Manti Te'o was speaking to a woman on the phone after all.
The architect of the hoax, Ronaiah Tuiasosopo, used his cousin Tino to play the part of Lennay Kekua during conversations with Te'o.
"Tino is the girl that Manti has been talking to all these months," a cousin of Tuiasosopo told the New York Post.
This revelation goes against Ronaiah Tuiasosopo's lawyer, Milton Grimes, who asserted that Ronaiah had been the voice Te'o believed to be Kekua during over 1,000 hours of phone conversations.
Te'o "thought it was a female he was talking with," Grimes told the New York Daily News. "It was Ronaiah as Lennay."
Te'o released voicemails he received from Kekua during an interview with Katie Couric Thursday.
"If [Ronaiah] somehow made that voice, that's incredible, that's an incredible talent to do that," Te'o said. "Especially every single day."
A member of the Tuiasosopo family is adamant the voice is not Ronaiah's.
"There is no doubt whatsoever that it's Tino," the Post's Tuiasosopo family source said.
Te'o has gone on record saying that he had no suspicions of the true nature of his relationship with Kekua until Dec. 6, when the person going by that name called to say she was still alive.
"The biggest lie I'm sorry for is the lie that I told my dad,'' Te'o told Couric. "He asked me, 'Did you see her?' I said, 'No. ... I mean, yes.' As a child, your biggest thing is to get approval of your parents.''
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