A love like no other

Who could have imagined that a story that started where a love story shouldn’t and survived where a love story can’t, would wind up here, where a love story belongs—in a waterfront suburban home?

There, a family of four shares smiles. The two growing girls and their loving parents seem downright... ordinary.

The former teacher known around the world as Mary Kay Letourneau now goes by the name Mary Fualaau. She’s been married for a year now to her former sixth grade student—the same young man she was once convicted of raping.

Last week, I sat down with Mr. and Mrs. Fualaau, now ages 22 and 44, in a hotel near their home. Together, they told their story of how this unusual— if not outrageous— relationship started.

Mary claims at the time it didn’t cross her mind that her new love was illegal.

The couple told me about their life now, their struggle to get full custody of their two daughters, and their surprising relationship with Mary’s four children from her first marriage.

And now, is Mary pregnant with the couple’s next child?

In our long conversation, this couple born in infamy did not hold back.

But at its heart, is this a true love story, or a true crime story? Can a couple the law regarded for years as criminal and victim now be accepted as loving husband and wife? Maybe the only way to decide is to listen to what Mary and Vili have to say now, and to judge for yourself.

But first you need to remember the whole story— and what a story it is.

In 1996, Mary Kay Letourneau, Mary to her friends, was a popular 34-year-old teacher at Shorewood Elementary in a Seattle suburb. She was married with four kids, ages two through 11. Vili Fualaau was a student in her sixth grade class. As some of Mary’s colleagues would later testify in a civil trial, Mary and Vili seemed a little too close.

That summer, between Vili’s sixth and seventh grade years, when Vili turned 13, the relationship blossomed from an unlikely friendship to an unfathomable romance.

It was months before they were found out. Mary’s husband suspected something illicit, and one of his relatives tipped off authorities.

By the time Mary was arrested in 1997, she was already pregnant with Vili’s child. Mary only got to spend a few short months with her baby girl Audrey. In the summer of 1997, she pleaded guilty to a felony for her sexual relationship with her baby’s father.

Mary went to jail. Her husband filed for divorce and moved to Alaska, taking the couple’s four children with him.

After 5 months behind bars, Mary was released on probation—contingent on her attending counseling and staying away from Vili. At the time, it sounded like that’s what she intended to do.

But it did happen again. Less than a month after Mary left jail, police caught Mary and now 14-year-old Vili together in a car at 3 a.m… along with baby clothes, $6,200 in cash and Mary’s passport.

Mary Kay Letourneau, by now an international media sensation, was sent to a medium security prison to serve out the full seven year sentence that had originally been suspended. But in the few short weeks she’d been out on probation, Mary had become pregnant again with Vili's second child.

With Mary in a prison cell, and Vili only 15, both their babies were placed in the temporary custody of Vili’s mother.

Mary’s feelings for Vili over the years seemed to remain remarkably consistent—just as she’d predicted they would in a 1997 Dateline interview the night before she first went to jail.

Five years later, when she was in prison and I interviewed her by telephone, she was a bit more circumspect—but she never disavowed her feelings for her former student.

But in truth, Vili’s feelings over their seven years apart seemed to be all over the map. In an interview when Mary first went to jail—when he still wanted his identity hidden—he told Dateline he was in love with Mary.

But a few years into Mary’s incarceration, Vili seemed to have a change of heart. He and his mother sued the school district and the local police for failing to stop the relationship. On the witness stand, Vili claimed his affair with his teacher had left him an emotional wreck, and swore he was no longer in love with her.

The jury didn’t buy it.

Vili and his mom didn’t get a cent. Had he faked indifference towards his erstwhile lover in hopes of a big cash payoff? Just when it looked like the public would never know for sure, along came the biggest development in this case in seven years.

In 2004, Mary Kay Letourneau was released from jail.

She left the lockup in the dead of night, using a decoy car to fool the TV cameras. The next day she followed court orders and signed up with the sheriff’s office as a registered sex offender. But her supposed victim, the same one who had claimed severe emotional damage in court, wasn’t sounding like a victim at all.

In a Today Show interview just after Mary’s release, Vili, by now 21, told Matt Lauer he had big plans for a future with her.

But those postcard fantasies would have to wait. As a condition of her probation, Mary was not allowed to leave the state of Washington. And there was a bigger problem: that court order prohibiting Mary from having any contact with Vili was still in effect.

So on August 6, 2004, just two days after Mary’s release, 21-year-old Vili petitioned the court to lift that order. And with the stroke of a judge’s pen, Vili Fualaau was transformed from jail bait, to potential mate. By Valentine’s day, they were engaged.

