FOOLED ON THE PLAY: Manti Te’o tells Katie Couric in an interview airing today that he was too ashamed to say he was the victim of a girlfriend hoax. (
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Notre Dame golden boy Manti Te’o yesterday admitted he didn’t have the guts to tell his adoring public the truth after learning the “girlfriend” he thought died of leukemia was an elaborate hoax.
“What would you do?” asked the 21-year-old Heisman Trophy runner-up. “I, my whole world told me that she died on Sept. 12. Everybody knew that. This girl, who I committed myself to, died.
“Now I get a phone call on December 6th, saying that she’s alive, and then I’m going be put on national TV two days later” for the Heisman ceremony, Te’o told ABC’s Katie Couric in an interview airing today at 3 p.m. on WABC/Channel 7.
Te’o said he couldn’t just admit that “Lennay Kekua” — a woman he’d claimed to have met four years ago, dated since 2011, and mourned when she died — was a scam made up by an acquaintance, Ronaiah Tuiasosopo.
Te’o knew he would be asked about Lennay at the Heisman ceremony.
“You stuck to the script,” Couric said. “And you knew something was amiss, Manti.”
“Katie, put yourself in my situation,” he responded.
Te’o said that, until the December phone call, the inspirational story of how he played through the deaths of both his beloved grandmother and Lennay to lead Notre Dame to the national football championship game was legit.
“What I went through was real,” he said. “You know, the feelings, the pain, the sorrow — that was all real and that’s something that I can’t fake.”
When Couric asked if the sob story helped him land more votes in the Heisman race, Te’o said, “I don’t know. I really don’t know.”
Te’o insisted he was not involved in the scheme.
“For me, the only thing I basked in was that I had an impact on people, that people turned to me for inspiration, and [that] was the only thing I focused on,” he said.
His parents, Ottilia and Brian, insisted their son didn’t manipulate the public for his own gain.
“People can speculate about what they think he is,” a teary-eyed Brian Te’o told Couric.
“I’ve known him 21 years of his life. And he’s not a liar. He’s a kid.”
ESPN reported yesterday that a source has provided it with documents containing Te’o’s phone logs showing that 1,000 calls were made — from May 11 to Sept. 12 of last year — to and from a person with an 661 area code believed to be “Kekua.” Of those calls, 110 lasted longer than an hour.
Meanwhile, hoaxmaster Tuiasosopo is under constant watch by family members, who fear he may be suicidal.
“I’m scared he’s going to go into a deep depression or hurt himself,” a relative told The Post yesterday. “We’re making sure a family member, especially his dad or his mom, always are keeping eyes on him.”
Tuiasosopo’s insisted that there was a reason for the twisted trick.
“There’s a whole other side to it that nobody knows about,” said the relative. “We’re trying to keep it where everybody is guessing. We don’t want everybody to know what’s going on.”