Viral Hoax of the Day: Manti Te'o's Imaginary Girlfriend

Back in September 2012, Notre Dame football star Manti Te'o revealed that his grandmother and his girlfriend had passed away within six hours of each other. Yesterday, Timothy Burke and Jack Dickey of Deadspin published their findings and asserted that Te'o's girlfriend, Stanford University student Lennay Kekua, had never existed and the photos belonged to a friend of a friend of Te'o's who did not know the football star.

After the story broke, Notre Dame released a statement saying that Te'o was the victim of an elaborate hoax, as many other news outlets compared the story to that of the film and television show Catfish, in which photographer Nev Schulman finds out his girlfriend "Megan" is really an older woman named Angela. Following this news report, Te'o also released his own statement, noting he was "looking forward to putting this painful experience behind [him]."