Age: 21
Appearance: Large man, even larger shoulder pads, a strip of what looks like black insulation tape on each cheek.
Preposterous! No one that eccentric could exist. Au contraire. There are many of them. He's an American football player.
Ah. Do they all have trendy punctuation in their names? No. And Te'o's isn't trendy either. The Te'os' origins are in Samoa, you see.
I sort of do. Anyway, he plays college football for Notre Dame University in Indiana. And he's very good at it indeed. Although he's had a hard time recently.
How so? For a while he's been telling journalists about his girlfriend Lennay Kekua, who he also talked to on Twitter. In September it was revealed that she had finally died of leukaemia.
How awful! Well, sort of. You see it turns out she was never alive in the first place.
You mean she was a vampire? It's worse than that. Kekua's problem was that she didn't exist at all.
OK. I have some questions. Let me try to answer them. According to Te'o, the relationship took place entirely online and over the phone – to the point where he was even sleeping with the handset on his pillow so he could hear her breathing.
So this wasn't the kind of romance where you actually meet the other person? No. Nor the kind where there even is one. "To realise that I was the victim of what was apparently someone's sick joke and constant lies was, and is, painful and humiliating," T'eo says.
Goodness. I think that might be the most embarrassing thing that has ever happened to a human being. It might. Or it could be that the hoax is itself a hoax. Deadspin, the website whose investigation broke the story, concludes that Te'o probably knew about the lies, which it suggests were concocted by a friend of his called Ronaiah Tuiasosopo using a classmate's Facebook pictures.
I see. Well, tough times ahead for Te'o either way. Don't worry. I'm sure that all those stadiums full of hostile fans will be sensitive about it.
Do say: "Faith is believing in something that you most likely can't see, but you believe to be true." (As Te'o, a devout Mormon, told ESPN.)
Don't say: "My girlfriend's been zero-timing me."
