Today’s Biggest News Stories

Manti Te’o, the charismatic, talented, God-fearing linebacker at Notre Dame, was projected to be a first-round pick in the NFL Draft by the end of his junior year in 2012. Then, early in his senior season news broke that his grandmother and his girlfriend Lennay Kekua had died on the same day — only for a Deadspin report to reveal a few months later, in January 2013, that Lennay was reported to be a man who spent years catfishing Te’o online.

For Te’o, months of mourning his grandmother and girlfriend were immediately followed by months of being the subject of one of the most embarrassing public spectacles in recent memory, one that ultimately cost him millions of dollars because it seemed to contribute to him getting selected later in the NFL Draft.

In the sports documentary series Untold, Te’o walks back in time to explain how he could have possibly dated a girl for three years without meeting her in person — and the naivete, loneliness, and tunnel-visioned worldview that shaped him at the time. Viewers also hear firsthand from Naya Tuiasosopo, the trans woman pretending to be Lennay, who found comfort in the Facebook profile that allowed her to be who she felt she was before she transitioned — “an escape where I felt safe,” she says in the film.

At its core, writes Albert Samaha, this is a story about two young people healing from the damage of experiences the rest of us are only beginning to understand.

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