Ronaiah Tuiasosopo says in an interview with Dr. Phil McGraw that he was the voice of Manti Te’o’s “girlfriend,” Lennay Kekua, and that the star Notre Dame linebacker had no role in the hoax.
The first of McGraw’s two-part interview with Tuiasosopo will air Thursday on the Dr. Phil Show. McGraw appeared Wednesday morning on NBC’s Today show, which aired two clips of the Tuiasosopo interview.
“There were many times when Manti and Lennay have broken up,” Tuiasosopo said, “but something would bring them back together, whether it was something going on in his life or Lennay’s life or in this case, my life.”
McGraw said Tuiasosopo told him he fell deeply in love with Te’o and that for Tuiasosopo, it was a romantic relationship.
“Here we have a young man that fell deeply, romantically in love,” McGraw told NBC. “I asked him straight up, ‘Was this a romantic relationship with you?’ And he says ‘yes.’ I said, ‘Are you then, therefore, gay?’ And he said, ‘When you put it that way, yes.’ And then he caught himself and said, ‘I am confused.'”
McGraw told NBC that Te’o “absolutely, unequivocally” wasn’t involved in the hoax.
One theory for the hoax is that Te’o was trying to cover up a homosexual relationship. In a TV interview with Te’o last week, news journalist Katie Couric asked him if he was gay.
“No, far from it,” he said. “Faaaaarrrr from it.”
Tuiasosopo told McGraw that as Te’o became more famous he knew that the online hoax, which he started more than two years ago, was going to blow up.
Tuiasosopo said: “I wanted to end it because after everything I had gone through I finally realized that I just had to move on with my life and had to get … you know, my real me, Ronaiah … I just had to start living and let this go.”
McGraw said he spent time with Tuiasosopo and his parents.
“Ronaiah had a number of life experiences that damaged this young man in some very serious ways,” McGraw said.
As Notre Dame rose to No. 1 in the Associated Press Top 25, sports writers nationwide recounted the story of the heroic, grieving athlete who persevered on the field after his “girlfriend” was diagnosed with leukemia and died. Te’o and his family provided them with plenty of stories about the relationship, and no one figured out it was fiction until Deadspin.com broke the story earlier this month.
Te’o, in his interview with Couric, reiterated that he lied about his online girlfriend after the Dec. 6 phone call indicated that she may be alive, while maintaining that he had no part in creating the hoax.
The interview, which aired on Couric’s syndicated television show, put Te’o and his parents in front of television cameras for the first time since the incident.
