Page 23 - Crimes of 20th century

22. Mary Kay Letourneau's

Forbidden Love, 1998

What happens to a woman when she finds the man of her dreams, only he is a child? And
if the woman is his teacher? American parents cringed at the story of Mary Kay
Letourneau, who first met Vili Fualaau when she was his teacher in second grade. He did
not start flirting with her until he was in sixth. She started to have sex with him the next
year, when he was 13. Already the mother of four from a marriage that was disintegrating,
she would bear the teenager's daughter, but not before she ended up in prison on rape
and molestation charges. She would then violate the rules for the suspension of her
sentence by seeing him again — and becoming pregnant again. Letourneau's beauty and
struggles with manic depression made her illicit affair the fodder of tabloids and women's
magazines around the world. But there was something touching, if maddening, about her
refusal to renounce her love for the boy at the cost of her freedom. In 1998, after giving
birth to her second child with Fualaau, she began serving a seven-year prison sentence.
Released on parole in August 2004, she quickly married her young lover, who by then had
turned 21.

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