According to a friend, a US school teacher Mary Kay Letourneau who made international headlines after raping a 12-year-old kid and becoming pregnant with his child did not have a “love”-based relationship with him.
In 1997, Mary Kay Letourneau, who was 34 at the time, was sentenced to prison for having an illicit relationship with Vili Fualaau, an elementary school student from Burien, Washington, who her acquaintance described as “putty in her hands.”
The mother of four already gave birth to Audrey while she was awaiting punishment, and the former teacher spent three months in jail as part of a plea deal.
But soon after her release, she was discovered having sex in a car with her victim.
The predator was sent to jail with the maximum sentence of seven and a half years after the judge overturned her plea agreement.
Fualaau’s second kid was born by the rapist few months after she entered prison again.
She remained incarcerated until 2004. After 14 years of marriage, Letourneau and Fualaau later separated in 2005.
Michelle Lobdell, Letourneau’s childhood best friend, remembers the tragic incident’s revelation to her in 1996.
She tells the New York Post in an interview that Letourneau brought her the horrifying news during a seismic phone call.
Michelle said: “She said, ‘I have some news and this is difficult.
“She said, ‘I’m pregnant and it’s not [Letourneau’s husband] Steve’s’. It was a shocking moment.
“She presented it to me that [the father] was some student she met during a summer school class.”
Lobdell immediately thought her friend’s secret paramour would be a college-aged man.
“She didn’t tell me he was 12,” she added.
Michelle didn’t learn the truth about the father until the story was splashed across headlines all around the world.
“I couldn’t imagine she’d do what she’d done. In a million lifetimes,” she says in the new ID documentary – Mary Kay Letourneau: Notes on a Scandal.
Michelle adds: “Love had nothing to do with it. He was putty in her hands. She created Vili. She hijacked his life and I do believe she was incredibly manipulative.
“I said, Mary Kay, how could you have done this to your kids? She said, and I quote, ‘What I’ve done is the best thing I could have ever done for my children.’ At that point, I knew she was so disconnected from reality. It was the last time I spoke to her,”
In 2020, Letourneau died of colon cancer at the age of 58, a year after she and Fualaau split. But after her death, Fualaau said he “lost a piece of himself.”
“It was a tragedy all around. When she died, to my shock, I walked outside of our house in Arizona, and I put my arms around my husband and I cried for an hour,” said Lobdell.
