Ex-Teammate: Armstrong Showed 'Genuine Emotion'













While critics railed against Lance Armstrong for coming off as detached in the two-part interview with Oprah Winfrey that aired Thursday and Friday nights, former teammate and friend, Tyler Hamilton, told "Good Morning America" today that he felt Armstrong was displaying "genuine emotion."


"I've never seen Lance shed a tear until last night. Before I even heard one word from him Thursday night, I could tell he was a broken man," Hamilton said.


Armstrong's contrition turned tearful Friday when he revealed to Oprah Winfrey how difficult it was to betray his family -- particularly his 13 year old son -- who stood up for the fallen cycling star as rumors swirled that he was taking banned drugs.


Armstrong, 41, choked up when he recounted what he told his son, Luke, in the wake of the scandal.


"When this all really started, I saw my son defending me and saying that's not true…" Armstrong told Winfrey, "I told Luke. I said, 'Don't defend me anymore.'"


Armstrong's interview with Winfrey drew millions of viewers.


It was the first time Armstrong admitted using performance-enhancing drugs and oxygen-boosting blood transfusions to help him win the Tour de France.


"I view this situation as one big lie that I repeated a lot of times," Armstrong said. "I know the truth. The truth isn't what was out there. The truth isn't what I said.






George Burns/Courtesy of Harpo Studios, Inc./AP Photo











Lance Armstrong Confession: 'I Could Not Believe Lance Apologized' Watch Video









Lance Armstrong-Winfrey Interview: How Honest Was He? Watch Video









Lance Armstrong-Winfrey Interview: Doping Confession Watch Video





"I'm a flawed character, as I well know," Armstrong added. "All the fault and all the blame here falls on me."


However, Hamilton said any hope for Armstrong's redemption would come if he came clean about others who were part of the doping scandal.


"The question now is where he goes from this, his actions moving forward. He needs to name names," Hamilton said.


READ MORE: Armstrong Admits to Doping


Armstrong was stripped of his seven Tour de France titles in October 2012, after a report by the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency found that he and 11 of his teammates orchestrated "the most sophisticated, professionalized and successful doping program that sport has ever seen."


Despite the admissions of his teammates that they had doped with Armstrong and seen him complete blood transfusions for races, Armstrong condemned the report and denied that he had ever cheated.


As sponsors including Nike began to pull support of Armstrong following the report, Armstrong's carefully-built image began to crumble. He stepped down from Livestrong, the charity he started to help cancer patients after he survived testicular cancer.


"It was a mythic perfect story and it wasn't true," Armstrong said of his fairytale story of overcoming testicular cancer to become the most celebrated cyclist in history.


In the interview, Armstrong explained his competition "cocktail" of EPO, blood transfusions and testosterone that he used throughout his career. He also said he had previously used cortisone.


Armstrong refused to give Winfrey the details of when, where and with whom he doped during seven winning Tours de France between 1999 and 2005, which was the last year he said he doped. Armstrong specifically denied using banned substances when he placed third in 2009 and entered the tour again in 2010.


Investigators familiar with Armstrong's case, however, told ABC News that Armstrong did not come completely clean to Winfrey, and say they believe he doped in 2009.






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Earl Smith is the man behind a military patch that President Obama prizes


That February morning in 2008 found Barack Obama decidedly out of sorts.


He was locked in one battle with Hillary Rodham Clinton for the Democratic nomination that showed no signs of ending — and another with a vicious cold that felt the same way.


As he rode the service elevator in the backway of a convention hotel here, the snowy-haired African American operating it turned suddenly. He held out a black-and-gold bit of fabric embroidered with a screaming eagle.

“Senator Obama, I have something I want to give you,” the man said. “I’ve carried this military patch with me every day for 40 years, and I want you to carry it, and it will keep you safe in your journey.” Obama tried to refuse, but the older man persisted.

Big endeavors can find their meaning in small moments.

Later that day, Obama and his aides discussed the encounter. The future president pulled the patch from his pocket, along with about a dozen other items people had pressed upon him.

“This is why I do this,” he said. “Because people have their hopes and dreams about what we can do together.”

Two American stories intersected that morning in that elevator. The more famous, of course, is the one that begins its next chapter on Monday, as the nation’s first black president takes the oath of office for a second term.

But the other story also tells a lot about where this country has been and how far it has come.

No one in Obama’s small party that day noticed the man’s name tag or, if anyone did, the fact that it said Earl Smith was quickly forgotten.

