A friend close to Ronaiah Tuiasosopo says he admitted to perpetuating a girlfriend hoax against Manti Te'o.

She says Tuiasosopo gave her the tearful confession and account of how he played what he said was at first a game on the unsuspecting Te'o. 

"He (Ronaiah) told me that Manti was not involved at all, he was a victim," said the unidentified woman. "The girlfriend was a lie, the accident was a lie, the leukemia was a lie. He was crying, he was literally crying, he's like 'I know, I know what I have to do.'

"It's not only Manti, but he was telling me that it's a lot of other people they had done this to."

The woman whose photos were portrayed as Lennay Kekua was identified by Inside Edition as Diane O'Meara. Her lawyer told the program that her client is also a victim and that her photos were stolen and used to create the illusion of Te'o's girlfriend.

A former Notre Dame teammate of Manti Te'o said that players knew the woman wasn't really his girlfriend even though Te'o played that up as his tragic story was being told.

After Deadspin.com broke the hoax story, however, multiple media reports have said players thought that Te'o had only met Lennay Kekua once and that it wasn't really accurate to call her his girlfriend.

Te'o began to "play along" with the story, according to the teammate.

Te'o craved attention and would sometimes point himself out to friends while on television, according to the teammate.

Te'o issued a statement Wednesday afternoon:

"This is incredibly embarrassing to talk about, but over an extended period of time, I developed an emotional relationship with a woman I met online. We maintained what I thought to be an authentic relationship by communicating frequently online and on the phone, and I grew to care deeply about her.

"To realize that I was the victim of what was apparently someone's sick joke and constant lies was, and is, painful and humiliating."

The father of Te'o, Brian Te'o, reportedly exaggerated and fictionalized the relationship in the media.

"They started out as just friends," Brian Te'eo said in October. "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.

"And we came to the realization that she could be our daughter-in-law. Sadly, it won't happen now."

Manti Te'o began receiving phone calls in early December from a number associated with Lennay Kekua.

Te'o became convinced he was the victim of a hoax by the time he went home for the holiday break. 

When Te'o returned to the Notre Dame campus on Dec. 27, he admitted never meeting Kekua in person. Te'o had previously said he first met Kekua on the Stanford campus.

Te'o's father, Brian, also was quoted several times in the media about his son meeting Lennay.

"That's pretty much Brian Te'o," a source said. "He's a great guy, but he loves to add color."

Brian Te'o couldn't be reached for comment.

The veracity of claims made by Manti Te'o that he was the victim of a hoax in which his girlfriend didn't exist will be scrutinized by NFL teams that consider drafting him.

Te'o has been expected to go in the middle of the first round in the 2013 NFL Draft.

"We'll draft criminals, but lie to my face and you're off our board," said one NFL executive on Thursday.

The girlfriend of Manti Te'o, Lennay Kekua, was said to have died from leukemia in September. The story became part of his Heisman narrative and Notre Dame's undefeated regular season. 

But the photographs purported to be Kekua are from the social-media accounts of a 22-year-old California woman not named Lennay Kekua.

Kekua was said to be a Stanford student that met Te'o in November of 2009.

The Stanford registrar's office has no record that a Lennay Kekua ever enrolled. There is no record of her birth in the news. Outside of a few Twitter and Instagram accounts, there's no online evidence that Lennay Kekua ever existed.

Ronaiah Tuiasosopo allegedly created the online persona of Lennay Kekua.

A friend of Ronaiah Tuiasosopo told us he was "80 percent sure" that Manti Te'o was "in on it," and that the two perpetrated Lennay Kekua's death with publicity in mind. 

Te'o's Twitter profile carries a quotation from Alexandre Dumas's The Count of Monte Cristo, the great adventure novel about a man in disguise.

Update: Notre Dame has released a statement claiming that Te'o was the victim of a hoax. Officials from the school were approached by Te'o and his family on Dec. 26.

Georgia linebacker Jarvis Jones has decided to declare for the 2013 NFL Draft, according to a source.

Jones is projected as going No. 2 overall in Jeff Risdon's most recent mock draft on RealGM.