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Manti Te’o is back in the news along with an embarrassing story of being catfished. The renewed attention on the football player is due to a new streaming show on Netflix.
That has a lot of viewers wondering: Where is Manti Te’o now, in 2022? How is he doing today? Does he have a wife?
The answer to the latter question is: Yes, he has a wife. Her name is Jovi Nicole Engbino. She posts pictures with Te’o and their child on her Instagram page. Te’o is also on Instagram, where he recently weighed in on the Netflix show.
First a quick recap.
The media wrote a series of heartfelt stories about Te’o’s supposed girlfriend, Lennay Kekua, dying of leukemia back in 2012. According to The New York Post, Ronaiah Tuiasosopo is now a trangender woman named Naya Tuiasosopo. Tuiasospo, it later turned out, made up Kekua, essentially catfishing Te’o by using a former high school classmate’s pictures.
The photos of “Lennay Kekua” were of a real woman named Diane O’Meara, who later revealed that she was a former high school classmate of Tuiasosopo. O’Meara spoke out about the incident in a 2013 CNN interview, saying that Tuiasosopo had asked her for a photo and took some from her Facebook page. She had no idea he was going to use them to catfish a football star.
In 2022, Netflix streamed the show, “Untold: The Girlfriend Who Didn’t Exist.” The caption reads, “From Notre Dame to the NFL, Manti Te’o’s future in football showed promise until a secret online relationship sent his life and career spiraling.”
Here’s what you need to know:
Te’o Has Spoken Out About the Netflix Show
Te’o spoke to “CBS Mornings” after the Netflix show began streaming.
“In order for me to kind of heal from this, I needed to reveal it,” Te’o told the show.
“I challenged myself at this time that if anybody asked about it or had questions about it, that I would be open and I would have those hard conversations, and I started to feel the strength that I would get from talking about it.”
He continued,
I didn’t know what to believe. You don’t expect for somebody to say ‘Hey, somebody’s dead,’ and three months later, ‘Somebody’s alive.’ What do you do with that information? Do you call somebody and say, ‘Hey, I just found out somebody’s alive.’
He also wrote about the show in an Instagram post:
As I sit here and think about the journey that it has been to come to this point, I am extremely humbled. I want to publicly thank everyone who has been a part of my journey because you all have played a vital role into me getting to where I am today. Thank you to @netflix especially @tonyvainuku and @ryanduffy for all the countless hours they’ve put in to making this project. To all the people that have supported me and have stood up for me, this one is for you. Thank you for your unwavering love and support. You have no idea what that has meant to me the past 10 years. To my family, we’ve been through it all…the highest of highs and the lowest of lows but I’m forever grateful that I had you all with me, every step of the way. Last but not least, God…thank you. Thank you for all lessons. Thank you for all the hard times. Thank you for the good people throughout the years that have reached out to show love and support when it was not the most popular thing to do. Thank you for it all. It was all meant for me.
I hope you all enjoy this project. Tune in on Netflix to watch it. Cheeeehooooo!!!
Te’o Now Has a Wife & Is a Free Agent in Professional Football
According to USA Today, today Te’o is a free agent in professional football.
“Te’o is married with one daughter and has a son on the way,” reported CBS.
According to The Sun, Te’o met his future wife in 2016, and they married in 2020. According to the Sun, “she formerly worked as a sales support specialist but is now a trainee nurse and fitness instructor.”
In 2020, she wrote on Instagram, “Yesterday I got to marry my best friend and the love of my life in an intimate beach ceremony❤️ Although this was not how we envisioned our ceremony, it was perfect. We will be having our reception and celebration when Temples and venues open back up so we can share this special occasion with our families and I couldn’t be more excited.”
Te’o wrote a shoutout to his wife:
My wife. My best friend. The Bonnie to my Clyde. The yin to my yang. I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life but dang I got this one right. Through all the injuries, jokes, memes, hashtags, doubts, mistakes, she held me down and stood up for me just like my family did and that’s how I knew. When the world turns their back on you, look around…those that are still there are the ones that will ALWAYS be there. I know who’s rocking with me and who ain’t and there’s one thing for sure, she’s a ryydahhh. Here’s to eternity queen. You got me…I got us! I love you @jovinicolefitness #givethanks #day4
Deadspin Unraveled the Catfishing Hoax
LRT: Today marks 3-year anniversary of Lennay Kekua’s death. Please keep Manti’s little angel in your thoughts. 🙏 😇 http://t.co/SHOZjLrZ1P
In 2013, Deadspin revealed that the heartbreaking story of Kekua’s death was a “hoax.” The exhaustively detailed investigation report was written by Timothy Burke and Jack Dickey.
