The plot is thickening when it comes to football star Manti Te’o and his deceased “girlfriend.”
DETAILS: Did Top NFL Prospect Manti Te’o Get Catfish’d By “Dead” Girlfriend?
The Daily Mail is revealing that the woman Te’o thought was Lennay Kekua is actually an unsuspecting marketing executive who lives in Los Angeles.
Diane O’Meara, 23, was ‘shocked’ to find out that pictures off her Facebook page had been turned into fake Twitter profile for Te’o’s non-existent girlfriend Lennay Kekua.
She only found out about the scam when a reporter from Deadspin.com contacted her last week – but by then she had been Te’o’s ‘girlfriend’ for almost a year.
O’Meara claims to not have known anything about the elaborate hoax. Family members told the New York Post that she was shocked.
Olga Volkov said that O’Meara was a ‘good person’ from a ‘good family’.
She said: ‘Somebody stole her identity.
‘(O’Meara’s family) found out about it yesterday. They were shocked.’
According to The Daily Mail, O’Meara found out about the hoax after Kekua’s alleged “death” when Deadspin contacted her. Many news stations were covering the tragic story, posting pictures of the made-up woman on television.
Kekua supposedly died around September 12 from leukemia after recovering from a near fatal car crash – just six hours after his grandmother passed away.
Among those that paid tribute to Kekua was CBS which showed a picture of her on This Morning with a direct quote she has supposedly said to Te’o: ‘Babe, if anything happens to me, you promise that you’ll stay there and you’ll play and you’ll honour me through the way you play.’
Next to it was a picture of Kekua – but it was actually O’Meara.
When Deadspin contacted O’Meara she said: ‘That picture is a picture of me from my Facebook account.’
O’Meara hasn’t commented on the hoax yet, but her Instagram and Facebook reveal that she was not associated with the Catfish scam at all.
Damn! I guess the truth is really coming out. Did Te’o know about any of this?
SOURCE: Daily Mail
