Instead, the sender offered him a place at the University of Southern California with a $5,000 scholarship. It meant tuition would have been $45,000 which he could not afford. Heartbroken to have been rejected by Colburn and not be able to afford the alternative, he stayed at McGill and let Lee comfort him. "I was very bummed out. I was pretty down. She was there consoling me and she seemed genuinely upset. I don't know how someone could do that," he said, knowing what he knows now. Before sending him the fictitious rejection email, Lee had used his laptop to turn down Colburn's email. She told them she would be 'elsewhere' and said she could not speak on the phone because it was broken. They carried on dating but broke up six months later for other reasons. On Friday, Abramovitz would not go into detail about her personality or why they split but said, looking back, there were 'warning signs' about her deceitful behavior.