Ronaiah Tuiasosopo
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The mastermind of the Manti Te’o girlfriend hoax believes he needs to “recover from homosexuality” after falling in love with the star Notre Dame linebacker, he said yesterday in his first tell-all interview.
Ronaiah Tuiasosopo confessed to TV shrink Dr. Phil McGraw that he created Te’o’s fake girlfriend, Lennay Kekua, because he’d fallen in love with the Heisman Trophy runner-up.
“Were you in love with him?” McGraw asked the teary-eyed Tuiasosopo, 22, who sings in a band in his father’s church.
“I mean, yeah,” Tuiasosopo said. “It ‘s very shameful and very painful to even talk about, [but] I grew feelings, I grew emotions that [I] couldn’t control anymore.
“You’ve heard of recovering drug addicts? It takes a lot of courage to stand and say that — to recover from homosexuality and this type of thing.
“Not only that. Coming back to your real life — as hard as a task as that is — I’m going to do all that I can to live right,” he said in the hourlong interview, which will continue on TV today.
The hoaxer also insisted that he was the voice behind Kekua and other family members, even as a skeptical McGraw said FBI experts believe there’s only a “1 in 10 million” chance of that being true.
McGraw said he has sent the audiotape to experts, who compared it against voice-message tapes that Te’o released last week to Katie Couric. He will reveal the results on his show today.
The Post first reported that Tuiasosopo family members used female relatives — including cousin Tino Tuiasosopo — to carry out the scheme. Tuiasosopo was visibly insulted when McGraw asked if he’d ever forgotten to put on his pretend voice.
“I’m not trying to be funny, but that’s kind of a rookie mistake,’’ he sniped.
“When you have been able to mastermind all of this and create this whole — not just Lennay but her family and this whole reality — and make it seem as real as possible, that’s a mistake that . . . I never made that mistake.”
But when McGraw said he had “serious doubts” Tuiasosopo was telling the truth and urged him to “prove it,” the scammer replied, “I just don’t want to, with all these cameras and everything….”
Tuiasosopo finally agreed to create the voice behind a privacy screen — which will air during today’s interview.
Tuiasosopo also said it was pure jealousy that spurred him to end the one-sided romance.
After using passwords to access Te’o’s social-media accounts, he confronted Te’o about Skype dates with four women.
A furious Te’o responded with a vicious text message, saying, “I never needed you. I’ll never need you. I never want to see you again.”
“It hurt me,” Tuiasosopo said. “It hit me like a brick wall. I was like, ‘Whoa, I’ve given so much into this.’
“And I realized right then, in that moment, that I poured so much into Lennay, that I myself was getting nothing, and look what I was left with.”
He insisted that Te’o was never part of the ruse.
“He has expressed over and over again how deeply he loved Lennay. She was his other half, the love of his life.” Tuiasosopo boasted.
“He really had fallen in love with this, well, character. It is what it is.”