No one knew how much of Smith’s life had been woven into a patch that, over four decades, found its way from the shoulder of an Army private to the pocket of a future commander-in-chief.

It was the only shred of cloth he had saved from the uniform of a nightmarish year in Vietnam. Smith fired artillery with a brigade that suffered 10,041 casualties during the course of the war. The brigade’s soldiers received 13 Congressional Medals of Honor.

The patch was waiting among his possessions when Smith was pardoned by the state of Georgia in 1977 after spending three years in prison for a crime he claimed was self-defense.

Smith kept it close as his lucky charm while he rebuilt his life and his reputation, starting with a job vacuuming hallways and changing sheets in an Atlanta Marriott. He carried it with him as he traveled halfway around the world again, to positions in hotels far from home, Riyadh in Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates.

Along the way, as he tended to travelers and made sure VIP gatherings went smoothly, he met three U.S. presidents.

His instincts told him Obama would make it four.

Like just about anyone else who was alive on Nov. 22, 1963, Smith can describe exactly where he was when he heard the horrific news: He was coming off a high school football practice field in his home town of San Benito, Tex.

Though not yet old enough to have voted for the man slain in Dallas, “I was devastated — a lot of us young people were — because John Kennedy was the young president,” recalled Smith, now 68.

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US stocks mostly higher; Intel pulls Nasdaq down






NEW YORK: US stocks ended mostly higher on Friday helped by news that Republicans might give way to a short-term rise of the debt ceiling to avoid a new crisis, but poor earnings from Intel pulled the Nasdaq lower.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 53.68 points (0.39 percent) to 13,649.70.

The broad-based S&P 500 added 5.04 points (0.34 percent) at 1,485.98.

But the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite ended down 1.29 points (0.04 percent) at 3,134.71, dragged lower by chipmaker Intel, which sank 6.3 percent after a poor fourth quarter, with a 31 percent drop in profit and a lowered forecast for this year.

- AFP/de



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Nirbhay to be test-fired in February

HYDERABAD: Nirbhay, India's first subsonic cruise missile, will be test-fired by the end of February, said V K Saraswat, director general of Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) and scientific advisor to defence minister A K Antony. Saraswat was speaking to the media during a seminar on 'Nurturing, Managing and Institutionalising Innovation' organised by the Defence Research and Develoment Laboratory (DRDL) here on Friday.

While 2012 was an eventful year for the defence organisation with almost a dozen successful launches of various kinds of missiles, this year also promises to be big with many more plans underway. "Nirbhay will be a medium-range cruise missile with advantages like the ability of not being detected and high accuracy. It is also a cheaper option," Saraswat said.

Asked if there were any hitches in test-firing the missile as it was expected to have taken place sometime back, Saraswat said some processes had been developed and there were no hitches.

This year, a major plan of the DRDO is 'canisterisation' of Agni IV and Agni V, which will enable firing of the missile from any platform. Another plan was to integrate Astra-III with Sukhoi. He said four Light Combat Aircraft (LCA) would be produced this year and in 2014, the necessary operational clearances would be sought.

The DRDO has also carried out 50 of the 56 modifications sought for the Main Battle Tank (MBT) Arjun Mark-II variant by the user. The rest of the modifications will be carried out in the next few months. Saraswat said the Long Range Cruise Missile (LRCM) will have all futuristic features.

Saraswat informed that they had got permissions for the missile testing range proposed at Machilipatnam. "It is a barren piece of land and we will turn it into a green area. There will be no environmental issues," he said. Talking about the civilian applications of defence technology, he said that the bio-digesters (toilets) were much in demand and there was a proposal with the tourism ministry on using them in buses.

Another important application would be the kit for detection of dengue. The kits developed by DRDO will take just two hours to confirm a dengue case while the kits available elsewhere take 24 hours. Saraswat said that the technology has already been transferred to manufacturers of the anti-mosquito 'attracticide', which is available in the market.

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Manti Te'o Hoax Incredibly Detailed and Complex













Fresh details have emerged about how complex and layered was the hoax involving Notre Dame star linebacker Manti Te'o and his fake girlfriend, "Lennay Kekua."


According to ABC News interviews and published reports, Te'o received phone calls, text messages and letters before every football game from his "girlfriend." He was in contact with her family, including a twin brother, a second brother, sister and parents. He called often to check in with them, just as he did with his own family. And "Kekua" kept in contact with Te'o's friends and family, and teammates spoke to her on the phone.


