It was game day, and Notre Dame linebacker Manti Te’o, 22, had a heavy heart. His team was about to face Michigan State, and he had just learned that his grandmother had passed away. Within hours he received a second phone call informing him that his girlfriend, Lennay Kekua, had also died.
Te’o went ahead with his plan to play the football game, giving his team a moving speech before they went onto the field. He led his team to a 20-3 win and three months later was named a finalist for the 2012 Heisman Trophy.
After an investigation by Deadspin.com, it was revealed that Lennay Kekua was a fabrication created by a man named Ronaiah Tuiasosopo. Te’o had been “catfished.”
Catfishing is the practice of building a fake online personality to fool other users.
After the Te’o story hit, some students realized they had also been catfished. During the summer of 2011 someone created a profile under the name Jake Wyant and said that he would be attending the school when the fall semester began.
“Jake Wyant, or whoever it was, messaged me on Facebook and asked me all these questions about West and volleyball. It wasn’t ever anything like, ‘Oh, I like you,’” junior Savanna Austin said. “He was telling me where he lived and sent me a picture of this big mansion that was supposedly his house.”
One of Austin’s friends was suspicious, so he typed in the email that was on Facebook using the name Jake Wyant as the password and gained access.
“He had messaged like 50 girls from the school and some of them he had even planned to hang out with, but he wasn’t even real,” Austin said.
Catfishing first became known when the movie Catfish came out in 2010. It followed a man named Nev Schulman delving into the story of his online girlfriend, Megan. Many believe the story to be fabricated. Morgan Spurlock of the documentary Supersize Me said, “It was the best fake documentary I have ever seen.”
The popular television network MTV also released a show titled Catfish: The TV Show that films people meeting the person they have been in an online relationship with. Most times people do not turn out to be who they say they are.
“I watch that MTV show Catfish all the time, and it just makes me laugh because people are stupid,” Austin said. “You shouldn’t do that because you’re lying to people and that’s not right.”
Officials at the University of Michigan recently catfished their athletes in an attempt to teach them the dangers of social media. A consultant came in and had a secretary message the players.
After every catfishing revelation, the people who were lied to ask the same question: Why? “This wasn’t a prank to make fun,” Ronaiah Tuiasosopo’s lawyer Milton Grimes said to the New York Daily News. “It was establishing a communication with someone. It was a person with a troubled existence trying to reach out and communicate and have a relationship.”
Catfishing is not strictly against the law. Some states prosecute offenders for impersonating someone online, but not impersonating a fictitious person. The issue may raise First Amendment questions in the future.
By Sabrina Russell, feature writer