They wanted a joyous, romantic ceremony, just like every couple— but not every couple has their nuptials broadcast nationwide on “Entertainment Tonight” and “The Insider.”

Mary and Vili’s story has been debated, dissected and judged, but they say once you’ve heard it from their point of view, you’ll see things very differently.

When you hear them tell it, nothing about this story is what you’d expect—starting with how it all began. Though Mary was a grown woman and Vili was a sixth grader, they both insist he was the one who put the moves on her.

Vili says he had no trouble attracting girls his own age, and didn’t see why his teacher should be any different.

Mary says she tried to keep focused on her teaching, but Vili’s very deliberate attempts at seduction made that difficult.

Young as he was, Vili seemed to have an intuition for how to woo a much older woman, who by her account, was trapped in a chilly marriage.

Mary says it was all about visual contact - long intense gazes from her student’s soulful brown eyes. Vili says he also scored points by giving her poems and drawings, even by starting provocative conversations.

Mary says she tried to use that as a teaching moment, advising young Vili to look up ‘affair’ in the dictionary.

Vili says he wasn’t a virgin at the time and he was confident Mary would be his next lover.

It’s a version of events that will no doubt infuriate a lot of child psychologists and law enforcement officers—and probably some of you viewers and readers too. How could a 13-year-old, no matter how “manly,” be an appropriate partner for a grown woman? Under the law, of course, he can not be. 

Mary concedes she knew it would be wrong to let the relationship go any further, but she says as soon as the school year ended, she and Vili did cross that line. It happened after the two of them ate dinner alone at a restaurant called Huckleberry Square. Afterwards, in the parking lot, they say, it was Vili who leaned over and started their first kiss.

Vili Fualaau: I thought that kiss was only gonna last for like a couple seconds.  But it ended up lasting for like 30 minutes.  Could’ve lasted longer, but I had to go home.  So then I got in trouble when I got home.  It was like 11:30 at night?

Over the next few months, Vili would be missing curfew a lot. They saw each other secretly all through the summer—and began sleeping together, even sometimes at Mary’s home. Then, in his seventh grade year, though he was at another school, Vili would stop back at Shorewood elementary in the afternoons to meet up with the married woman he now considered his girlfriend.

Perhaps it’s understandable that Vili wasn’t concerned about all this leading to serious trouble...

Mankiewicz: Did you have any second thoughts at that point? Did you think “I’m gonna get in trouble or I could get her in trouble?”

But Mary’s reaction is a little harder to grasp.

She claims she’d been thinking of leaving teaching anyway. The romance intensified as the months passed. Then that winter, Mary got the biggest news yet: she was going to have Vili’s baby.

In a few months she’d be having a baby who probably wasn’t going to look much like Steve Letourneau. That meant freedom, she says, because now she would have no choice but to seek the divorce she’d been too scared to ask for.

Mary and Vili say abortion was not a serious option. And for a brief while they imagined they and the baby could be together as a family.

How could she not know it was a crime?  Back in 1997 there hadn’t been a lot of notorious cases in the news of female teachers prosecuted for consensual sex with underage boys.

Mary says the thought it would make a difference that Vili was a more than willing partner. She says she was stunned to learn that under statutory rape laws, it is illegal to have sex with a 13 year old even if he is willing.

Perhaps even more surprising: her explanation for that night between her incarcerations, when she and Vili were found in a car together at 3 a.m. with cash and her passport.

She says the money was to pay her lawyer and the passport was just I.D. And get this: She claims she didn’t mind being caught and sent back behind bars. She says it was her only chance to see her kids.

Under the conditions of her release, Mary was prohibited from contact not just with Vili, but with her five children—a ban she found intolerable.

Mary says she decided she’d prefer to be in prison, with at least occasional visits from her kids. She claims she was already making arrangements to pull out of her treatment program and go to prison, so seeing Vili was no risk at all. But at the hearing where her seven year sentence was reinstated, she surely didn’t look happy about it.

All contact with her young lover was still forbidden. No visits. No phone calls. No letters. But Mary and Vili admit now they did find a way to communicate.

After the birth of their second baby, Georgia, Mary was allowed to pump her breast milk and have it sent to the home where their two babies lived with Vili’s mom and with Vili. Mary enclosed secret messages in the packaging.

Songs like “Oh Happy Day,” and “Let’s Get it On.” Vili says he would play the songs Mary suggested and he kept a printed card for decoding her ultra private messages.