"There are a remarkable number of characters involved. We don't know how many people they represent," Notre Dame Athletic Director Jack Swarbrick said at a news conference this week. "There are male and female characters, brothers, cousins, mother, and we don't know if it's two people playing multiple characters or multiple people."


"It goes to the sophistication of this, that there are all these sort of independent pieces that reinforce elements of the story all the way through," he said.


Click here for a who's who in the Manti Te'o case


One of Te'o's teammates who asked not to be identified told ABC News that it was normal for Te'o to pass his phone around to teammates when he was on the line with "Lennay" so they could say hello to her.


"I talked to her," this teammate said. "I wasn't suspicious."


When Te'o got the call telling him that Lennay had died last fall, he was in the locker room, the teammate said.


"He got real emotional, crying," the teammate said. "He's an emotional guy."


The teammate said he thinks Te'o genuinely got hoaxed. The fact that Te'o talked about meeting her and touching her hand - when really he only "met" her on the internet - makes this teammate think that he was not completely telling the truth about his relationship.








Manti Te'o Hoax: Was He Duped or Did He Know? Watch Video









Manti Te'o Hoax: Notre Dame Star Allegedly Scammed Watch Video









Tale of Notre Dame Football Star's Girlfriend and Her Death an Alleged Hoax Watch Video





"I think he was just embarrassed about it, the whole internet thing," the teammate said. The player said he hasn't talked to Te'o since this story broke.


With so many questions swirling around the revelation that Te'o's fake girlfriend, a source in the Notre Dame athletic department said the school would like Te'o to speak out publicly, but noted that they are not currently in touch with him.


"At some point the ball ends up in his court," the source said. "We're not involved right now."


A newly released transcript of "Sports Illustrated" writer Pete Thamel's Sept. 23 interview with Te'o gives a hint at the staggering depth of the deception.


Te'o told Thamel that Lennay Kekua's real name was Melelengei, but since no one could pronounce it properly it was shortened to Lennay. But her family nicknamed her Lala, he said.


Te'o's knowledge about the details of his girlfriend's life was often murky, including her majors in school, occupation and extent of her injuries after an alleged April 28 car accident with a drunk driver.


What he was absolutely clear about was how much time he spent in contact with her, especially while she was in the hospital recovering from the car accident, which led to the discovery of her leukemia.


"I talked to my girlfriend every single day," Te'o told Themel. "I slept on the phone with her every single day. When she was going through chemo, she would have all these pains and the doctors were saying they were trying to give her medicine to make her sleep. She still couldn't sleep. She would say, 'Just call my boyfriend and have him on the phone with me, and I can sleep.' I slept on the phone with her every single night."


He would spend eight hours a night with someone, somewhere, breathing on the other end, he told Thamel.


Te'o recounted how his girlfriend who was "on a machine" after being in a coma.


"We lost her, actually, twice. She flatlined twice. They revived her twice," he said. "It was just a trippy situation."


For a while Kekua was unable to talk and he described the nurse-deemed "miracle" of how Kekua's breathing would pick up when she heard his voice on the phone.


"There were lengthy, long telephone conversations. There was sleeping with the phone on connected to each other," Swarbrick said. "The issue of who it is, who's playing what role, what's real and what's not here is a more complex question than I can get into."


Perhaps one of the most touching displays of love from Kekua to Te'o, he told the writer, was the one-page letter she would write him on her iPad before each game. One of her siblings, often her twin brother Noa, would then read him the letter over the phone before sending it to him.






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First Human Contact With Large Emperor Penguin Colony


One of the largest emperor penguin colonies in Antarctica was discovered last month by a team from the International Polar Foundation's Princess Elisabeth station.

The penguin colony had previously been identified through satellite imagery by researchers from the British Antarctic Survey. The penguins themselves didn't show up very clearly, but their excrement stains on the ice did.

Expedition leader Alain Hubert, who has spent seven seasons in Antarctica, long suspected a colony existed somewhere along the vast coast near Princess Elisabeth station. "When you go on the coast," explained the Belgian explorer, "after ten minutes, penguins come out of the water to look at who you are and what you are doing."

The satellite images gave Hubert and his team a rough idea of where to start looking. When ice research brought them within 37 miles (60 kilometers) of the probable location, they hopped on their snowmobiles for a side trip. The team traversed steep crevasses from the continent's cliffs down to the ice shelf, which has been shifting 650 feet (200 meters) toward the sea each year. "We were lucky to find it," said Hubert.

