In describing the type of woman Te'o would be attracted to, Swarbrick said 'the greater the need, the more she's the love of his life.'

He said Te'o is the most trusting guy he knows on the football team, making him the perfect target for a scheme like the one he and Te'o say has been perpetrated against the linebacker. Swarbrick said that since the hoax became public, he has received roughly a dozen emails from strangers saying they had been victimized in a similar fashion. That trusting nature has been a hallmark in the narrative that has evolved around Te'o, whose story of overcoming the death of his grandmother and what was believed at the time to be Kekua's death was told and retold throughout Notre Dame's season, which ended with a loss to Alabama in the Discover BCS National Championship in Miami. He's the only guy on the team who knows whether a student manager is having trouble in calculus.' 'I'd have been more suspicious if he said 'I was really wary of this all along,'' Fighting Irish athletic director Jack Swarbrick told ESPN's Mark Schwarz on Saturday, referring to Te'o's trusting nature. Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick reiterated his support for Manti Te'o on Saturday. They appear to validate Te'o's version of events as he described them Friday night during a 2½-hour interview with ESPN's Jeremy Schaap, his first public statements after the revelation on Wednesday that the girl the world had come to know as Lennay Kekua does not exist. 'Everything he said and every emotion he expressed were painfully authentic.'Īs the Te'o saga has continued to unfold, and incidents such as the car accident and several others have been proven false, a number of Te'o's allies on Notre Dame's campus stepped forward publicly Saturday, including Pepelnjak. 'That phone call made it clear to me how much Lennay meant to him,' Pepelnjak told in a statement. Te'o kept Pepelnjak apprised of some of the details of the conversation during several pauses, including whom he was talking to.

The voices on the other line, her purported brothers, were updating Te'o on her condition, according to Pepelnjak. In the final game of a three-game series, Te'o received a phone call he had been anxiously awaiting.Ī woman Te'o had met online, who went by the name Lennay Kekua, had been in a car accident just a few days earlier, on April 28. Last spring, John Pepelnjak was engaged in a late-night session of 'Madden NFL' on Xbox 360 with his friend Manti Te'o in Te'o's first-floor Dillon Hall dorm room.

Teo notre dame