On Friday, Jan. 25, ProPublica reporter Marshall Allen interviewed Timothy Burke and Jack Dickey — the Deadspin reporters who first broke the Manti Te'o hoax. Their story, "Manti Te'o's Dead Girlfriend, the Most Heartbreaking and Inspirational Story of the College Football Season, Is a Hoax," caused an instant sensation in the sports world and the general culture alike.
Because it was such a juicy investigative story, we invited Burke and Dickey on the MuckReads Podcast to find out how they pieced the puzzle together. It started with a simple email to their generic "send a tip" line and quickly became the biggest sports scandal of the year. While other news outlets were debating how to handle the story, Deadspin tracked down the real person behind the photos of the nonexistent "Lennay Kekua," traced her connection to Ronaiah Tuiasosopo, developed more sources that helped them confirm the allegations and published the story.
"There are so many hoaxes going on here. The first hoax is that this girl existed," Dickey said to Allen while describing what they found. Burke added that the second hoax is, "that she had to fake her death in order to get away from drug dealers....the third hoax is that Lennay Kekua was the love of Manti Te'o's life."
Burke and Dickey go on to discuss why we may never learn the full truth, when and why the Kekua myth really took off, how they felt when the story was finally posted online and why the story resonated so widely. Ultimately, the pair said, "it's about fact checking." Burke noted, "There are two really huge parts of the story. There's the Manti Te'o having a fake, dead girlfriend and the person behind it. But there's also the hey look, the sports media and the media in general have been reporting a story that wasn't true. And we sort of highlighted both of those."