If Loving You Is Wrong (52 page)

“I had no idea he was going the next day! He made it sound vague, like he was only considering going to clear up some business matters with Fixot. He didn't say he was going on a book tour with his teenage daughter, David Gehrke, and Vili. I didn't know the book was even printed. As far as I was concerned we hadn't even finished it yet.”

But it was.
Un Seul Crime, L'Amour (Only One Crime, Love)
was a hastily assembled volume of interviews of Vili, Soona and Mary Kay. Mary Kay told friends that chunks of text were simply not true. Disclosures of sex in cars and around every corner of the block were not the words of a soulful and loving young man like Vili. Having sex
two or three hundred times was not the message that she had wanted out!
Blanks were filled in in the rush to get the book out while the story was still hot.

“I know what happened,” she said, bitterness creeping into her normally sweet voice. “Bob Huff got impatient and instead of waiting for the writer he drove Vili around Seattle talking into a tape recorder. They filled in the blanks with David and Bob. You can hear David's voice in the book, too.”

She didn't blame Vili for what he had put into print. She saw Vili as a bit of a chameleon when it came to interacting with others.

“Put him in a car with a lawyer like Robert Huff and how do you think he's going to respond? He's going to act just like Bob because he wants to be liked, to fit in. Bob's like a surrogate father to him.”

Bob Huff later refuted Mary Kay's allegations. He had been working around the clock with the book and didn't know that he was headed to Paris until a few days before he left. There wasn't time to reach Mary Kay. He admitted that he helped to “adapt” the English manuscript to French. He was fluent in French and the publishing crunch was on to get it out while the interest in the story was still high. He did not fabricate any of the content.

“I couldn't make any of this up,” he explained. “It's too wild.”

But Vili Fualaau's lawyer suggested that perhaps, the teacher's young lover did have a tendency to stretch the truth. Bob recalled one time when he “and the boys”—writer Bob Graham and Vili—were hanging out at Bob Graham's rented place in the Belltown section of Seattle discussing the book's content. Vili's details of conquests with his teacher grew more and more outrageous.

“You know how it goes,” Bob Huff said later of the locker room banter. “But I did learn later that Vili did make up some stories. But we didn't need any bullshit. There was enough of a good story there.”

Even if inaccurate, the book made headlines, as did nearly everything associated with the former teacher. But if she had hoped the book would help her—there was a postcard in the back pre-addressed to Washington State Governor Gary Locke, with a plea for clemency—it only made matters worse. While she wrote of her undying and spiritual love for Vili, the teen wrote of waiting to have sex with her and betting a friend $20 bucks that he could nail his teacher, and living in her car while she was released from the King County jail. Mary Kay and Vili also wrote how they had disregarded the law and continued to see each other after her arrest at Shorewood Elementary. When she went into labor, it was Vili who drove her to the hospital—though, at 13, he didn't have a license and couldn't manage a stick shift. Mary took over and drove the rest of the way.

Other details were revealed, from the ridiculous (Mary Kay wore Mickey Mouse underwear at her sentencing) to the shocking (the sex). Vili wrote of a life in a violent home in the “hood,” of sex with other girls, of influencing pre-teen Steven Letourneau to abandon his “preppy” ways for a gangster style—while he was sleeping with the boy's mother. He had no respect for Steve Letourneau, as a man or a husband.

Before they consummated their relationship, Mary Kay had even told Vili that when two-year-old Jacqueline was of age, Vili should marry the girl. Mary Claire, she said, was too much like her father to be worthy of Vili's love. And while Vili struck a tough kid pose, Mary Kay's chapters, for the most part, were sweeter than a Hallmark card.

The book also described Mary Kay's month of freedom in January 1998 as one sexual escapade after another. She wrote how she even sneaked Vili into music teacher Beth Adair's Seattle house for nights of sex. When Mary was arrested the second time “in the car with the steamed up windows” Vili wrote how she had threatened suicide and how they had devised a “Romeo and Juliet” pact.

