Revisiting with sympathy the catfish saga that gripped America

The Girlfriend Who Didn’t Exist: A new Netflix documentary paints a nuanced portrait of two young people at the centre of the Manti Te'o story

CATFISHED: Manti Te’o of the New Orleans Saints in 2017. Pic: Wesley Hitt/Getty Images

Two sporting scandals dominated the American news cycle at the start of 2013: the disgrace of Lance Armstrong and the humiliation of college footballer Manti Te’o. 

But if Armstrong’s belated confession that he doped to win all seven of his Tour de France titles told a story about the rotten heart of American success that felt, four decades after Watergate, somehow traditional, the Te’o affair seemed to offer a warning about the dangers of the internet at a time when techno-optimism was still all the rage – before bot accounts, misinformation, and online harassment became features of everyday life.