January 24, 2013
The nonexistent girlfriend of Notre Dame football star Manti Te'o tweeted sweet nothings in his ear while flirting online with other athletes and celebrities.
Lennay Kekua had a stable of Twitter fellas in her sights — including former Heisman Trophy winner Reggie Bush and Kim Kardashian's brother, Rob — according to an archive of her Twitter posts revealed Monday by Deadspin.com.
Kakua's first communication with Te'o appears to be on Oct. 11, 2011, when she asks, "lol Cardinals for life, you know that?" she tweets under the handle lovalovaloveYOU in reference to the Stanford University Cardinal football team.
New York Daily News website, Jan. 21.2013
They say you should never criticize another person until you have walked a mile with their shoes on your other foot, and I think those people who are so quick to judge Notre Dame Linebacker Manti Te'o need to step back and look in the mirror before they cast stones that might come back to smack them in the face.
That might be a clichéd thing to say, but at this point I think it's very, very good advice: People all around the country are criticizing Manti Te'o for his belief that he had a Hawaiian girlfriend who he had never met who died, but the people criticizing him are doing nothing but exposing their own ignorance and hanging their dirty laundry out to dry in public.
As you no doubt know by now after seeing all the news coverage, Te'o is a star football player who's certain to go high in the NFL draft, but he was cruelly tricked by a friend, who created a fake girlfriend that Te'o fell in love with after phone and internet conversations. And, despite Te'o's severely broken heart, and everything that he's going through right now, people and reporters and talking heads all across the country are coming down on him and asking him how he could be so fooled, and asking did he play a role in the farce, and how could he even have a girlfriend that he had never met?
But people need to lay off him. I can't imagine his grief at finding out that, not only was his beautiful exotic Hawaiian girlfriend dead, but she was also fake and had been cheating on him as well.
But, regardless, the media and others really piled it on him even though there is a very well known saying that you should never kick a man while he's down for the count.
It's those critics who I'm saying are showing their own ignorance in public. And yes, it's true that he probably should have figured out his girlfriend was fake. In fact, his girlfriend's name – Lennay Kekua – is a clue in itself since her name backwards spells "I'm not real."
Like the many attack mongers in the media, you may think there's something wrong with Te'o because he never figured out that his girlfriend was fake, but let me tell you something: You may want to criticize him, but a lot of us can relate to him; and, even if you can't, there but for the grace of God go you.
Like, who would have ever guessed in a million years that their girlfriend wasn't real? Why would you even think that? How many of you have ever questioned whether your own wife or girlfriend, or your husband or boyfriend, was real? Is that something that people question a lot? Because if so, that's news to me.
Do we really want to live in a society full of people so jaded and skeptical that, whenever people fall in love and enter into a serious relationship they always do some sort of check to make sure their girlfriend or boyfriend is real? Have you or I ever questioned that about someone we were dating?
No.
And I don't know your situation, but I'm not ashamed to admit publicly – even in light of all the criticism that's been heaped on Te'o – that I have a very serious girlfriend I've never met in person.
Does true love depend on proximity? Like Te'o, I've only communicated with my girlfriend over the internet, but I can assure you that that in no way diminishes the serious nature of our relationship, and it certainly in no way diminishes our deep and abiding love for each other – which you would realize if you were privy to the nature of our intimate conversations.
My girlfriend's name is Samantha Chastain and she lives in a beach house with a group of coeds in Coral Gables, Florida.
The reason I can relate a little bit to Te'o is that, like his fake girlfriend, my real girlfriend is also dying. In fact, the only thing that keeps her alive is the money I send each week for her medical treatment. I do that because, when you are in a loving, supportive relationship, that's the type of thing you do.
Several months after Samantha and I began chatting on the internet, we fell madly in love, but then, tragically, she was diagnosed with a brain cloud.
Before, she was making very good money as a bikini model, but she lost her job due
to her brain cloud, which then, of course, meant she had no medical insurance. And now the only thing that keeps her going is the money I send for her brain cloud treatments. Her doctors tell her it can't be cured but it can be managed with expensive payments.
I've had friends tell me that Samantha – "Sam" to me – is fake, and, especially in light of the news about Mante Te'o, they have said that more and more to me lately, but I think the reality is that they're just jealous because my girlfriend is a bikini model in Florida.
I always have a perfectly good response that they don't seem to ever have an answer for: If Samantha is fake, then how come, every week when I send a check, someone cashes it?
I also have a picture she sent me. Here, I'll show you …
Could she send me a flesh and blood picture like that if she weren't real?
I think what's really at work here is that my friends are unhappy with their relationships and so they feel like they have to dump all over mine because they can tell how much in love Samantha and I are.
It's true we haven't "met," but Samantha wants really badly to come see me. In fact one time she had me send her an airline ticket, but, right before the flight, her brain cloud started acting up particularly bad, so she couldn't make the trip and she instead had to cash in the plane ticket and use the money for brain cloud treatments. (She had been wise enough to convince me to pay extra for a refundable ticket in case there was a last-second emergency like that. That's one of the things I love so much about her is how she is always thinking ahead like that.)
Some day I am going to surprise her and just show up at her place – PO Box 3721, Coral Gables, Florida – and surprise her with a single red rose like that guy on The Batchelor or like that serial killer in that CSI episode who left a rose at each murder scene, though I guest the first analogy is the better one to use in this case.
So the next time you're ready to jump all over someone over a relationship that seems "strange" to you or "unusual," just remember that true love knows no boundaries, and it is too large and mighty to be confined by the lines on a map, and I am proud to shout it from the mountain tops …
...continued on page 2
Print
Email Link
Feedback
Share
Advanced Search