Te’o Mentioned ‘Girlfriend’ Twice After Hoax Discovery

Questions continue to swirl around Notre Dame linebacker Manti Te'o and his dead online girlfriend who turned out to have never existed, with the Associated Press reporting yesterday (January 17th) that he twice spoke about her after supposedly finding out in early December that the woman he said he'd been with for three years never existed.

AP found that the Heisman Trophy runner-up talked about Lennay Kekua on December 8th, and again in an interview published on December 10th, even though Notre Dame said that he learned on December 6th that the online girlfriend never existed and it was a hoax.

In the December 8th interview, he said, "I mean, I don't like cancer at all. I lost both my grandparents and my girlfriend to cancer." That fuels speculation by many that Te'o wasn't the victim of a hoax, but someone involved in perpetrating it.

According to the story, which garnered Te'o widespread publicity and sympathy, Kekua died of leukemia in September on the same day as his grandmother. In another revelation yesterday, Sports Illustrated posted a previously unpublished transcript of a September interview in which Te'o mentioned meeting Kekua for the first time after a game in California, saying, "We met just, ummmm, just she knew my cousin. And kind of saw me there so. Just kind of regular."

Te'o has since said he never met Kekua in person.