I'm very fond of Manti, but there's no sense hiding any of this anymore:
- He had multiple girlfriends throughout that year, especially that fall.
- He knew it was all bullshit before the timeline stated.
FINE, I'll type my longer version.
First off, let's get this level set: Based on all known and available evidence, Manti was 100% the victim of a catfishing by Ronaiah. So if we can all start from that standpoint, we can move on to the issues with Manti that many have.
Since we all agreed Manti was catfished, that means that if this catfishing followed typical catfishing processes that Lennay's "illness & death" was a reaction to something that happened between Lennay and Manti. Luckily, we don't have to speculate as to what that was. Manti openly admitted in either the ESPN story or the Netflix doc(I believe it was the Netflix doc) that he ended the "relationship" with Lennay in the summer of 2012. Ronaiah also confirms that timeline of events.
Manti was doing more than okay around Notre Dame with women and was casually dating numerous women in those summer and early fall months of the 2012 season. By the end of the season (November-ish) he was in a serious/committed(for college) relationship with a student from St. Mary's.
Back to the timeline. Manti ended the relationship in part because of his dating on campus as well as getting shit from the team for "dating" a girl he had never met or seen. Players have talked about this and how they thought it was weird. Manti essentially told Ronaiah/Lennay to kick rocks. Now that obviously triggers the next step in any catfishing..the "illness-death" scenario to rope the victim back in and re-gain their attention. To add to this...with Manti's grandmother (actually) dying, even more of his attention was diverted away from Ronaiah/Lennay, and thus you get Lennay tragically "dying" soon after Manti's grandmother.
So, Manti, from the jump lied about Lennay being his girlfriend at the time of her "passing". He continued to do so and most everyone on the team thought it was horseshit. Manti has never once taken accountability for his role in perpetuating the lie and building it up. Manti had a convenient out for really not ever having to address it because by the time the story broke, it was such a sensational story, very few in the media cared to go back and re-hash the timeline of events and follow the logic of it all...they were just worried about getting as much as they could about Ronaiah/Lennay because that was the juicy side of things.
ESPN wanted to poke, prod, and peel away the layers of the story for their doc on it. Manti initially said yes, then backed out when he wasn't given control of the edit/production. He took the project to Netflix at that point. Manti's doc came out, portrayed himself as a fully innocent victim with nothing to do with what happened, but he also unwittingly gave enough bread crumbs that if you step back and think about it for 30 seconds, you realize he just gave away the ghost.
There are ultimately two reads on this. The "good faith" one is that Manti lied initially during an emotional time in his life and didn't think it would snowball the way it did and just got in way too deep..way too fast.
The bad faith version is Manti knowingly lied to garner more attention for himself and try and hype himself up to improve his Heisman, draft, and personal stock.
Teammates fall on both sides of that coin depending who you ask.
Was Manti a victim? Yeah. But he also lied his ass off and my sympathy for him stops somewhere around the time he tried to retcon them into a relationship at the time of her "passing" to the media.