They finally came upon the colony at 11 p.m. on December 3, when the sun was still shining during the Antarctic summer. Spread out on the ice were 9,000 emperor penguins, about three-quarters of them chicks. Despite his polar experience, Hubert had never seen a full colony before. "You can approach them," he said. "When you talk to them, it's like they are listening to you."

Researchers hope penguins will tell them—through population numbers and colony locations—how they are faring with climate change. Emperor penguins breed on the sea ice. If the ice breaks up early, before the chicks can fend for themselves, the chicks die and the future of the colony is imperiled.

Hubert has high hopes for his newly met neighbors because they located their nursery on top of an underwater rift, where the sea ice is less likely to melt. "They are quite clever, these animals."


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Amazon says music catalogue open to Apple users






SAN FRANCISCO: Amazon said Thursday its 22-million song music catalogue was now "optimised" for users of Apple devices, making it easier for iPhone owners to circumvent the iTunes store.

The move is part of a new initiative by the Internet retail giant challenging Apple's dominance of the digital music market.

"For the first time ever, iPhone and iPod touch users can discover and buy digital music from Amazon's 22-million song catalogue using the Safari browser," Amazon said in a statement.

"Music purchases are automatically saved to customers' Cloud Player libraries and can be downloaded or played instantly from any iPhone, iPod touch, iPad, Kindle Fire, Android phone or tablet, Roku, Sonos home entertainment system, or any Web browser, giving customers the freedom to enjoy more music, from more devices than any other major cloud music service."

The move comes a week after Amazon launched a service that gives compact disc buyers instant copies of music in the Internet "cloud" in a challenge to iTunes.

Amazon AutoRip provides free MP3 versions of music on CDs bought from the online retail titan.

In the newest announcement, Amazon said its MP3 mobile website for iPhone and iPod touches is built on HTML5, which means customers can make purchases directly from the website.

Amazon offers some deals, including US$5 albums, 69-cent songs, and free songs from artists on the rise.

According to research firm NPD, iTunes last year held a 64 per cent share of the digital music market and 29 per cent share of all music sold at retail. Amazon had 16 per cent of the digital market, according to NPD's September survey.

- AFP/jc



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Murder accused MLA makes Cong insecure in HP

SHIMLA: The disqualification of murder accused Congress MLA Ram Kumar Chaudhary has jeopardized the party's position in 68-member House of Himachal Pradesh. The Doon MLA's ouster has left the party with 34 MLAs only. For clear majority, the government should have the support of 35 members. If Chaudhary is disqualified, the party will be left with no option but to seek the outside support.

The MLA's suspension has prompted a fresh debate -- whether the tainted MLA arrested by Haryana police in the murder case of a dalit woman would able to take oath within 60 days of his election to avoid disqualification.

Assembly election results were declared on December 20 and the newly elected MLAs had taken oath of office on January 8, barring Chaudhary, who remained underground to evade arrest. Now that the court has remanded him to police custody till January 18, his family members will have to apply for his bail on Friday. If court rejects the bail, then Chaudhary would become a disqualified member after the expiry of 60 days.

Congress in Himachal came to power with 36 members. Of them, one of its MLAs from Palampur, Brij Behari Butail, has become the assembly speaker, leaving the party's MLA strength to 35 in the House. If Chaudhary is disqualified, then Congress would be left with 34 members only -- one less than the required majority. Under such circumstances, the party will have to take outside support to keep majority in the House.

Although out of six independent MLAs, four have extended support to Congress, sources said the party does not want to lose Chaudhary's membership to keep its majority position. Chaudhary has been placed under suspension but the party is treading cautiously on the issue of his disqualification despite Haryana police claims that evidences indicating towards his involvement in the crime.

Speaker Brij Behari Butail told TOI that Chaudhary cannot be called a member of the legislative assembly as he has yet to take the oath. "He has 60 days time to take oath and would be disqualified after that," he said. If court allows it, then Chaudhary could be administered the oath as member, Butail added.

Chaudhary is one of the four suspects in the murder of a 24-year-old dalit woman Jyoti from Hoshiarpur, whose body was found in Sector 21 of Panchkula on November 22. He had surrendered to police on January 8.

