How Jay-Z Inspired Manti Te’o to Open Up About Being Catfished

Nearly a decade after former Notre Dame linebacker Manti Te’o’s infamous catfishing scandal took over social media in early 2013, Netflix on Tuesday released a new documentary chronicling the story, Untold: The Girlfriend Who Didn’t Exist.

While making press rounds ahead of the doc’s release, Te’o—who was drafted in 2013 and has since played for the Chargers, Saints, and Bears—stopped by CBS Mornings and shared how a Jay-Z concert inspired him to move on from the bizarre catfishing hoax.

“Cam Jordan with the Saints took a bunch of us teammates to a Jay-Z concert,” Te’o recalled about the 2017 moment. “And at that concert, Jay-Z opens with saying these words, ‘You cannot heal what you don’t reveal.’ And it may have been just some random words to everybody, but for me, at that time, it hit me like a ton of bricks.”

“In order for me to kind of heal from this, I needed to reveal it,” he said of the performance of 4:44 opener “Kill Jay Z.” 

In the trailer for the Netflix documentary, Manti Te’o talks about how he found out he might be a victim of catfishing. “My uncle immediately said, ‘I think you’re getting catfished,’” he says. “And that was the first time that somebody ever brought up the term ‘catfish.’ I didn’t know what catfishing was. Even when he explained what it was, I still couldn’t understand what that even entailed.”