How Teacher Mary Kay Letourneau Married Her Student Vili Fualaau

Because Letourneau understood better than most just how complicated a new arrival can be. 

After all, her relationship with Fulaau—the student she met when he was in her second grade class and she was a married mom of four—started as a crime. 

In 1996, the middle school teacher began sexually abusing a then-12-year-old Fualaau. And on Mar. 4, 1997, she was arrested for child rape after becoming pregnant with Fualaau's child.

She gave birth to Audrey Lokelani Fualaau, while she was on trial for child rape. Their second daughter Georgia Fualaau was born while Letourneau was in prison.

"I thought this could be trouble, because it's not really a social norm," Letourneau said in 2004, reflecting on her choices during an appearance on CNN's Larry King Live, "but I didn't—I didn't have an idea—I didn't believe that it was a felony. It just...I knew it just didn't...just wasn't normal."

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Fualaau was barely 13 and had just finished sixth grade, again having been in Letourneau's class, when their sexual relationship began. They were both taking the same art class at a community college that summer and she encouraged his drawing and poetry writing.

Letourneau claimed that she was separated from her husband when the affair began, that she would still have had feelings but would have resisted acting on them if she knew it was a felony. She described the build-up to the affair as "a million moments that just kept building something very beautiful and scary at the same time." In 1996, she had suffered a miscarriage and subsequently became depressed. She wasn't looking to fall in love, she said.

She later told Larry King that she and Fualaau had a "really compatible sense of humor" and a similar "perspective on life."

Fualaau had begun his adolescent advances after making a bet with his cousin that he could "get" her. "I remember I used to like plan the next day, like 'What I was gonna do, what was I gonna say, what I was gonna, like, what surprise I was gonna leave on her desk,'" Fualaau later told Dateline. He objected to being called a victim.

On Australia's Sunday Night in 2018, he recalled, "Mary and I became really close, and I kinda forgot about the bet."

Police came across them sitting in Letourneau's van one evening, parked near the marina, but a quick phone call to Fualaau's mother confirmed that the child was with a trusted adult.

"He said there was nothing between them," his mother later told the Seattle Times. "And I assumed I could trust her with my son."

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"Everyone said this was going to happen," her attorney David Gehrke said on MS Now, formerly MSNBC, at the time. "We were not surprised. Whether it's true love, whether it's sick love, whether it's an obsession or whatever, you can't start her in treatment one week and say, 'You're cured.'" Fualaau initiated the contact, he said.

Letourneau was sent to prison to serve out her original sentence. That March, it was revealed she was pregnant with her and Fualaau's second child.

Meanwhile, Steve divorced her and moved with their four kids to Alaska. "I'm kind of speechless," he told People in March 1998, after Letourneau was locked up again. "It's like taking a picture of our family from the wall and throwing it on the ground." Their kids were "handling it pretty well," he said, "considering their anger."

Her and Fualaau's daughter Georgia was born later that year at the Washington Corrections Center for Women in Gig Harbor, Wash., then eventually also went to live with her sister Audrey in the custody of Fualaau's mother.

For the seven and a half years Letourneau was in prison, she was allowed no visits from or contact with Fualaau, though they managed to get messages to each other. One of the biggest blows was not being allowed to attend her father's funeral in 2001.

Letourneau got out of prison in August 2004.

"I don't know what my feelings are right now," Fualaau told Seattle's KING 5 News on the eve of her release, admitting he was "kind of nervous. But I know that I do love her."

During her time in prison, Fualaau had dropped out of high school, though in 2004 said he was working on his GED. "I tried to get my mind away from everything," he told People. "I was partying, drinking too much. Too many hangovers." His mother had unsuccessfully tried to sue the school district for negligence.

Two months after her release, Letourneau told King in her first interview since being back on the outside that she and Fualaau were engaged. (They had to petition a judge to dissolve a no-contact order first.)

Recalling the lead-up to the scandal being national news, Letourneau said that neither she nor Fualaau ever considered not having the baby when she got pregnant the first time. She encouraged him to stay in school and she planned to take maternity leave and pursue a new career.

Asked if the children knew anything about what was going on, she explained, "I mean, the story is that their mother was away at prison. And now, finally, their mommy and daddy are back together. And that's the story. And I've told my oldest one, at least, that, you know, mommy's doing a time-out."

Her four eldest children had visited from Alaska four times a year. Gehrke's wife, Susan, would drive Audrey and Georgia to the prison twice a month to see her. 

"I'm very sensitive to each of my older children's developmental level and their understanding right now," Letourneau also said on Larry King Live. "I'm there for them right now. They're in Alaska, but I stay very close in touch with them. And it's not—it hasn't been appropriate to talk with my 10 and 12-year-old right now. I'll do that with their father."

Letourneau said that she didn't consider her life to be "tumultuous," a word King used. Rather, it was "blessed."

"I'm healthy. My children are healthy. And I still have a mother. And I come from a very loving family. And I have Vili," she said. At the time, she was not allowed to leave the state of Washington without permission. She could teach again, she said, just not in the public school system.

She and Fualaau wed on May 20, 2005, at a winery in Woodinville, Wash. They set up registries at Williams Sonoma, Macy's and Tiffany. Their daughters were flower girls.

"They've got this nice little place on the beach and there's always things to look at," the lawyer said on MS Now's The Abrams Report. "We figure, the little girls are there and they can watch the ships go by, and there's eagles that fly by."

They remained in the Seattle area to raise their kids. When Fualaau had aspirations to work as a DJ, Letourneau hosted a "Hot for Teacher" night at a bar where he was deejaying in 2009. 

In April of 2015, ahead of their 10th wedding anniversary, she and Fualaau sat down with Barbara Walters for ABC News.

"The incident was a late night, and it didn't stop with a kiss," Letourneau recalled about their first sexual encounter. "And I thought that it would, and it didn't."

Added Fualaau, "It was a huge change in my life, for sure. I don't feel like I had the right support or the right help behind me. From my family, from anyone in general. I mean, my friends couldn't help me because they had no idea what, what it was like to be a parent, I mean, because we were all 14, 15."

Being barred from talking to Letourneau, the mother of his kids, was difficult: "I mean, if they gave me more options or choices to make instead of just saying, 'Oh, you can't talk to her anymore,' and I was like, 'I really do want to talk to her, though.'"

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As for his daughters? "I think I understand about it, just like how it was surprising to people," Audrey, now 28, said about her parents' relationship. "It's been feeling different because it's not really been brought to our attention, just because we grew up with it, so we're adapted to it."

She and Georgia considered their mom to be on the strict side, Audrey revealing that mom once cut the padding out of one of her bras. Their dad "definitely feels like a young dad now that I'm at that adult age to where I can go to a bar," she said. "He's like a 'friend dad.'"

Though the couple officially divorced in 2019, with Fualaau moving to California, when she grew ill, he "gave up his life there, and for the last two months of Mary’s life he stood by her 24/7 taking care of her," attorney Gehrke told Today. "So yes, they were divorced and they had their spats, but they were always in love with each other."

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