Automatik;1368143 wrote:With all if the info that has been released so (true or not), how can anyone say with a straight face that they think he was duped, catfish'd, or whatever?
The only image he knew of her was fake
No skype?
Direct quotes from himself and his father referring to them meeting in person
Flowers to the funeral?
She gets in a car wreck, no visit?
On her death bed, no visit?
Simple logic points to him bullshitting everyone.
Yeah, that's the thing for me. I'd legit feel horrible for him if it was a dupe for the simple fact that there's virtually no way for him to win in the court of public opinion (by which I don't just mean people like us on message boards, but also people like NFL GMs and the like).
It's like a few years ago when I read a story about Nigerian scammers and in it, it was mentioned that the wife of someone in government (congress...or maybe it was a lower-level like a state office somewhere) was duped. The only thing I could think was "how damn stupid does someone have to be to fall for those horribly written letters offering a large sum of money to a random person for helping them launder it across national borders".
And that's where I'm at with this. Supposedly, he was deeply in love with a person he'd never met and apparently never felt a real desire to meet despite how there was that supposed love he felt combined with the way she was reportedly injured in a car wreck and then ill/dying of cancer. Supposedly, he said he'd met her, despite the fact she didn't exist.
I was reading Pat Forde's column on Yahoo and it did mention things like how Mormons tend not to have relationships until they've reached the young adult phase in this way:
It would take a remarkable level of naiveté to be sucked in by the perpetrators of this hoax, but Te'o could be that guy. At the risk of stereotyping, I'll offer this conjecture: Te'o is a Mormon, and there are a lot of LDS members who lack significant romantic experience when entering young adulthood. Courtship might have been a novel and/or highly idealized concept. Physical interaction might not have been at the top of his relationship wish list.
But still, to believe his side, you have to basically put him in the absolute lowest level of common sense and intellect for never questioning or wondering if anything was up in considering the fact he was in a long-term relationship with someone to the degree his dad felt marriage was in the future...even though he never met the girl and only had communication with her through basic online sources that apparently never included live "personal" stuff like Skype. Where if I'm an NFL guy, I'm thinking this guy is too stupid to draft unless my franchise gives him 24/7 handlers so he NEVER has to interact with the real world without someone holding his hand and guiding him through every little bit of social interaction he might have.
I mean, it IS possible for him to be that easily deluded, since other people have been before. It's just near-impossible for me to conceive how a person could be that that dumb. It's like night and day from how remotely normal people think.
