The Dead Girlfriend That Never Was: US In Shock After Sick Prank On Football Player

The United States are in shock after a bizarre sick prank that involved the “girlfriend” of a National Football League player has been revealed.

The girlfriend, who called herself Lennay Kekua, claimed to be a Stanford graduate. But she was merely an online persona who “ingratiated herself with Notre Dame player Manti Te’o and then conspired with others to lead him to believe she had tragically died of leukaemia,” university spokesman Dennis Brown said.

Notre Dame Athletic Director Jack Swarbrick said the university learned of the hoax from Te'o the day after Christmas.

He answered questions honestly and private investigators uncovered several things that pointed to Te'o being a victim in the case.

"This was a very elaborate, very sophisticated hoax perpetrated for reasons we can't fully understand but had a certain cruelty at its core, based on the exchanges that we were able to see between some of the people who perpetrated it," Swarbrick said.

Swarbick spoke out after the website Deadspin.com published an expose under the headline “Blarney”, alleging that Kekua was a hoax dreamed up by a friend of Te’o’s.

"...there is no Social Security Adminstration record there of the death of Lennay Marie Kekua, that day or any other. Her passing, recounted so many times in the national media, produces no obituary or funeral announcement in Nexis, and no mention in the Stanford student newspaper,” the website wrote.

Deadspin.com said all the photographs identified as Kekua and shown in online tributes and on TV news reports belonged to a living 22-year-old California woman of a different name who is not a Stanford graduate, has never had leukemia and has never met Te'o.

Manti on the pitch.

Te'o acknowledged in a statement carried by ESPN.com and the Honolulu Star-Advertiser, that he had never met Kekua in person.

But he said he had developed an emotional relationship with her and “maintained what I thought to be an authentic relationship by communicating frequently online and on the phone.”

“To realise that I was the victim of what was apparently someone's sick joke and constant lies was, and is, painful and humiliating,” Te'o said.

The story began as Te'o told his coach his grandmother and girlfriend had died just a few days before an outstanding game he played in September. The coach told reporters and Te'o's excellence became even more celebrated by the media.

"The thing I am most sad about is that the single most trusting human being I have ever met will never be able to trust in the same way again in his life," Swarbrick said of Te'o.

"That is an incredible tragedy."

The private investigators turned their final report over to the university on January 4.

That report will not be made public, Swarbrick said.