Raised to be polite and empathetic toward others, Diane O’Meara said Wednesday that she thought she was simply doing a favor for a former high school classmate when she unknowingly became part of a fake girlfriend hoax involving Notre Dame star linebacker Manti Te’o.
O’Meara, 23, claims to have had photos from her Facebook account taken by alleged hoax perpetrator Ronaiah Tuiasosopo, 22, which were used to represent Te'o's girlfriend Lennay Kekua, who supposedly died of leukemia in September but turned out to be a fake who never existed. O’Meara’s pictures appeared on Kekua’s fake Twitter account and were used in news reports at the time of her alleged death, but O’Meara said she had never heard of Te’o until the reporters from Deadspin.com who broke the story contacted her last week.
O’Meara told Savannah Guthrie on TODAY Wednesday that Tuiasosopo, her former classmate at Paraclete High School in Lancaster, Calif., reached out to her on Facebook and described in great detail how he and his cousin had been in a traumatic car accident earlier in 2012.
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