The Girlfriend Who Didn’t Exist: the Manti Te’o hoax revisited with sympathy
Two sporting scandals dominated the American news cycle at the start of 2013: the disgrace of Lance Armstrong and the humiliation of college footballer Manti Te’o. But if Armstrong’s belated confession that he doped to win all seven of his Tour de France titles told a story about the rotten heart of American success that felt, four decades after Watergate, somehow traditional, the Te’o affair seemed to offer a warning about the dangers of the internet at a time when techno-optimism was still all the rage – before bot accounts, misinformation, and online harassment became features of everyday life. According to a new two-part documentary about Te’o’s ordeal premiering this Tuesday on Netflix, however, the scandal needs to be understood as more than the simple tale of catfishing it’s often presented as. As it’s framed in The Girlfriend Who Didn’t Exist, the romantic hoax at the heart of Te’o’s national humiliation was about much deeper and more interesting questions of identity, faith and belonging, for minorities in particular, in early 21st century America.
