Student-affair teacher freed after seven years

A teacher who notoriously seduced a 12-year-old pupil – and had his children - has been released from a US prison after serving seven years for child rape.

As a condition of her release, Mary Kay Letourneau, 42, cannot contact her former lover, Vili Fualaau, now 21.

“I’m not allowing myself to think about being with him,” Letourneau said before her release. “We had a beautiful relationship, and I value it for what it was.”

In 1996, Letourneau was a 34-year-old elementary school teacher and a married mother-of-four in Des Moines, Washington state, when her friendship with the then 12-year-old Fualaau became sexual.

When Letourneau was arrested in 1997, she was already pregnant with Fualaau’s daughter. A judge sentenced her to six months for second-degree child rape, and ordered her to stay away from Fualaau.

A month after her release, however, Letourneau was caught having sex with Fualaau in her car. She was sent to prison for seven and a half years, and gave birth to Fualaau’s second daughter behind bars.

“Nothing could have kept the two of them apart,” Seattle lawyer Anne Bremner said.

Bremner had struck up a friendship with Letourneau in 2002, while defending police against a civil lawsuit filed by Fualaau and his mother, alleging the police and school district failed to protect him.

A jury rejected their claims.

Letourneau, who sang in the choir and recorded books-on-tape for the blind while in prison, wants to try to build a normal life, Bremner said.

“She wants to be a mother. She wants to be a responsible member of society.”

Fualaau said he would like to reunite with Letourneau but wants to take things slowly.

He is unemployed and his mother is raising their children.

“I don’t know what my feelings are right now,” he said yesterday, acknowledging he was “kind of nervous”.

“But I know that I do love her.”

Bremner said Letourneau still has feelings for Fualaau. “She’s always said this love is eternal and endless, and I think she stands by that,” Bremner said.

Letourneau’s two daughters with Fualaau are now six and seven. They visited her in prison about twice a month. Her four older children live in Alaska with her ex-husband and visited a few times a year.

“There’s enormous pain” with her four older children, Bremner said.

As a sex offender, Letourneau will have to register with the state and receive court-ordered treatment.

Authorities will notify her new neighbours – although the TV trucks will probably tip them off first.

Seven years in prison has done little to dim Letourneau’s notoriety.

“People are fascinated by scandal,” Bremner said. “Love somehow made her do things that led to complete catastrophe. Then there’s the side of watching a train wreck. You can’t look away even if you want to.”

Letourneau may now want to tell her own story. A state appeals court ruled in 2000 that she may sell and profit from her story. She has also expressed interest in working for a group that advocates for the rights of mothers in prison.