Jack Swarbrick's press conference. going with the te'o is the dumbest person alive defense

A gutsy defense indeed, but will it pay off?


Bolded parts are my interpretation of what he's saying/my own thoughts about it.

Good evening. Thanks to all of you for joining us on relatively short notice. We're here tonight, obviously, because of an article that appeared in Dead Spin earlier today and to address the subject matter of that article.

My focus here tonight is to talk to you about what the University knew, when we knew it, and what decisions we made based on that information. Much of what drove that process and those decisions relates in part to a fundamental view of the importance of student privacy, and that will likely play a role tonight also because, at the end of the day, this is Manti's story to tell and we believe he should have the right to tell it, which he is going to do.

Please leave me alone, why are you asking me this? I want to go home.

So there may be some questions this evening which I defer to him, but I will try to be as responsive as I possibly can to all of your questions.

See above.

While we still don't know all of the dimensions of this and other than the perpetrators, I can assure you that no one knows all of the dimensions of this there are certain things that I feel confident we do know. The first is that this was a very elaborate, very sophisticated hoax perpetrated for reasons we can't fully understand but had a certain cruelty at its core, based on the exchanges that we were able to see between some of the people who perpetrated it.

Manti was the victim of that hoax. Manti is the victim of that hoax, and he will carry that with him for a while.

In many ways, Manti was the perfect mark because he is a guy who is so willing to believe in others and so ready to help that, as this hoax played out in a way that called upon those tendencies of Manti and roped him more and more into the trap. He was not a person who would have a second thought about offering his assistance and help in engaging fully.

What I'm trying to say is this. Manti Te'o is the dumbest person alive. Yes, that is the defense we're going with. You see as I will mention later, Te'o never once met this woman, yet fell in love with her. Now you may be asking yourself, "But how could this happen." I'm here to tell you that you need to spend more time online. You just have to have faith. For us here at Notre Dame that's a big part of what we do here.

Finally and reflective of that, I want to stress, as someone who has probably been as engaged in this as anyone in the past couple of weeks, that nothing about what I have learned has shaken my faith in Manti Te'o one iota. The same great young man, great student, and great athlete that we have been so proud to have be a member of our family is the same guy tonight, unchanged in any way, except for, as he indicated in a statement in his release, the embarrassment associated with having been a victim in this case.

Believe me. I would be embarrassed if I was in his situation too. First he lost out on the Heisman, had that stinker against Alabama, and now this. It's been a rough month.

On the morning of December 26th, very early morning, Manti called his coaches to inform them that, while he was in attendance at the ESPN awards show in Orlando, he received a phone call from a number he recognized as having been that he associated with Lennay Kekua. When he answered it, it was a person whose voice sounded like the same voice he had talked to, who told him that she was, in fact, not dead.

lol then who was phone?

Manti was very unnerved by that, as you might imagine. I will let him again talk about that and his reaction to it. But he maintained that secret vis a vis the members of the football family until he called the coaches on the morning of the 26th. They promptly reached out to me to inform me of this shocking piece of news, and I arranged to meet Manti upon his return to campus and did so on the afternoon of the 27th.

I met with Manti for about an hour and 45 minutes and asked him to review every detail of the relationship as he knew it with this woman. Manti did so, was forthright, answered every question, and was eager to share the information with me.

He was like, "I unno I never met girl". I kept asking him for answers but all he could say is they never met not once.

I met with him again the next day, as I had put the notes together from the previous day's meeting, to just review again what we had gone over to make sure I had all the details correct. And, again, he was a full and excellent partner in making sure that the information I collected was accurate.

I then took that information and shared it with other leaders in the university for a deliberation as to next steps, what we should do. Some additional questions of Manti were then developed, which he again promptly responded, and a decision was made to engage in an independent investigative firm to see if they could determine what was at the nature of what increasingly appeared to us to be a sophisticated hoax.

I took that shit straight to our lawyers to find out if CBS and everyone else we peddled that whole "story" to could sue the shit out of us.

While apprised by that investigative firm of their work along the way, we received a final report from them on January 4th. I met with Brian and Ottilia Te'o in Miami on the 5th to share with them the essence of those findings. We left that meeting with an understanding that they would think about what they had heard, engaged Manti's future representation, which would be determined later in the week, in consultation as to how to best respond, and keep the university fully informed of their intentions and work in concert with us when they were ready to communicate the story.

It was my understanding...is my understanding that they were on a timetable to release the story themselves next week when today's story broke.

With that, I welcome the opportunity to take any questions.

*Unfunny questions omitted

Q. You talked a little about what you talked to him about. Can you say what you've seen or what the investigator saw that would some people obviously don't know the whole story and are going to question whether Manti was behind the hoax. What have you seen that would prove that that would not be the truth? 

