Mary Kay Letourneau Says First Kiss with Her Student-Turned-Husband 'Seemed Very Right'
Notorious former school teacher and sex offender Mary Kay Letourneau is speaking out — and she knows that her relationship with husband Vili Fualaau is still every bit as controversial as it was in 1996, when she was 34 and he was her 12-year-old sixth-grade student.
“[It] sounds young, I get it,” Letourneau, now 56, said on Tuesday night’s Autobiography, on A&E. “He was young, I get it. Am I sorry that he’s the father of my children? No I’m not.”
Both Letourneau and Fualaau cooperated for the show after years living in relative seclusion in Washington. As they spoke about their relationship, Fualaau, now 34, said that he made the first move and asked his teacher if he could kiss her.
“She said, ‘Only a coward would ask,’ ” he recalled.
“Twenty years later, people ask how it turned into romance,” Letourneau said. “Back in the day, I accepted the kiss, you know. I did. He wasn’t my student when that happened. For some reason, the kiss, it seemed very right.”
Their relationship first turned physical right after the end of the school year.
Fualaau said on A&E that, “after the kiss, we kind of made it official that we are kind of a thing now.”
That “thing” ended up landing Letourneau in prison for seven years.
Following a guilty plea for felony second-degree rape of a child, she was sentenced to six months behind bars, with three months suspended, and told to have no contact with Fualaau for life. But she was unable to stay away from him and was re-arrested when she was caught having sex with him, again, in a car.
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Letourneau was sent back to prison and was released in 2004. She twice became pregnant with Fualaau’s child when he was underage. The couple eventually married and raised their two daughters together.
The couple legally separated last year, after 12 years of marriage. Despite that apparent split, Fualaau and Letoureanu are still living together and have recently been spotted out near their apartment in Des Moines, Washington.
He has worked at a home improvement store and as a deejay. She has worked as a legal assistant.
Speaking out this week, LeTourneau admitted that even given their long relationship, she sometimes wonders how things could have gone differently with Fualaau
“Maybe I am just naive in that area of life,” she said on Biography, “Maybe it could have stayed just a kiss. I always thought, ‘What if it could have?’ ”
Mary Kay Letourneau: Autobiography aired Tuesday and is available on demand and on A&E’s website. It will be rebroadcast throughout the month.
Related Video: Mary Kay Letourneau Splits From Vili After 20 Years
