6:58 pm - 01/31/2013
o rly now
Ronaiah Tuiasosopo - I'm a Recovering Homosexual
The man behind the Manti Te'o girlfriend hoax -- a deeply religious Christian -- told Dr. Phil he believes he suffers from homosexuality ... and desperately needs to "recover" from it.
During his interview, Dr. Phil asked Ronaiah Tuiasosopo straight ... "Are you gay?"Ronaiah replied, "If you look at this situation and everything that I've been through, I would say yeah I'm gay. But honestly I'm so confused."
Ronaiah -- who admitted he had deeply romantic feelings for Manti -- added, "It takes a lot of courage to recover from homosexuality and this type of thing and coming back to your real life. As hard of a task it is, I'm going to do all I can to live right."
Dr. Phil was blown away by Ronaiah's response, saying, "This is for another time, but I have so much to say to you about what you just said, because a lot of it bothers me so much." He added, "But we will talk about that another time."
The man behind the Manti Te'o girlfriend hoax -- a deeply religious Christian -- told Dr. Phil he believes he suffers from homosexuality ... and desperately needs to "recover" from it.
During his interview, Dr. Phil asked Ronaiah Tuiasosopo straight ... "Are you gay?"Ronaiah replied, "If you look at this situation and everything that I've been through, I would say yeah I'm gay. But honestly I'm so confused."
Ronaiah -- who admitted he had deeply romantic feelings for Manti -- added, "It takes a lot of courage to recover from homosexuality and this type of thing and coming back to your real life. As hard of a task it is, I'm going to do all I can to live right."
Dr. Phil was blown away by Ronaiah's response, saying, "This is for another time, but I have so much to say to you about what you just said, because a lot of it bothers me so much." He added, "But we will talk about that another time."
it seems you meet a lot of people who have had relationships with the other gender but still adamantly declare they're straight
:(
But I do know that this is a terrible thing to think about yourself and I hope he gets the help he needs, and by help I mean the therapy road to acceptance type, not the Jesus will smite you type.
Why would the other dude bother bringing up a girlfriend who never existed in interviews? Why say she died - which would make people want to see her more if there was nothing to find?
this is fucking hilarious
I'm trying to believe that maybe they did have something going on but like... Idk I am just confused as fuck rn lol. Whatevs.
This shit is confusing.
1. Te'o's grandma dies and his "girlfriend" dies shortly after. He gets lots of sympathy from fans and the industry.
2. Deadspin does some research into Lennay Kekua, and finds out she's fake. There are no legal documents indicating that Lennay Kekua ever existed. No birth certificate, no death certificate, etc. and she has no internet footprint prior to her association with Te'o. Te'o had previously claimed that he met her irl.
3. Three (of many) theories:
-He was duped. He was a naive kid who met a cute girl online and didn't consider that somebody might have been messing with him. He tried to meet her irl, but there was always some excuse. He was too embarrassed to admit that he had an internet girlfriend, so he told the media and his parents that he had seen her in the flesh.
He was fooled by his friend Ronaiah. A few twitter sleuths found some former friends of Ronaiah's who claimed that they stopped talking to him once they found out he was fucking with Manti. Ronaiah got the photo from a former classmate of his, telling her that a sick relative or friend thought she was beautiful and wanted to see her picture. He set up a twitter account using the girl's picture and pretended to be Te'o's gf. Why did he do this? Attention maybe. He was a high school football star whose career never took off and his music wasn't really doing so well either.
-Or, Ronaiah and Te'o were working together. They created a sob story to get some symapthy and to drum up some media attention for Te'o.
-Or, they're both gay or bi and chose the most convoluted way imaginable to cover it up. It would have looked strange that Manti didn't have a girlfriend, so they created one.
omg, this is the length of a novel
Edited at 2013-02-01 01:34 am (UTC)
But since he comes from a very religious background AND he plays football, I wouldn't be surprised if he were covering up his sexuality.
idt 2 works b/c lennay was created years before te'o was even nationally famous. they couldn't have known notre dame would go undefeated 2 years in the future.
But when I said this on the original post everyone was like LOL WHATEVER HE MADE UP A GIRLFRIEND YOU MUST BE A FOOTBALL FAN! (I don't even know the rules of football) even when that scenario doesn't make sense. Why would Ronaiah bother asking this Facebook woman for a pic of her holding a sign if Te'o hadn't needed convincing? They didn't appear to have used that picture to convince the general public of anything; they already had all the other pictures he'd stolen from the FB friend to make the girlfriend seem real.
It doesn't make sense for Te'o to have pretended to have a girlfriend anyway. Why have her die too when his grandmother just died? If he wanted sympathy he'd already have gotten sympathy for his grandmother. Ronaiah had to kill Lennay off because Te'o was too suspicious or Ronaiah was having religious-based gay-shame about the whole thing, plus he already had Te'o as a friend at that point (it appears he used Lennay to "introduce" him to Te'o). He also might have created that leukemia story just because people who do that kind of fake-identity shit are addicted to drama, but then he might have realized too late that Te'o might try to find records of her being there, or call the hospital or something, and he wanted to end it. He probably said she died the same day Te'o's grandmother died because he wanted Te'o distracted and unable to visit Lennay.
I mean, I honestly wouldn't care if Te'o was gay and he and Ronaiah were both covering up a gay relationship. But I think it's more likely that Te'o was just duped like Ronaiah had duped people before, and he was too embarrassed to admit he hadn't actually met his own girlfriend. When I was a teenager I had online boyfriends and it was embarrassing to admit it; people had to pry the "online" part out of me.
But for whatever reason, people want to think that Te'o made it all up for publicity -- when he apparently already had publicity, and could have gotten a real girlfriend, and whatever else. I blame the original Deadspin article for putting forth that theory with no basis whatsoever, because people read it and then thought that, even though it made zero sense compared to the theory that Ronaiah just duped Te'o.
Oh well, whatever. I feel sort of bad for Te'o if Ronaiah really just duped him, because it's already embarrassing enough without everyone thinking he seriously made up a girlfriend for publicity too.
I'm really curious to know for sure whether Ronaiah was faking the voice or if it was an actual girl (that would be really weird) or maybe after the fact, Te'o's people just made up some voicemails so Te'o didn't look like even more of an idiot for believing Lennay was real. But honestly, it would be... surprising to say the least if Te'o kept on a fake relationship with Lennay without even phone calls. "I don't have a webcam" can get you pretty far with someone who wants to believe you're real, I'm sure, but everyone has a phone. So I hesitantly believe that Te'o really did talk to someone he thought was Lennay, but who knows.
The story is bizarre.
/conspiracy
That man is such a hack.
It upsets me so much that Oprah is responsible for Dr. Phil being a thing.