Mary Kay Letourneau on affair with student: ‘There wasn’t anything going on at all when he was a student of mine’

MARY Kay Letourneau has revealed “the truth” about her sexual relationship with her former student in a new documentary.

IN 1997, primary school teacher Mary Kay Letourneau was convicted of second-degree child rape after it was revealed she was having a “relationship” with her sixth-grade student.

It was the case that shocked the world and now Letourneau tells her side of the story in a new documentary, which recounts her tumultuous past in her most in-depth confessional to date.

In Mary Kay Letourneau: Autobiography, the now 56-year-old revisits her controversial past and reveals key, never-before-heard details about her sexual encounters with 13-year-old student Vili Fualaau, and the media firestorm that followed.

Why? Because in her words, it’s important to set “the record straight”.

Letourneau pleaded guilty to child rape in 1997 after it was revealed she was having a sexual relationship with a former student.

The first widely-reported fact she wants to shoot to smithereens in the documentary is that Fualaau was indeed her student when they began their affair.

According to Letourneau, this wasn’t the case.

“There wasn’t anything going on at all when he was a student of mine,” she says matter-of-factly.

Letourneau says their “relationship” began while they were taking classes at the same community college.

One day after class they went out to eat, Fualaau asked her if he could kiss her, she accepted and that was that.

“Am I sorry he’s the father of my children and the man of my life?” Letourneau says in the special, referring to the now 34-year-old Fualaau. “No, I’m not.”

Letourneau was a married mother-of-four when her encounters with Fualaau began. She was arrested in March 1997 after a relative of her husband, Steve Letourneau, notified police. She gave birth to a daughter, Audrey, in May 1997, while out of jail on bail.

Letourneau eventually pleaded guilty to two counts of second-degree child rape and was sentenced to six months in jail. But as part of her plea bargain, Letourneau agreed to avoid any further contact with Fualaau, a condition she violated in 1998, when she became pregnant a second time by Fualaau. That resulted in her longer prison sentence.

Vili Fualaau, Mary Kay Letourneau and daughters, Audrey and Georgia.

According to the documentary’s executive producer Brad Abramson, it took some convincing to get Letourneau to take part in the special, but, in the end, she was happy that she did.

“I think she wanted to tell her side of the story for the first time,” Abramson says.

“This platform, where she’s looking right at the camera in an intimate and personal way, allows her to frame her story … which she was not allowed to do for many years.”

The end result is both breathtaking and infuriating in equal parts.

“I think reliving (her) time in prison was brutal,” he adds.

“It brought back a lot of raw emotions. I was quite surprised to see that after 20 years.”

Letourneau and Vili wrote a book called Only One Crime, Love about their experience.

Letourneau is no stranger to speaking her mind.

In 2015, on their 10-year wedding anniversary, Barbara Walters did a sit-down interview with Letourneau and asked her if she took Fualaau’s childhood from him.

“The only benefit, if there is any benefit that I was away (in prison), is that he had years to be without me and not in a relationship,” Letourneau responded.

“I think that even though we did start when he was a young teenager, I was gone for a while, so he had plenty of time to do his thing.”

Today the couple are still married and live together in Washington State.

With the felony child-rape charge, Letourneau will be on the registered sex offender list for the rest of her life.

Mary Kay Letourneau: Autobiography airs Saturday at 9.30pm on Foxtel’s Crime + Investigation and is available on Foxtel On Demand.