EOTM! Online

Via CNN

This may be the strangest twist in a tale overflowing with strangeness.

Manti Te’o's deceased girlfriend tweeted late Wednesday night.

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On a Twitter account — not verified, naturally — the “girlfriend” said the “myths” about the story that have sports fans scratching their heads will be addressed Thursday.

The Twitter account appears to have deleted all the previous messages sent to Te’o and seems to have been created Thursday. It is unclear if the same person who sent tweets before from that account reactivated it after reports broke — or if someone else created the account.

Whatever the “girlfriend” says, she’ll find it hard to top what’s already come out about the Notre Dame linebacker and the woman he called the “love of my life.”

First, sports website Deadspin published a piece dismissing as a hoax the existence of Te’o's girlfriend — the one who he said died around the same time as his real-life grandmother while his team marched toward the BCS National Championship Game.

Then Wednesday, the university held a press conference saying Te’o was the victim of a “elaborate hoax.” And Te’o, the Heisman Trophy runner-up, released a statement saying he was embarrassed that he was the victim of a “sick joke.”

The bizarre developments left many wondering if they, instead of Te’o, were led on — and whether the heralded linebacker was in on it.

“Te’o's story that he is completely innocent in this does not really ring true to us,” Timothy Burke, co-author of the Deadspin article, told CNN’s Anderson Cooper Wednesday night.

The hoax

The story of the girlfriend came to light in September as Notre Dame continued its improbable undefeated season and Te’o, a relentless tackler, was beginning to emerge as a frontrunner for the prestigous Heisman Trophy.

He led the Fighting Irish, amassing multiple double-digit tackle games and becoming the face of one of the best defenses in the nation.

In September and October, Te’o told interviewers that his girlfriend and his grandmother had died within hours of each other. The girlfriend, Lennay Kekua, a 22-year-old Stanford University student who had been in a serious car crash, died of leukemia, he said.

The twin losses inspired him to honor them with sterling play on the field, Te’o said. He led his team to a 20-3 routing of Michigan State after he heard the news.

“I miss ‘em, but I know that I’ll see them again one day,” he told ESPN.

It was indeed a gripping interest story of determination. And the media ran with it.

No one bothered to seek out Kekua’s family to ask how they felt about the way Te’o was honoring their daughter. Until Deadspin, acting on an anonymous e-mail it received last week, started poking around.

“What do you do when you first want to know something, you Google it, right?” Burke said on CNN. “And Google searches for ‘Lennay Kekua’ only showed up articles about her dying, and inspiring Mant’i Teo.

“There’s no evidence of her existing in any way, other than, you know, after she had allegedly died. And we thought that was a little weird.”

Te’o's grandmother did in fact die in September, Deadspin said. But there was no Social Security Administration record of Kekua’s death.

The website called mortuaries and funeral homes in Carson, California, where Kekua was reportedly buried — but came up empty. They sought out the person whose picture had been presented as that of Kekua and tracked her down.

Timeline: How the story unfolded

She was alive, didn’t have leukemia and had never met Te’o.

“That sort of opened everything up,” Burke said.

The revelation prompted the athletics director of Notre Dame to call a news conference Wednesday. There was no way for Te’o to know the relationship was a hoax because it had been conducted strictly online and on the phone, said director Jack Swarbrick.

The pair had set up several meetings, including in Hawaii, where Te’o grew up — but Kekua never showed, Swarbrick said.

The university said it did not know how many people were in on the ruse.

According to Swarbrick, Te’o received a call from a woman claiming to be his girlfriend in December, telling him she was not dead. Those calls continued but Te’o did not answer, he said.

Stanford University’s registrar’s office told CNN that it has never had a student registered in Kekua’s name or using an alternate spelling.

“Outside of a few Twitter and Instagram accounts, there’s no online evidence that Lennay Kekua ever existed,” Deadspin contends. “There was no Lennay Kekua.”

Te’o in his own words

Her ‘soulful eyes’

So, how did the two fall in love?

If the South Bend Tribune in Indiana — the newspaper of Notre Dame’s home town — is to be believed, the two met — yes, met — after a football game in Palo Alto, California, in 2009.

“Their stares got pleasantly tangled, then Manti Te’o extended his hand to the stranger with a warm smile and soulful eyes,” the paper gushed. “They could have just as easily brushed past each other and into separate sunsets. Te’o had plenty to preoccupy himself that November weekend in Palo Alto, Calif., back in 2009.”

The article went on to say: “Lennay Kekua was a Stanford student and Cardinal football fan when the two exchanged glances, handshakes and phone numbers that fateful weekend three seasons ago.”

Te’o's father, Brian, was quoted in the article: “They started out as just friends. Every once in a while, she would travel to Hawaii, and that happened to be the time Manti was home, so he would meet with her there. But within the last year, they became a couple.”

Media reports indicate the parents never met Kekua.

The newspaper said Wednesday it based the details on information from Te’o, his family members and coaches — and pulled the story from its website.

Social media jump all over hoax story

Te’o tried to clear things up with a statement Wednesday saying he “developed an emotional relationship with a woman I met online.”

“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.”

In his statement, reported by ESPN, the star said, “To realize that I was the victim of what was apparently someone’s sick joke and constant lies was, and is, painful and humiliating.

“It further pains me that the grief I felt and the sympathies expressed to me at the time of my grandmother’s death in September were in any way deepened by what I believed to be another significant loss in my life.”

Will the real Kekua please stand up?

Late Wednesday night, the story took another twist when ESPN found an NFL player who said he knew Kekua and that she is a real woman. The player, Reagan Mauia, an Arizona Cardinals fullback, told the sports network that he and Pittsburgh Steelers star Troy Polamalu met her

“This was before her and Manti,” Mauia told ESPN. “I don’t think Manti was even in the picture, but she and I became good friends. We would talk off and on, just checking up on each other kind of thing. I am close to her family.”

Who’s who on the Internet? Who knows

Then later Wednesday night came a tweet from @LennayKay — a Twitter handle that once was associated with Kekua.

“It isn’t fair to drag Reagan and Troy into this.. a lot of truths and myths need to be addressed here, and they will be at noon PST tomorrow,” the tweet said.

The other two tweets on the page were retweets from the verified account of Te’o.

“@LennayKay I miss you!” said a November 6 tweet from Te’o's said.

On September 12, Te’o tweeted “@LennayKay you will always be with me wherever I go!”

Now that may be true.

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