Netflix documentary reopens catfishing story of college footballer Manti Te’o

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A new documentary coming out on Netflix on Tuesday explores the decade-old catfishing scandal involving Notre Dame linebacker Manti Te'o. 

The story starts in December 2012, after the Samoan-Hawaiian college footballer announced that his grandmother and girlfriend had passed away on the same day. He received an outpouring of support from fans and sympathetic media attention nationwide. Te'o finished the regular season expected to be the first-round pick of the NFL 2013 draft. However, in January 2013, Te'o found out his girlfriend, Lennay Kekua, was not a real person. 

As the documentary "The Girlfriend Who Didn’t Exist" notes, Kekua, who pretended to be a female Stanford student while engaging in a romantic online relationship via Facebook, was actually a young man at the next time from Seattle named Ronaiah Tuisosopo. 

Tuiasosopo, who has recently come out as trans and goes by the name Naya, maintained months long relationship with Te'o by mimicking a female voice over the phone and using stolen photos of a high school classmate and friends on Facebook. The documentary explores the gender struggle and confusion of Tuiasosopo that led to the catfishing incident. 

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"The Lennay profile was not necessarily a way out but a way to something else," Tuiasosopo says in the documentary. "At that time, I knew for sure there was something inside of me that just wanted to scream out and be like, ‘Why am I different?’ There were a couple of encounters online where it was like, ‘This guy’s cute. Let’s see where this goes.’ I knew what was right and