Manti Te’o said the "hardest part" of the hoax soap opera that has enveloped him is what his family has gone through, and his "biggest regret" was the failure to be honest about not having ever met his purported online and telephone girlfriend.
The Notre Dame All-American from Laie made the statements during a 21⁄2 hour off-camera interview with ESPN’s Jeremy Schaap on Friday night, and though they were not initially aired, both were contained in the 34-page edited transcript of the interview posted by the network Saturday.
"The hardest thing for me is to know that it’s not my first name that I care about, it is my last name," Te’o said. "And to see that being tossed around, because there’s a lot of people who carry the same last name as me. And just to hear from my peers what people are saying about me and my family and just the trouble that my family’s going through is the hardest part to swallow."
When the Deadspin.com revelations and accompanying news reports about the hoax emerged Wednesday, Te’o said his reaction was to, "avoid every piece of technology, don’t listen to anything, don’t turn the TV on, don’t go on Twitter, don’t go on Facebook …"
Te’o said he got his information "from my friends and they were telling me what people were saying about me and stuff."
Asked if he had read the Deadspin report, Te’o said, "No, I haven’t."
Te’o said the anticipation of people’s reactions about him dating a girl he had never met were part of the reason he worked at leaving an impression that he had met Lennay Kekua.
"I even knew that it was crazy that I was with somebody that I didn’t meet," Te’o said. "And that, alone, people find out that this girl who died I was so invested in and I didn’t meet her as well. So, I kind of tailored my stories to have people think that, yeah, he met her before she passed away. So people wouldn’t think that I was some crazy dude."
Asked if, in retrospect, that was wise, Te’o said, "No. Out of this whole thing, that is my biggest regret. And, that is the biggest, I think — that’s from my point of view — mistake I made."
Te’o said he was embarrassed to disclose that he had known her for three years but had not met her in person.
"Because I knew that (is) how everybody’s reacting now. I knew it was going to happen. So, I chose to be less crazy, be looked at as less crazy as somebody who had total faith into this individual, who committed himself to this individual, who cared about this individual without seeing her, to have done that without ever seeing her. People would consider it crazy."
Te’o said the reason his father, Brian, had told reporters that Manti had met Kekua in Hawaii is because he had lied to his father.
"To avoid all the questions, I just said, ‘yeah, Dad, I saw her.’ "