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Opinion: Lance One of Many Tour de France Cheaters


Editor's note: England-based writer and photographer Roff Smith rides around 10,000 miles a year through the lanes of Sussex and Kent and writes a cycling blog at: www.my-bicycle-and-I.co.uk

And so, the television correspondent said to the former Tour de France champion, a man who had been lionised for years, feted as the greatest cyclist of his day, did you ever use drugs in the course of your career?

"Yes," came the reply. "Whenever it was necessary."

"And how often was that?" came the follow-up question.

"Almost all the time!"

This is not a leak of a transcript from Oprah Winfrey's much anticipated tell-all with disgraced cyclist Lance Armstrong, but instead was lifted from a decades-old interview with Fausto Coppi, the great Italian road cycling champion of the 1940s and 1950s.

To this day, though, Coppi is lauded as one of the gods of cycling, an icon of a distant and mythical golden age in the sport.

So is five-time Tour winner Jacques Anquetil (1957, 1961-64) who famously remarked that it was impossible "to ride the Tour on mineral water."

"You would have to be an imbecile or a crook to imagine that a professional cyclist who races for 235 days a year can hold the pace without stimulants," Anquetil said.

And then there's British cycling champion Tommy Simpson, who died of heart failure while trying to race up Mont Ventoux during the 1967 Tour de France, a victim of heat, stress, and a heady cocktail of amphetamines.

All are heroes today. If their performance-enhancing peccadillos are not forgotten, they have at least been glossed over in the popular imagination.

As the latest chapter of the sorry Lance Armstrong saga unfolds, it is worth looking at the history of cheating in the Tour de France to get a sense of perspective. This is not an attempt at rationalisation or justification for what Lance did. Far from it.

But the simple, unpalatable fact is that cheating, drugs, and dirty tricks have been part and parcel of the Tour de France nearly from its inception in 1903.

Cheating was so rife in the 1904 event that Henri Desgrange, the founder and organiser of the Tour, declared he would never run the race again. Not only was the overall winner, Maurice Garin, disqualified for taking the train over significant stretches of the course, but so were next three cyclists who placed, along with the winner of every single stage of the course.

Of the 27 cyclists who actually finished the 1904 race, 12 were disqualified and given bans ranging from one year to life. The race's eventual official winner, 19-year-old Henri Cornet, was not determined until four months after the event.

And so it went. Desgrange relented on his threat to scrub the Tour de France and the great race survived and prospered-as did the antics. Trains were hopped, taxis taken, nails scattered along the roads, partisan supporters enlisted to beat up rivals on late-night lonely stretches of the course, signposts tampered with, bicycles sabotaged, itching powder sprinkled in competitors' jerseys and shorts, food doctored, and inkwells smashed so riders yet to arrive couldn't sign the control documents to prove they'd taken the correct route.

And then of course there were the stimulants-brandy, strychnine, ether, whatever-anything to get a rider through the nightmarishly tough days and nights of racing along stages that were often over 200 miles long. In a way the race was tailor-made to encourage this sort of thing. Desgrange once famously said that his idea of a perfect Tour de France would be one that was so tough that only one rider finished.

Add to this the big prizes at a time when money was hard to come by, a Tour largely comprising young riders from impoverished backgrounds for whom bicycle racing was their one big chance to get ahead, and the passionate following cycling enjoyed, and you had the perfect recipe for a desperate, high stakes, win-at-all-costs mentality, especially given the generally tolerant views on alcohol and drugs in those days.

After World War II came the amphetamines. Devised to keep soldiers awake and aggressive through long hours of battle they were equally handy for bicycle racers competing in the world's longest and toughest race.

So what makes the Lance Armstrong story any different, his road to redemption any rougher? For one thing, none of the aforementioned riders were ever the point man for what the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency has described in a thousand-page report as the most sophisticated, cynical, and far-reaching doping program the world of sport has ever seen-one whose secrecy and efficiency was maintained by ruthlessness, bullying, fear, and intimidation.

Somewhere along the line, the casualness of cheating in the past evolved into an almost Frankenstein sort of science in which cyclists, aided by creepy doctors and trainers, were receiving blood transfusions in hotel rooms and tinkering around with their bodies at the molecular level many months before they ever lined up for a race.

To be sure, Armstrong didn't invent all of this, any more than he invented original sin-nor was he acting alone. But with his success, money, intelligence, influence, and cohort of thousand-dollar-an-hour lawyers-and the way he used all this to prop up the Lance brand and the Lance machine at any cost-he became the poster boy and lightning rod for all that went wrong with cycling, his high profile eclipsing even the heads of the Union Cycliste Internationale, the global cycling union, who richly deserve their share of the blame.

