Say It Ain't So, Te'o: The Greatest Story Ever Fabricated

Everyone coming has probably read or heard about this somewhere else already, but I'm in a bit of a cold-induced funk and want to know where I can find it when my head clears, to be sure it was real. And can think of something to say about it other than:

What?

Notre Dame's Manti Te'o, the stories said, played this season under a terrible burden. A Mormon linebacker who led his Catholic school's football program back to glory, Te'o was whipsawed between personal tragedies along the way. In the span of six hours in September, as Sports Illustrated told it, Te'o learned first of the death of his grandmother, Annette Santiago, and then of the death of his girlfriend, Lennay Kekua. 

Kekua, 22 years old, had been in a serious car accident in California, and then had been diagnosed with leukemia. SI's Pete Thamel described how Te'o would phone her in her hospital room and stay on the line with her as he slept through the night. "Her relatives told him that at her lowest points, as she fought to emerge from a coma, her breathing rate would increase at the sound of his voice," Thamel wrote. 

Upon receiving the news of the two deaths, Te'o went out and led the Fighting Irish to a 20-3 upset of Michigan State, racking up 12 tackles. It was heartbreaking and inspirational. Te'o would appear on ESPN's College GameDay to talk about the letters Kekua had written him during her illness. He would send a heartfelt letter to the parents of a sick child, discussing his experience with disease and grief. The South Bend Tribune wrote an article describing the young couple's fairytale meeting—she, a Stanford student; he, a Notre Dame star—after a football game outside Palo Alto. 

Did you enjoy the uplifiting story, the tale of a man who responded to adversity by becoming one of the top players of the game? If so, stop reading. 

Manti Te'o did lose his grandmother this past fall. Annette Santiago died on Sept. 11, 2012, at the age of 72, according to Social Security Administration records in Nexis. But there is no SSA record there of the death of Lennay Marie Kekua, that day or any other. Her passing, recounted so many times in the national media, produces no obituary or funeral announcement in Nexis, and no mention in the Stanford student newspaper. 

Nor is there any report of a severe auto accident involving a Lennay Kekua. Background checks turn up nothing. The Stanford registrar's office has no record that a Lennay Kekua ever enrolled. There is no record of her birth in the news. Outside of a few Twitter and Instagram accounts, there's no online evidence that Lennay Kekua ever existed. 

The photographs identified as Kekua—in online tributes and on TV news reports—are pictures from the social-media accounts of a 22-year-old California woman who is not named Lennay Kekua. She is not a Stanford graduate; she has not been in a severe car accident; and she does not have leukemia. And she has never met Manti Te'o.

Within hours of the revelations by Deadspin, the denials started flowing from Notre Dame -- which is at the least complicit in the most ornate hoax in sports-media history -- and Te'o -- a Heisman Trophy finalist and probable high first-round draft pick who is either the most naive 22-year-old in America, an effective-yet-short-sighted con artist, a deeply troubled young man or some combination of the three.

I am going to go out on a limb and say that quite a bit more to this story will be out there soon, probably by the time this gets posted. Wherever it goes from here, the shame of the story of The Dead Girlfriend Who Never Lived falls as much on the mass-media journalists who hyped it as the bastards/geniuses who perpetrated it.

When I wrote for the New York Times, standard policy was that you at least attempted to talk to anyone who was of even minor importance in any story. Apparently, things have changed since I kicked the professional journalism habit a few years back.

SB Nation has a handy list of the assorted guardians of truth, and their employer/enablers, who evidently do not follow that policy.

Thanks to all listed for encouraging the portion of the populace already prone to seeing media-fueled conspiracies behind even the most horrific stories imaginable. And also to those responsible, for making today a little more interesting.