Untold: The Girlfriend Who Didn't Exist review: The cost of being a victim of catfishing

3/5

Story: Manti Te'o, who was once one of the most promising line-backers in American college football, gained national attention after the passing of his girlfriend and grandmother on the same day. But it was later revealed that his girlfriend was never a real person. His promising NFL career was derailed after being a victim of a catfishing hoax. It was a story that gripped America, one that even overshadowed Lance Armstrong’s shocking doping scandal.

Review: The relatively new space of social media has created several avenues for people from across the globe to interact and socialise with one another. But social media also became a soft target for fraudsters. Unfortunately for Manti Te'o, he became one of the first high-profile victims of a catfishing scandal.

The two-part documentary takes a deep dive into the scandal that grabbed the attention of the general public in America. The documentary features extensive interviews with Te'o himself and the person who conned him, Ronaiah Tuiasosopo (now Naya Tuiasosopo). There are also interviews with Te'o’s family, friends, those closely associated with the case, and the reporters who broke the news in 2013.

The first part focuses entirely on how Te'o and Tuiasosopo met online and their respective perspectives on how their relationship developed. As the interviews dig deeper into their past it becomes evident that Te’o is without a shadow of a doubt a victim of the hoax, despite accusations that he may have orchestrated the story to gain media coverage. It also does not do any favours to Tuiasosopo’s image despite admitting to everything.

The second episode focuses on the people who exposed the hoax — writers of the sports blog Deadspin, Timothy Burke and Jack Dickey. There is also significant emphasis on how Te'o’s once-promising career nose-dived despite the fact that he was the victim in the whole scenario. Te’o went from a media darling to one of the most ridiculed sports personalities in America, simply because an individual pretended to be a woman named Lennay Kekua and catfished him.

Despite offering insightful interviews with great production value, the documentary fails to answer several questions, and it tries to empathise with Tuiasosopo. This is a juxtaposition considering Tuiasosopo went to great lengths to cover their true identity. Te'o was made to believe that Lennay, who he believed was his girlfriend, died on the same day as his grandmother. To keep up the ruse Tuiasosopo manipulated other individuals and it became a wider web of lies and deceit.

The documentary fails to explain why Tuiasosopo was never charged with any crime, nor does it go into detail about how Te'o’s life and career eventually panned out.

Verdict: The documentary gives great insight and global attention to a story that was well publicised in the US. But its attempts to empathise with Tuiasosopo is a poor attempt at staying neutral despite most previous instalments of Untold being successful in managing to be objective.