For days in January 2013, the biggest news story in the country was the revelation that a 21-year-old college football star had dedicated his season to a dead girlfriend who didn’t exist.Te’o was already pretty famous before most of us knew anything about his relationship. He was a charismatic, talented, God-fearing linebacker at Notre Dame, one of the most prominent institutions in the sports world, and by the end of his junior year, experts were projecting him to be a first-round pick in the NFL Draft.Then, early in his senior season, in September 2012, news broke that his grandmother and his girlfriend had died on the same day. While his 72-year-old grandmother had succumbed to natural causes, “his 22-year-old girlfriend, Stanford student Lennay Kekua, died of leukemia just eight months after surviving a life-threatening car accident,” ESPN reported at the time.
Source: Netflix’s Manti Te’o’s Documentary Is Actually About Healing