polygraph would have to show that he was being honest and his I.Q. test would have to come back with a score between 5-10.

Did anyone else read about the guy in New York who created an indiegogo "foundation" to send money to a leukemia foundation on behalf of Lennay after the bowl game? Well, it happened. The problem is, after the bowl game, Notre Dame sent a crew to interview him and create content for the schools website!!! If so, is Notre Dame in on the coverup? There is still so much info we need to see.

USA Today ran yet another story on some of the discrepancies here - (LINK)

One detail that I hadn't caught before showed up in this story. It seems that, back when he was interviewed by Kate Sullivan in the early December timeframe, Te'o talked about how Kekua would write letters to him and that the Stanford game was the last one which was accompanied by a letter. It may not be so bad if that game had not been played on October 13th, a shade over a month AFTER Kekua supposedly died.

It still strikes me as very odd that someone who supposedly was deep in love with this "person" did not, in reality, consider that enough to physically meet them, or indeed attend their funeral. That's not an original revelation here, but it is one of the core inconsistencies that simply make me tend to believe that Te'o had knowledge of what was going on here, and even if not at the genesis of the plan, certainly later on.

The article in the South Bend Tribune, I believe, mentioned that allegedly meetings were set up where Kekua never showed, but I would think that, if this is the case, doesn't that raise a gigantic red flag, even to someone like Te'o? I have difficulty believing that he could really be that naive and not see the glaring inequity there in this "relationship".

 These things, in combination with the fact that Te'o continued to talk about Kekua as if were dead after he knew this story was coming unglued in early December, tend to make me believe that an elaborate duping is not what this is. If it was, then I would seriously worry about sending a man who has no ability to think critically and problem solve into a professional workforce of any kind.  

I think its very possible he wasn't "in on it" but was guilty of taking what he knew to be a small Twitter flirtation  and playing it up 1000 fold.  As I posted in one of the other threads, its entirely possible that he didn't know he was being duped but when the girl "died" he over dramatized it to those around him, not realizing that the media would become tipped off and start asking about "the girlfriend that died."  At that point he elected to not come clean, and played the matter up, figuring he'd get some milage out of it from the MSM before it fell off the radar.  As unexpected momentum built, he did so many interviews about the topic that he had to come up with "new material," so he invented late night phone calls that never happened, a "first meeting" in Palo Alto that never happened, visits to Hawaii that he told his family about (who then relayed them to the media) that never happened and so on...  I'm sure the "shocking" Dec. 6 phone call from "the perpetrator" never happened either.  There was no girl, just Tuiasosopo, some picks of a hot girl he obtained and some Tweets/messaging. The whole Dec. 6 call "from a girl I thought was dead" is another fabrication; it was Te'o's way of trying to come clean with the least amount of egg on his face.

 At some point he must have figured out he was being messed with, and may have even heard whispers that journalists were investigating this "girl friend" of his.  In a panic he took the matter to the school and together they went into damage control (which apparently means do nothing until forced to, then have the AD cry).  Notre Dame administrators know he was embelishing, so part of damage control is to try and keep the focus on the fact that he had been tricked and draw attention away from the fact that this only happened because Te'o took a benign Twitter flirtation and tried to spin it into Love Story.  

Now he's stuck:  he's being accused of being "in on" the hoax, but the only way to prove he wasn't would be to admit that he embellished everything to begin with which, frankly, might be just as bad.  

("Love means never having to say you're sorry!")

...I can puncho yo buns...