Buckle up
In this docuseries, Manti Te'o is positioned as the ultimate good boy, golden retriever type. He loved the church. He worked hard to earn his place in life as a football player for Notre Dame. He was respectful of his parents, they literally quote him as having only two answers to any questions; “yes dad” and “yes mom”.
The series really pulls us back to an era of online innocence that was very of the zeitgeist at the time. It was a time wherein we still had genuine usernames for our accounts on Tumblr, like puppylover96, and emails began with things like Gracelovespink. It’s a bit of novelty in that sense and in a 2022 context, we’re reminded that it wasn’t all MSN and playing solitaire when the internet was too shite to get you onto Bebo.
When Te'o was catfished, people were shocked, from his parents to anybody with a TV because yes, it was on the news. It was 2009, catfishing wasn’t a concept anyone really knew much about or spoke of — we didn’t even get a word for it until the following year when in 2010 the MTV series came out. If we had heard of people pretending to be someone they were not online, it was certainly something none of us thought would happen to us, and certainly not a quasi-celebrity.
The catfish ‘Lennay’ sought him out. She courted him. She couldn’t help herself from coercing him into a relationship under awful false pretenses like having leukemia, getting into an accident that left her unconscious and solely responsive to the sound of his voice on the phone, and eventually, she even faked her death. She even tried to bring her catfish persona back to life, telling him she didn't really die after he mourned in front of the entire world.
But people ridiculed Te'o for being a victim of manipulation and lies at the hand of this catfish. He became a meme, the butt of a joke. Beyond the teasing, people even accused him of being responsible for all of this as a publicity stunt that backfired.
The journalists who exposed the story knew how seedy the story was. A small online journal worked relentlessly trying to find evidence of ‘Lennay’ after both her fake death and receiving a tip about her non-existence. After checking hospital records to find evidence of her death, they came up short and eventually found the real ‘Lennay’ — or at least the woman whose photos were being used.
It’s almost got parallels to cancel culture today — it remarks on how small snippets of people’s lives can make the public turn on them, reducing them to a punchline or a meme or making them completely irrelevant. Powerful scenes of Te'o in the water, waves rugged and him in up to his neck, were an accurate representation of his emotional state and gorgeous artistic break from the footage and VTs.
The docuseries is a powerful lesson in identity and forgiveness. Since the incident, the person behind ‘Lennay’ has transitioned, goes by the name Naya, and she feels remorseful for the things she did. At that time, she developed feelings and a connection for Te'o, admitting that she had fallen in love with Te'o on ‘Dr Phil’.
This docuseries shows the fine lines between reality and pretend that is still relevant nowadays especially online. Maybe today we're generally less susceptible to catfishing, but it's still just as easy to project a filtered, tweaked, and often fake life. Fooling people online is still a trend.
'The Girlfriend Who Didn't Exist' is on Netflix now.