The Girlfriend Who Never Was: The Hoax the Paper Carried

September 2012 – January 2013 · the newspaper-hoax stock, at its record size

The search first: a folklore record looks in the city's newspaper for the tales the newspaper itself made — the April Fools' fabrications and planted hoaxes by which American papers once kept a folklore of their own. For the South Bend Tribune, no April Fools' fabrication of its own stands in the record this section could reach; the search is printed here so the gap has an address. What the record does carry is larger: a hoax the paper — with the national press — carried as news for four months, the most-read false story ever printed about a Notre Dame football player.

The tale: in September 2012 the Tribune reported, in its coverage of the death of linebacker Manti Te'o's grandmother, that his girlfriend, Lennay Kekua, had died the same week after a battle with leukemia — the double loss becoming the emotional spine of an undefeated season, told and retold nationally. On 16 January 2013 Deadspin published its investigation: Kekua did not exist. There was no death, because there was no person: the girlfriend was an invention, worked on Te'o in an online and telephone relationship by Ronaiah Tuiasosopo, who later admitted the hoax publicly. Notre Dame's athletic director, Jack Swarbrick, faced the press the same day with the university's own investigation behind him: the school had known since late December, had hired investigators, and Te'o stood in its account as the victim of “a very elaborate, very sophisticated hoax.” No South Bend hand made the tale up; the city's paper is in the story the way every paper is in it, as a carrier — which is the standing lesson of this whole section, printed at modern size: a story with a dying girlfriend, a grieving star and a perfect season was too well-shaped to check, and it ran for a third of a year in the age of the search engine, not the age of the campfire.

Sources:

1. South Bend Tribune, September 2012 — the report of Lennay Kekua's death in the paper's coverage of Te'o's grandmother's death, as the record of the hoax's carriage by the city's paper.
2. Timothy Burke and Jack Dickey, “Manti Te'o's Dead Girlfriend, The Most Heartbreaking And Inspirational Story Of The College Football Season, Is A Hoax,” Deadspin, 16 January 2013 — the exposure: no record of Kekua's existence or death; the trail to Ronaiah Tuiasosopo.
3. Jack Swarbrick, press conference, 16 January 2013 (University of Notre Dame) — the university's investigation, known to it since late December 2012, and its conclusion that Te'o was the victim of an elaborate hoax.