Manti Te'o has admitted that he never actually met Lennay Kekua, despite lying to his parents and briefly misleading the media on this issue, but he maintains that he spent countless nights talking to his "girlfriend" on the telephone.
According to a report in the New York Daily News on Thursday morning, alleged hoax orchestrator Ronaiah Tuiasosopo was actually on the other end of those calls, using a falsetto voice to pose as a female. Manti “thought it was a female he was talking with,” Tuiasosopo's lawyer, Milton Grimes, told to the Daily News. “It was Ronaiah as Lennay.”
Regardless of whomever was on the other end of the phone, ESPN reported that Te'o spent hundreds of hours talking to someone. According to spreadsheets purporting to be Te'os phone records provided to ESPN, Te'o "made and received more than 1,000 calls totaling more than 500 hours in length from the same number in the 661 area code." According to the source who provided ESPN with this information, Te'o believed that the 661 number belonged to Kekua.
In advance of airing her interview with Te'o and his parents on Thursday afternoon, Katie Couric released audio from three voicemails supposedly left for Te'o from whomever was pretending to be Kekua.
CLICK HERE to listen to all three messages.
Below is the audio of one of those voicemails, via Deadspin, supposedly left for Te'o the day before Kekua "died" in September 2012:
What do you think? Does that sound like Tuiasosopo posing as a woman? Or could there still another person involved in this bizarre hoax?