Manti Te’o’s bizarre relationship revelation was widely described Wednesday as a "catfish" moment.
"Te’o" and "catfish" combined for a hot topic on Twitter, and six hours after the website Deadspin broke the story, there were 66,500 references to the football player and the fish on Google.
The term was spawned by a 2010 documentary film of the same name about New York City photographer Nev Schulman, who is mailed a series of impressive paintings by Abby Pierce, an 8-year-old prodigy who lives in rural Michigan.
Schulman, then 24, gets to know — via social media, texts and phone calls — Abby’s mother, Angela, and Abby’s beautiful 19-year-old musician sister, Megan Faccio, with whom Schulman starts an online relationship.
Schulman’s filmmaker brother films it all.
Trouble is that Megan is a character played by Abby’s mom, frumpy 40-year-old housewife Angela Wesselman-Pierce, and the paintings are hers, not Abby’s.
The multiple photos that Schulman had seen of Megan were those of Aimee Gonzales, a model living in Portland, Ore.
Vince Pierce, Angela’s husband, coins the film’s title when he relates how catfish would be shipped with cod overseas because they keep the cod agile.
"And there are those people who are catfish in life," he says in a reference to his wife. "And they keep you on your toes."
He adds that he’s thankful for the catfish "because we would be droll, boring and dull if we didn’t have somebody nipping at our fin."
The hit documentary resulted in an MTV series called "Catfish," also starring Schulman, that follows similarly questionable social media relationships, as well as a new "Urban Dictionary" listing.
"A catfish is someone who pretends to be someone they’re not, using Facebook or other social media to create false identities, particularly to pursue deceptive online romances," one definition reads.