Vili spent months daydreaming about her getting out. But as time passed, he admits he dated other girls—girls his own age. By 2002, with Mary locked away for five years, Vili very publicly proclaimed in that civil trial, that his love affair with Mary Letourneau was over.  

He says his mom and her lawyers convinced him that disavowing his love for Mary would pay off.

Mary heard about it all in prison from news accounts.

Two years later, when Mary was released and this star-crossed couple finally reunited— legally this time— they both say their love was as strong as the night they parted.

My conversation with Mary and Vili Fualaau took place just a few days after their first anniversary, and the subject of the wedding still brings a glow.

The 43-year-old bride and her 21-year-old groom received a little extra joy on their special day—reportedly as much as a million dollars worth—by selling the rights to their wedding video. It’s paid their bills all year, but also led to some public skepticism about the state of this union.

And for the past year, that’s just what he’s been doing in the rented waterfront home he and Mary share with their girls in a Seattle suburb. As they talk about their day to day life, they sometimes gaze at each other like teenagers.

Who gets up earlier?

Mary and Vili insist they’re perfectly comfortable with their 21 and a half year age difference. Still there are a few occasions when Mary seems to act more like his mom than his wife—like when Vili cranks up the music of rapper Little John.

But a year after the wedding, and a decade after the first sparks ignited in room 39 of Shorewood elementary, Mary says the passion is still very much alive.

Vili is pretty sentimental too, and not afraid to show it.

That story won’t be complete, Vili says, until he and Mary and their daughters are a full, legal family. For most of their lives, these two little girls had a teenager for a father and a prison inmate for a mother. But today, their parents say 9 year old Audrey and 7 year old Georgia are happy, active kids with two very involved parents who are eager and able to care for them full time.

When I spoke with Vili and Mary last week, they were still on a high from seeing Georgia nail a dance performance the night before.

Mary says it felt pretty good after so many years of missing recitals, sports events, and parent teacher conferences. She says these days, the kids still bring up the subject of her prison term from time to time.

If that sounds a little like a family in denial, Mary says it isn’t. She says the girls understand their mom was sent away, because at one time, being with their dad was against the rules.

During Mary’s stay behind bars, the girls were placed in the temporary custody of Vili’s mother, Soona. Vili says he didn’t like being seen as merely a big brother to his own kids.

Some questions may still remain about Vili’s maturity. In April, he was convicted of a DUI charge. He’ll be sentenced later this month. There may be questions, too, about Mary’s history of very poor judgement. But now the state of Washington, which once viewed their relationship as a crime, is apparently sanctioning it. Mary and Vili say they expect to get permanent custody of their girls this summer, under a court supervised transition plan.

And what about Mary’s other children—four from her marriage to Steve Letourneau? Remember, they moved to Alaska with their dad shortly after Mary went to jail.

Now, they’re spending a lot of time right here in Seattle, with their mom and their new stepfather, who’s not a lot older than they are.

In fact Mary’s oldest son is currently living with the couple. Her 18-year-old daughter goes to art school in Seattle and often spends weekends with them. The younger ones, now in their early teens, visit too. None of Mary’s kids from her first marriage want their faces shown on television. Vili admits he’s not comfortable disciplining Mary’s older kids, but overall, Mary and Vili say their unconventional family gets along surprisingly well.

And will Mary and Vili be having more children together? For the first time, there’s no law against it.

Mary Fualaau, suburban mom and registered sex offender, is piecing together a normal life with the husband who was once considered her victim. The next step: finding work. 22-year-old Vili, a talented artist since childhood, is considering employment at a tattoo parlor.

Here he is practicing his craft on a grapefruit.

Mary, now 44, surprised us with her career plans—she says she wants to go back to teaching.

Because of her conviction, Mary will never be able to teach in public school again, but she says she hopes to get a job teaching math at a private school or community college.

But even as they look to the future, Mary and Vili acknowledge it’s not easy shedding a past that so many have found so disturbing for so long.

But can new images replace the old ones? Can a love that just about everyone agrees was wrong at the start age into something acceptable, even beautiful? To some, theirs will forever be a tainted, even deviant relationship. But Mary and Vili see themselves in very different terms—a triumph of love against the odds.

And you know, I just, makes you even more sure that she’s the one for me. 

Mary says Vili has been the one for her too, ever since he finished up his sixth grade year.

But they say they’re much more focused on the here and now—spending precious time with each other, their two kids, and maybe, one more.

They have another project underway, too. Mary Fualaau, the teacher once known as Mary Kay Letourneau, is of course writing a book.  It’s the story of their lives.