Nurse the Hate: Manti T'eo Story Revisited (I told you so!)

While watching the Chargers v Broncos game on Sunday, I saw Manti T’eo get shaken up when someone smashed into his temple at 40 mph.  I had almost forgotten about T’eo as he has maintained an amazingly low profile since that imaginary girlfriend story captured my attention like no other story in the past year.  I maintained at the time that the most likely scenario in this entire episode was that T’eo was a homosexual that did not want to be outed, and then spun what may have been the most ridiculous cover story in history to cover his tracks.  I had made a bunch of totally uninformed guesses about what had really happened when The Spin was in full force here: http://nursethehate.blogspot.com/search?q=So+totally

I had predicted that his “current girlfriend” was a plant by a public relations firm.  The woman, a 20 year old junior at the time named Alexandra Del Pilar, was a public relations major at St Mary’s that I had guaranteed was being given a job and financial inducements to pretend she was T’eo’s girlfriend.  The goal of this farce was to secure T’eo’s monster NFL contract and try to reel in all the wild speculation about his personal life.  As I sat watching T’eo woozily walk off the field yesterday, I wondered how all of that had shaken out.  I went to the phone and made some Google searches…

You might be surprised to learn that after Alexandra Del Pilar “broke up” with T’eo after their relationship became “long distance” due to his needing to train for the NFL combine in Florida (uh-huh…  That must have been it.  The distance.  Um-hm…). She then moved to Manhattan to spend four months working at Hitzik Strategies.  Hitzik Strategies is a high powered public relations firm that specializes in high profile clients that need to call in the cavalry.  If you are a big celebrity and you really fucked up, these are the guys to call.  Hitzik Communications refers to this in their press releases as “crisis communications”.  Their client list includes Justin Bieber, Glenn Beck, Ryan Braun, Alec Baldwin, and… Manti T’eo.  Well, that’s odd…  To think that a small 15 person office in New York that makes problems go away for enormous superstars like Justin Bieber needed a 20 year old college girl from Indiana without any experience to work in their office.  I would think that would be a difficult place of employment for a seasoned shark to land, much less a fresh faced kid that wasn’t even out of school.  And what an amazing coincidence that the firm handled Manti T’eo’s “crisis communications”!  Well, they were probably just so impressed with her after meeting her that they knew they needed to bring her into the office to handle things like Alec Baldwin punching photographers in the face.  It appears that after her “internship” ended, she went back to South Bend where she now is (surprise!) a reporter for Notre Dame Sports on 360TV.  Isn’t that just nice and tidy!

It’s a shame that our collective attention spans are so short.  For my money, the behind-the-scenes story of how the T’eo story was managed and how the pawns were manipulated is much more interesting than what the hell is really up with T’eo.  It was all swept under the rug with startling efficiency.  Kudos to Hitzik Strategies.  You pulled it off.

 

Update:  The State of Illinois has dropped all charges on me from the EZ Pass transponder debacle.  I have re-established normal relations with the State of Illinois and The Tollway Authority.