It is not his PED popping that is the hard-to-forgive part of the Lance story. Armstrong cheated better than his peers, that's all.

What I find troubling is the bullying and calculated destruction of anyone who got in his way, raised a question, or cast a doubt. By all accounts Armstrong was absolutely vicious, vindictive as hell. Former U.S. Postal team masseuse Emma O'Reilly found herself being described publicly as a "prostitute" and an "alcoholic," and had her life put through a legal grinder when she spoke out about Armstrong's use of PEDs.

Journalists were sued, intimidated, and blacklisted from events, press conferences, and interviews if they so much as questioned the Lance miracle or well-greased machine that kept winning Le Tour.

Armstrong left a lot of wreckage behind him.

If he is genuinely sorry, if he truly repents for his past "indiscretions," one would think his first act would be to try to find some way of not only seeking forgiveness from those whom he brutally put down, but to do something meaningful to repair the damage he did to their lives and livelihoods.


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'Catfish' Star Reaches Out to Manti Te'o













Nev Schulman, the star and creator of the MTV show "Catfish" that follows Internet dating hoaxes, has reached out to Notre Dame football star Manti Te'o and offered to help solve his girlfriend hoax.


Te'o and Notre Dame claim he was a "catfish" victim when it was revealed that the woman he said was his girlfriend and died of leukemia never existed.


The "Catfish" television show was spawned by a movie of the same name in which Schulman tracked down a person who pretended to be a young woman he had met online.


".@MTeo_5 I know how you feel. It happened 2 me. I want 2 help tell ur story & prevent this from happening to others in the future. Lets talk," Schulman tweeted to Te'o.


Schulman says in his tweets that he has information about the baffling hoax. "I am working on finding out more about this @MTeo_5 #Catfish story. I have been in contact with the woman involved and will get the truth," Schulman tweeted on Wednesday night. It is unclear which woman Schulman has been in contact with.


However, in a statement released to ABC News, Schulman said "I have been in touch with Donna Tei. She reached out to me back in December asking for help regarding the person who had been using her photos to create a fake profile."






ABC News; David J. Phillip/AP Photo











Manti Te'o Hoax: Notre Dame Star Allegedly Scammed Watch Video









'Catfish' Star Nev Schulman's Red Flags for Spotting Online Fakers Watch Video









Tale of Notre Dame Football Star's Girlfriend and Her Death an Alleged Hoax Watch Video





It's not clear whether Donna Tei was the woman whose photo was used as "girlfriend" Lennay Kekua or another person in the complicated hoax.


He also tweeted, "However his #Manti story ends, it doesn't change that we are all the victims of a #Catfish."


In an interview with ABC News, Schulman defended the possibility that Te'o had been duped.


"From what I gather, and from some contact that has been made with me with people who have been involved in this story directly, I get the impression that this is a much larger scheme than he would have thought," Schulman said.


"It doesn't seem to me that he is in on it, although, of course, that is yet to be seen. Even though it seems hard to believe because he is a high-profile football player, he is just as vulnerable and susceptible to being Catfished as anyone else."


"I think there is a lot more we are going to find out about this story," he said.


Notre Dame Athletic Director Jack Swarbrick cited the documentary "Catfish" in trying to explain how the star linebacker became a hoax victim.


"I would refer all of you, if you're not already familiar with it, with both the documentary called 'Catfish,' the MTV show which is a derivative of that documentary, and the sort of associated things you'll find online and otherwise about catfish, or catfishing," Swarbrick told reporters Wednesday.


The 2010 film stars Schulman, who was the real-life victim of a "catfish" scam. Schulman wanted to make the documentary to show how he was sucked in by an Internet pretender -- or a "catfish" -- who built an elaborate fake life.


Schulman made the documentary as he was falling for someone named "Megan," a gorgeous 20-something from Michigan. Their online relationship blossomed until Schulman confronted "Megan."


"Megan" turned out to be a middle-aged mom of two named Angela Wesselman, who later said she had been diagnosed with schizophrenia.


Inside 'Catfish': A Tale of Twisted Cyber-Romance


"It was different. It was something new. It was a little mysterious," Schulman told ABC News in an earlier interview, describing his reaction before he discovered Megan's true identity.






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