In high school, Te’o was a good all-around star — beloved by these around him and track for a complete football scholarship in the University of Notre Dame. He was your golden boy in his Hawaii hometown, active in his faith and simple to get along with.
Then, tragedy struck. His grandma died, then his girlfriend. Each on the same day.
Only, their girlfriend didn’t in fact die. His sweetheart, the media uncovered, did not even exist .
It was a catfish all along — with Ronaiah ‘Naya’ Tuiasosopo, the woman at the rear of the hoax, captured in the middle.
Te’o, Tuiasosopo and the elaborate 2013 hoax are the subject of a new two-part documentary, “Untold: The particular Girlfriend Who Didn’t Exist, ” guided by Ryan Duffy and Tony Vainuku, out Tuesday on Netflix.
The story of Te’o and his fake partner is a well-known a single, but the story associated with Tuiasosopo — who seem to created the fictional girlfriend as a way to come to terms with her own gender dysphoria — is less so. Tuiasosopo provides since come out being a transgender woman.
Although audiences may first recognize Te’o’s title, the documentary opens with Tuiasosopo. She takes a central part throughout the two episodes, bringing audiences along on her journey of self discovery and gender identity — shaped in part by her experiences catfishing Te’o.
CNN spoke with Maclain Way, who created the “Untold” series with brother Chapman, about how the team contacted portraying Tuiasosopo’s and Te’o’s journeys as both synchronous plus separate.
This discussion has been edited just for length and clarity.
What made you decide to concentrate on Manti Te’o and Naya’s story particularly?
When we obtained the news that we would be able to make a lot more “Untolds” and we would have a volume 2, this was a story that was on our literal plus proverbial whiteboard of sports ideas. Is actually just always been a white whale within the sports documentary space; it’s something that my mate and I remember very well, just kind of reading through the news media on it and all the sound.
We reached out to Naya and just had an amazing conversation with her. It was probably the call that was only going to be 15, 20 minutes, and ended up talking to her for two hours. And she ran us through just a remarkable journey that she’s been on, a trip of self-discovery plus self-identity and how she identifies as a trans woman.
And then with regards to reaching out to Manti and talking to him, I actually definitely think a lot of people had approached him about talking about this story over the years. I think there was a pile of documentary pitches sitting in his inbox over the course of the yrs.
I think we caught Manti at a really fascinating time in his living. His NFL profession was winding down — I question that this would’ve been a story that he would have commented on or done a really long form in-depth interview on while he was still active in the NFL. But he’d just gotten married and just had a kid, and I think for each Naya and Manti, neither were quite happy with how the media at large covered this particular saga back in 2013. I don’t think they wanted that mass media coverage to be the time period at the end of this actually long sentence that was a story between these two individuals. And so I believe for both of them the opportunity to really job interview at length, from deep, about this tale was appealing and attractive to them. As well as for us as filmmakers, that’s when we really knew, “All correct, we have something exclusive here. I think we are able to go make this documented film. ”
One thing that stood out to me is this a story about Manti obviously, however, you choose to lead with Naya, and you just stated that you actually spoke with her first. But many individuals may expect the episodes to be a lot more football-focused. Why did you make that will choice to guide with her and put her story at the forefront?
It had been where, as filmmakers, we kind of experienced the most questions. Naya had appeared for the Dr . Phil show and had engaged with light media performances but had never truly gone deep around the record and informed her whole side from the story.
I always kind of acquired more questions about who are the people that engage in this catfishing… “how did this particular happen, how did this come about, exactly how was this partnership like between a person two? ”
(Naya) was very open, really vulnerable, she informed her story warts and everything. Just listening to the girl motivations of exactly why she decided to take up this space, exactly why create this on-line identity profile, DM and message a football player like Manti Te’o, build a relationship, have phone calls — it was all just really appealing for us and i think which was really the basis associated with why we were therefore interested in speaking with her.
I am just a sports fan yet I definitely thought that her part of the story was the one that roped me in.