Jack Swarbrick: Well, there's several things. One is 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. It is a scam I'm probably revealing my television watching habits, but it was covered by Dr. Phil extensively recently that follows the exact arc of this, and it's perpetrated with shocking frequency for me shocking as an older guy who's not as versed in the online world and it is just as this one. An initial casual engagement, a developing relationship online, a subsequent trauma traffic accident, illness and then a death. As hard as it is for me to get my arms around this, there's apparently some sport in doing this, in being able to do it successfully. So that was one that we sort of found this external guidebook, if you will, or platform for doing this. Two were the internal consistencies, right? As we probe, ask questions, wanted to make sure it all lined up with what we knew independently, the facts as we understood them, we're very comfortable with the consistency in how it all fit together. Thirdly, our investigators through their work were able to discover online chatter among the perpetrators that is sort of the ultimate proof of this, the joy they were taking, the sort of casualness with which among themselves they were referring to what they had accomplished and what they had done.

He's literally using this as an explanation of what happened, if this doesn't tell you how far they're reaching I don't know what does.

Q. There were some reports earlier in the year when this was going on that Manti and Kekua had met and spent time together in Hawaii. Did he explain how those came to be? 

Jack Swarbrick: He did, and, again, I'm going to let Manti tell the story because he deserves that right. What I will tell you, this was exclusively an online relationship.

It was strictly an online relationship was it? THEN WHAT ABOUT THIS ARTICLE FROM YOUR VERY TOWN NEWSPAPER EXPLAINING HOW THEY MET IN HAWAII??:

 "Every once in a while, she would travel to Hawaii, and that happened to be the time Manti was home, so he would meet with her there. But within the last year, they became a couple." 

http://articles.southbendtribune.com/2012-10-12/sports/34419536_1_brian-and-ottilia-manti-te-o-irish-head-coach

Oh that's weird!??!? That link doesn't work anymore when it did EARLIER TODAY! Hmm... That's so strange that that would happen! What are the odds?

^ It's back up now 

Luckily Google cache still has it up:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Gsq3BkqY4-oJ:articles.southbendtribune.com/2012-10-12/sports/34419536_1_brian-and-ottilia-manti-te-o-irish-head-coach+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us 

Q. By your discussions with Manti, when then did they meet? How long had this been going on? 

Jack Swarbrick: I don't remember the exact length of time, but it had...it began with an online reaching out to him that he responded to.

 Again, this is contradicted by that article from the South Bend Tribune (that mysteriously vanished) where it explains that they met at a game in Stanford.

"It never felt like a chance meeting, although it probably appeared that way from the outside looking in.

 Their stares got pleasantly tangled, then Manti Te'o extended his hand to the stranger with a warm smile and soulful eyes.

They could have just as easily brushed past each other and into separate sunsets. Te'o had plenty to preoccupy himself that November weekend in Palo Alto, Calif., back in 2009."

Other people go on to point out that according to the Dead Spin article and that South Bend one that's now taken down, it points out they met at a Stanford game:

Q. Two questions actually. One, I wish I could say it, I know there have been reports that Manti said he had an initial face to face meeting with his girlfriend at Stanford at some point. What's going on with that? 

Jack Swarbrick: Again, I'll let Manti provide the details, but as I said earlier in this press conference, when Manti took me through the entire story from start to finish, when he first described the contact, he used the verb met. For him, the fact that they connected online, that they met online, was consistent with using that verb. Not one that I might have chosen, but it was for him. And the timing was consistent with the playing of that game.

Really? How the hell does that work? Met = connected online? What? No one has ever thought that, ever. The article goes IN DETAIL about how "their stares were "tangled" and how he reached his hand out to her." I've spent a lot of time online and I've never heard anyone use those phrases when talking strictly about how they met online. My bullshit meter is off the charts.

Q. And lastly, what's the university's response to, say, the 20 some year old fans who have experience with this and say, if you haven't actually met her in person, it seems slightly deceiving on his part to bring such attention to it. 

Jack Swarbrick: Then you don't know Manti is my answer. Manti lives his life on his sleeve, and he is out there. As I said earlier and I don't think this was an accident they understood, given the nature, the extraordinary nature of this man, the more trouble she was in car accident, diagnosis of leukemia, failing health the more engaged he would become, the more focused he would become, and the more dedicated he would become, and that's exactly what happened here. And for those who are suspicious that that can happen in sort of a virtual environment, I think there are a lot of examples out there that suggest otherwise. I mean, this documentary chronicles one of them, but as we've gotten into this, I've been surprised to learn the frequency with which it exists and the cautionary tale it affords to those same young people. The people who will be least skeptical of this are the people who live their life in the social media as an important component of it. Skepticism probably increases with age, but it's harder for those of us who aren't fully engaged in that medium to understand how it can be used to this effect.

Back to the Catfish defense. You see people being duped into falling in love with strangers online really is the scourge of this generation. "Look to your left and now to your right, at least one of you will be tricked into falling in love with a stranger online..." Manti is also such an emotional person that he is literally above all suspicion. Damn those older people for thinking this sounds like horseshit. You people need to spend more time online.

 Lots more shit here.