Photo Credit: Manti Te’o/Instagram
You might remember former NFL player Manti Te’o and his long term girlfriend that ended up being exposed as someone that did not exist now almost 10 years ago. He finally decided to come out about what happened in the Netflix documentary Untold: The Girlfriend Who Didn’t Exist debuting August 16th. What happened was the year before he was drafted in 2013, he said his grandmother died the same day his girlfriend Lennay Kekua did. The problem is she didn’t exist. It was later revealed that he had been catfished, never met the person and that it was really a man named Ronaiah Tuiasosopo that has now transitioned to being a woman. Her name is now Naya Tuiasosopo.
Te’o said on CBS Mornings it was a Jay-Z concert that had him decide to finally tell his truth. “Cam Jordan with the Saints took a bunch of us teammates to a Jay-Z concert,” Te’o stated. “And at that concert, Jay-Z opens up with saying these words — ‘you cannot heal what you don’t reveal.’ And it may have been just some random words to everybody, but for me, at that time, it hit me like a ton of bricks. In order for me to kind of heal from this, I needed to reveal it.” He says he vowed after that day to tell his story the first chance he got and when he was approached by documentary director Tony Vainuku in 2020, he did just that.
These days, he’s on year 2 of his marriage to Jovi Nicole Engbino with a daughter and a son on the way. The problem we have is that this story doesn’t quite pass the smell test. Being that he became an NFL player, it would not surprise me if he tried to keep this under wraps and pretended nothing happened. Mind you he lied about meeting her when he didn’t. Why would he need to do that? This comes across very much a story of a man in denial about his identity. And that can be dangerous for his wife. Over the years, the majority of the guys that I have met that were admittedly violent to their spouses struggled with their identity. There is nothing wrong with being into both sexes, just don’t take your repressed desires out on other people. We’re going to watch this to see if things add up and if 2+2 will equal 7,396.
