Ronaiah Tuiasosopo, by all accounts the mastermind of the Manti Te’o hoax, “called a church friend in early December crying and admitted to duping the Heisman finalist,” according to ESPN’s Outside the Lines.

Ready for the story to get really wild? ESPN is not revealing the name of the “friend” who gave them this information. Here’s what the unnamed friend is saying:

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. And, she says, he told her that it wasn’t the first time he had done it.

“He (Ronaiah) told me that Manti was not involved at all, he was a victim. … The girlfriend was a lie, the accident was a lie, the leukemia was a lie,” said the woman. “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.”

Wonder how hard ESPN vetted this friend, who wouldn’t even let their voice be recorded. There is audio. She appears, on the surface, to be real. They pass a polygraph test?

Oh, and we also have this, from Outside the Lines: Te’o isn’t the first person who has been stitched a clown suit by Tuiasosopo, who sounds like an evil, cruel, human being:

OTL also interviewed two other people who said they have a cousin who had the same online hoax pulled on them by Tuiasosopo.

J.R. Vaosa, 28, of Torrance, Calif., and Celeste Tuioti-Mariner, 21, of Whittier, said that in 2008 their cousin began an online romance with a woman who portrayed herself as a model. Vaosa said the cousin showed Vaosa a picture on MySpace of a woman from a Victoria’s Secret catalog that he said was Kekua. Vaosa said that the online Kekua would agree to meet his cousin at certain places. Vaosa said he went with the cousin to meet her.

“When Lennay said she was gonna be at this park one day, we’d go to the park and Ronaiah pops up and then we go to the gym in Orange County where the kids have volleyball tournaments, Ronaiah’s there,” Vaosa said.

Finally, the family convinced Vaosa’s cousin that something wasn’t right and he needed to cut things off not only with Kekua, but Tuiasosopo, whom they were convinced was the real Kekua, Tuioti-Mariner said.

I’d have an easier time explaining the end of the Usual Suspects or the Fiscal Cliff than this sordid affair. [ESPN]