Two sporting scandals dominated the American news cycle at the start of 2013: the disgrace of Lance Armstrong and the humiliation of college footballer Manti Te’o. But if Armstrong’s belated confession that he doped to win all seven of his Tour de France titles told a story about the rotten heart of American success that felt, four decades after Watergate, somehow traditional, the Te’o affair seemed to offer a warning about the dangers of the internet at a time when techno-optimism was still all the rage – before bot accounts, misinformation, and online harassment became features of everyday life. According to a new two-part documentary about Te’o’s ordeal, however, premiering this Tuesday on Netflix, the scandal needs to be understood as more than the simple tale of catfishing as which it’s often presented. As it’s framed in The Girlfriend Who Didn’t Exist, the romantic hoax at the heart of Te’o’s national humiliation was about much deeper and more interesting questions of identity, faith and belonging – for minorities in particular – in early 21st century America.
Almost a decade after the story became meme-fodder, the basic outline of the Te’o scandal is still fairly common knowledge: Te’o, a star Samoan-Hawaiian linebacker at Notre Dame, claimed that his grandmother and girlfriend had died on the same day in December 2012. An outpouring of national sympathy fired Te’o to new heights of excellence on the field, Notre Dame finished the regular season undefeated, and Te’o seemed destined to become a first-round pick in the 2013 NFL draft. There was only one problem, though, and in January 2013 that problem became international news: Te’o’s girlfriend, Lennay Kekua, was not real. In fact, Kekua, who purported to be a student at Stanford and with whom Te’o had pursued a purely online relationship, was the Facebook creation of a young man – also, like Te’o, of Samoan ancestry – from Seattle.