Yeah, and I think also we all don’t quite have a mandate, or all of us don’t really like in order to shoehorn these stories into specific thematic overarching bridges between all of our “Untold” documentaries. But I do think in a way, none of our documentaries, even though they’re sports activities documentaries, really have anything to do with who’s going to win the particular championship game, whoms going to hit the three-pointer as the time clock winds down plus win the game for his or her team. Really, all of us talk about these stories as they’re simply very interesting points happening off-field or off-ice or off-court. That’s really the story telling that we love to tell in the vein of doing these sports documentaries.
For this a single, this kind of mega-big catfishing scandal from 2013, it just seemed ripe. Yes, it is a sports story, the football story to some degree, but actually it’s a story regarding two individuals who had been pretty young at the time — I think these were 19-, 20-years-old when they were building this relationship — therefore to us these were really the only two people that will knew what those people conversations were, that will knew what their relationship was like, that will knew how each other felt about each other. And so for us, it had been just really a solid requirement that we might have both of them speak about this because I think that’s really the only method you can tell this kind of story.
Naya’s changeover journey is a huge component of this documentary, and am know you incorporated a disclaimer that Manti and some of these interviewed didn’t know Naya is trans when referring to the girl. You also showed several older photos plus footage from before she transitioned. I understand sometimes those things could be sensitive for a lot of people. How did you decide to navigate that in the two episodes, especially for an audience that may not be as acquainted with transgender identity plus LGBTQ+ issues?
I believe that the nuanced point to make is that these types of documentaries take a long time just because they’re their very own art forms, along with a two-part documentary for us took us over two years to make. Whenever we first talked in order to Naya, the way the lady spoke about her journey of self-discovery and a journey associated with self-identity was an evolving process.
She now, and we are extremely encouraging of this, identifies as a proud trans woman. But at that time that we were recording this documentary, the girl journey was evolving to a degree. So in discussion with her and all of us and people that are significantly rooted into LGTBQ matters, we generally had an understanding that it wasn’t quite our place as filmmakers to tell others regarding the complex journey that will she was taking place. I think if the documented was starting nowadays, considering where Naya’s at, we would probably be in a different stage, but at that time… Naya wasn’t quite determining as that.
Was generally there anything that surprised a person as you all had been going about the research and reporting process? Anything that stuck out that you hadn’t been expecting?
We definitely felt like Naya and Manti were the main storytellers, but obviously as you get introduced to other people and other people have their very own perspectives or their very own experiences with the tale, we did discover the investigation that Tim Burke and Jack Dickey at Deadspin did to the story very fascinating. Obviously they’re those that got the anonymous tip and had been the first to break the story and hit publish, but the behind the scenes upon just how they run as investigative media was just extremely fascinating to learn regarding.
I think that these all of the kind of start and prevent where you get your major storytellers and then you start to think about who else could have interesting voices. We always seemed the Deadspin guys could have interesting sounds to a degree. Probably no one knows actually about this story when they didn’t choose to go after that anonymous suggestion that they had. So they seemed to have a direct impact on the story, an immediate impact on certain storyline points in the story and how the story unfolded.
There’s this concept in the episodes of, you could call it lineage maybe, where each Manti and Naya are focusing on becoming an inspiration to the people coming after them, particularly in the second episode. Was that a style that you all thought about while putting these episodes together?
I believe it was just something which felt genuine plus important in the way which they talked about it. For both Naya plus Manti, we do several multi-day selection interviews, long day interviews, two to three days with each of them. And in the course of that process, it’s an unique method to speak with people and to hear their tales, but I think you definitely pick up on what is very important to them and what they will feel on a deep, genuine human degree. And I think for both of them they talked from the heart whenever they talked about that and that will meaning. So for all of us as artists plus filmmakers, when you get those interview answers back from your subjects it really is like a leading light and a star in some way that encourages you to put them in your documentary film. I believe it was just extremely genuine from them.