The story of Kekua and Te’o had even made the pages of Sports Illustrated. “In the span of six hours in September, as Sports Illustrated told it, Te’o learned first of the death of his grandmother, Annette Santiago, and then of the death of his girlfriend, Lennay Kekua,” Deadspin reported.
The story went that Kekua, 22, was injured in a car accident in California and then died of leukemia. According to Deadspin, the Sports Illustrated author even described how her “relatives told him that at her lowest points, as she fought to emerge from a coma, her breathing rate would increase at the sound of his voice.”
Started the Manti Te’o Netflix doc last night. A decade later it still astounds me that until the Deadspin story no one fact-checked anything during the whole season or even put a call in with Stanford’s registrar’s office to check if Lennay Kekua was ever enrolled there.
According to Deadspin, the football player spoke on television about letters Kekua sent him and the heartfelt story was featured in other respected publications.
ESPN wrote before the hoax unraveled:
Te’o’s family was originally set to meet Kekua for the first time this Saturday, and the emptiness probably will be felt in the same way it has been every day since her passing, when the couple’s ritual of falling asleep on the phone together came to a tragic end.
Kekua made Te’o promise he would not leave Notre Dame should anything happen to her, requesting only a few white roses. So he responded three days after her death by recording 12 tackles in a prime-time win at then-No. 10 Michigan State.
Only it wasn’t true.
Deadspin Wrote, ‘There Was No Lennay Kekua’
GettyManti Te’o
Deadspin could find no record of Kekua or her death and discovered photos of her were of a woman who had never met Te’o.
According to the Deadspin investigation, the relationship began on Twitter between @MTeo_5 and @lovalovaloveYOU, on Oct. 10, 2011.
However, the photos on that account were of the other woman unearthed by Deadspin, who was not Kekua. She told Deadspin she had sent the picture to a high school acquaintance named Ronaiah Tuiasosopo, who was actually a family friend of the football player. Tuiasosopo now is a trangender woman called Naya Tuiasosopo.
Deadspin wrote, “we spoke with friends and relatives of Ronaiah Tuiasosopo who asserted that Ronaiah was the man behind Lennay. He created Lennay in 2008.”
Concluded Deadspin, “There was no Lennay Kekua.”
According to Deadspin, Notre Dame released this statement:
On Dec. 26, Notre Dame coaches were informed by Manti Te’o and his parents that Manti had been the victim of what appears to be a hoax in which someone using the fictitious name Lennay Kekua apparently ingratiated herself with Manti and then conspired with others to lead him to believe she had tragically died of leukemia. The University immediately initiated an investigation to assist Manti and his family in discovering the motive for and nature of this hoax. While the proper authorities will continue to investigate this troubling matter, this appears to be, at a minimum, a sad and very cruel deception to entertain its perpetrators.
Te’o wrote:
This is incredibly embarrassing to talk about, but over an extended period of time, I developed an emotional relationship with a woman I met online. We maintained what I thought to be an authentic relationship by communicating frequently online and on the phone, and I grew to care deeply about her. To realize that I was the victim of what was apparently someone’s sick joke and constant lies was, and is, painful and humiliating. It further pains me that the grief I felt and the sympathies expressed to me at the time of my grandmother’s death in September were in any way deepened by what I believed to be another significant loss in my life. I am enormously grateful for the support of my family, friends and Notre Dame fans throughout this year. To think that I shared with them my happiness about my relationship and details that I thought to be true about her just makes me sick. I hope that people can understand how trying and confusing this whole experience has been. In retrospect, I obviously should have been much more cautious. If anything good comes of this, I hope it is that others will be far more guarded when they engage with people online than I was. Fortunately, I have many wonderful things in my life, and I’m looking forward to putting this painful experience behind me as I focus on preparing for the NFL Draft.
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