A new documentary coming out on Netflix on Tuesday explores the decade-old catfishing scandal involving Notre Dame linebacker Manti Te'o. 

The story commences in December 2012, just after the Samoan-Hawaiian faculty footballer announced that his grandmother and girlfriend had handed absent on the similar day. He been given an outpouring of aid from followers and sympathetic media attention nationwide. Te'o finished the normal period anticipated to be the 1st-spherical choose of the NFL 2013 draft. Nevertheless, in January 2013, Te'o observed out his girlfriend, Lennay Kekua, was not a authentic man or woman. 

As the documentary "The Girlfriend Who Did not Exist" notes, Kekua, who pretended to be a female Stanford pupil while engaging in a passionate on the net romantic relationship through Fb, was in fact a young male at the future time from Seattle named Ronaiah Tuisosopo. 

Tuiasosopo, who has recently come out as trans and goes by the identify Naya, preserved months long marriage with Te'o by mimicking a woman voice about the cellphone and working with stolen pics of a high college classmate and good friends on Fb. The documentary explores the gender wrestle and confusion of Tuiasosopo that led to the catfishing incident. 

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"The Lennay profile was not always a way out but a way to one thing else," Tuiasosopo claims in the documentary. "At that time, I knew for certain there was a thing inside of of me that just desired to scream out and be like, ‘Why am I diverse?’ There were being a few of encounters on the web in which it was like, ‘This guy’s sweet. Let us see wherever this goes.’ I realized what was correct and improper, but I was too significantly in appreciate with getting appeared at in this way. It was wholly egocentric, but it was what produced me happy. It was what I wanted to be a truth."

Right away, Te'o went from a beloved up-and-coming faculty football participant to the subject matter of mockery and jest as the tale became internationally famed. The documentary tells the point of view of Te'o and Tuiasopopo, but the pair never meet in individual and have not spoken since the scandal broke. 

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"When we started filming, they hadn’t been in make contact with considering that the scandal broke. They hadn’t talked, they hadn’t seen each individual other," Chapman Way, a person of the documentary's govt producers, informed the NY Submit. "And so it was a truly exciting way of earning this. They have not been in speak to. They have not been in interaction."

Manti Te'o is the concentration of a new Netflix documentary that sheds light on his infamous 2013 catfishing scandal.  (Getty Illustrations or photos)

"But I imagine kind of what created these interviews so effective is they had been drawing on recollections from 10 a long time in the past. Recollections that have stayed with them. Pretty potent reminiscences. Pretty strong thoughts. I feel the two of them are nevertheless performing as a result of form of what this full scandal was and how it impacted them separately."

Te'o would eventually recuperate from the scandal by signing a two-12 months deal with the New Orleans Saints in 2017 in advance of switching to the Chicago Bears observe squad in 2020. The 31-year-old is not presently signed with an NFL and is a free of charge agent. 

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In 2020, he married the exercise enthusiast Jovi Nicole and the pair share a child daughter.