Dr. Phil sues Gawker Media over Manti Te'o hoaxer interview

TV therapist Dr. Phil McGraw's production company has filed a lawsuit against Gawker Media and its sports website, Deadspin.com, for posting his interview with the man behind the Manti Te'o hoax before it hit west coast markets.

The cranky afternoon television self-helper claims the website posted video of his interview with Ronaiah Tuiasosopo immediately after the east time zone broadcast thus swiping viewers before it could be aired in a majority of "The Dr. Phil Show" markets.

The first part of the two-part February interview left viewers with a tease, to watch the next day if Tuiasosopo would speak in the female voice he used to create the fake “Lennay Kekua.”

Tuiasosopo did speak in Kekua's voice in the second part of the interview, but the suit alleges that Deadspin stole the copyrighted material and made it available to viewers online "hours before the ‘Dr. Phil Show’ aired to over 98% of its viewers," resulting in lower ratings for the second episode.

In an eight-page complaint filed Monday in federal court in Texas, McGraw claims Deadspin posted the interview before it could get to other profiable nationwide markets.

McGraw's suit essentially says Deadspin siphoned away viewers who would have otherwise watched it on TV.

Deadspin broke the story about the "catfished" Notre Dame football player and his fake girlfriend back in January.  The story brought in numbers the snarky sports website had never seen before.

Maybe Dr. Phil should just thank the site for giving him the lead and a story line.

Dr. Phil offers proof Tuiasosopo was the voice of Te'o fake girlfriend

The 22-year-old man who fooled Notre Dame linebacker Manti Te'o into falling for a fake girlfriend via email and phone messages said he was repeatedly molested as a 12-year-old child and was only creating the phony persona as an escape from what he later called rape.

Ronaiah Tuiasosopo spoke publicly for the first time Thursday, in a taped interview with with Dr. Phil McGraw, on the "Dr. Phil Show" and said, " I felt the need to create this.  It has everything to do with what I went through as a child."

After Thursday's show, McGraw expressed some skepticism that Tuiasosopo was actually the voice of the girlfriend, Lennay Kekua — a virtual woman he invented and introduced to Te'o via the Internet before killing her off in December.

When Tuiasosopo didn't pass three voice tests (taped in the Dr. Phil studio for Thursday's show), evaluated by three audio technicians — which could have matched his disguised voice to the previously recorded tapes of the phony Kekua — the soft-spoken Tuiasosopo blamed it on the unfamiliar and uncomfortable setting in the television studio.  So McGraw had him go to more familiar surroundings to recreate Kekua's voice— and the same place for years he made the original calls to Te'o — his California home.

Tuiasosopo needed to score a 60% chance of certainty from the trifecta of audio analysts to confirm that he could have really been the voice of the fake Kekua.

All three audio tests came back with high scores of 87.94%, 70.54% and even a perfect 100%  authentication from one lab.

"They all say with scientific certainty Ronaiah Tuiasosopo is the female voice in those recordings," said McGraw when the results came back.