Mary later said there had never been any thought of suicide. She had read a biography of Virginia Woolf and learned how the author had loaded stones in her pockets before walking into a lake. She joked, she said, that she could do the same thing.

“The lake was right there... . It was not serious. 'Maybe I could put some rocks in my pockets and walk into Lake Washington'. It was not a threat. It was a joke.”

Soona Fualaau lambasted the Highline School District when spokesman Nick Latham told a TV reporter that her son had lied about going on a promotional trip to France to market a book. According to Nick Latham, the boy had said he said he was going to Europe “to study art.”

“She told us that we had no right to say anything about her son. Nothing whatsoever,” the district spokesman said later.

Chapter 80

VBLI FUALAAU WAS in Paris with his lawyers while Mary Kay went into labor and was rushed from the prison in an ambulance driven by Gig Harbor Fire Department paramedics on October 16, 1998. She was taken to St. Joseph's Medical Center in downtown Tacoma while the troop of media, groupies, and friends began to assemble to keep the vigil. A rumor circulated that the
Globe
had offered up to $50,000 for the first photograph of mother and baby. Nurses were put on notice to keep a wary eye for the media. At 36, Mary Kay became a mother for the sixth time when she gave birth to Alexis Georgia Fualaau. But this was not the blissful birth of a baby born to a woman who would take her home and placed her in the family's bassinet lined with the beautiful fabric from Duchamps. It was about a prisoner who handed her baby over to the infant girl's grandmother before being carted back to her cell.

The babies' names remained a point of contention between Soona and Mary Kay. Mary Kay had wanted to name her first baby with Vili “Audrey-Anna”, but Soona nixed it as being too similar to the name of another family member. When the second baby was born, Soona refused to call the infant Georgia. In time, Mary Kay and her friends were the only ones who did.

“I'm getting used to these little fussy battles,” Mary Kay said later, choosing her words carefully. “Soona and I don't always agree.”

The big question after his second baby was born was not how Vili Fualaau felt about being a father for the second time, but whether his “soulmate” would be charged with a second count of rape. Prosecutors had said they considered filing a third-degree rape charge against her, but had decided enough was enough. No more charges would be filed.

“There's no legal barrier to prosecution of Mary Kay Letourneau,” King County Prosecutor Norm Maleng said. “It is instead a question of justice... . seven and a half years is a substantial punishment for the conduct involved.”

And poof... if was over. Or some had thought—and hoped—it would be. Few worked the media like the teacher and student.

Vili appeared on TV for money and Mary Kay called in to give her side of the story. She was hurt when Vili went off to France with Bob Huffs teenaged daughter and pictures of the pair appeared in the
Globe
. The tabloid even reported that Vili had several flings with neighborhood girls, though his heart still belonged to Mary Kay.

“I'm still in love with Mary and I still wear her ring. I'm not going to sit around and wait and cry my eyes out. I'm going to keep busy,” he told
Inside Edition
.

Things were tough for the “toast of Paris” [as David Gehrke called Vili] when he returned to Seattle after the book tour. Vili was booted out of school for openly smoking pot on school grounds. Bob Huff showed up with his client to argue the boy's case before the school district. “It was the first time I've ever heard of a suspended kid bringing a lawyer to defend him on a routine suspension. Her son could have taken drug abuse counseling and enrolled back into class. Instead, they fought it,” said a district employee.

TV reporter Karen O'Leary and others who followed the case knew that the whole sad Letourneau affair would never really be over. It would rear up once more and remind the world that the teacher and the student were still around. On the afternoon of November 9, the cracking voice on a police scanner indicated a shooting, a self-inflicted gunshot at a home in White Center. The address seemed familiar and Karen confirmed it for the news crew headed out with a camera: It was the home of Soona Fualaau.

“I was hoping that it wasn't Vili, that it wasn't some suicide. I thought of the love story he and Mary had tried to promote, and I wondered if the final chapter for the teenager had been written,” Karen O'Leary said.

In the middle of the afternoon, Vili's brother, Perry, had been shot in the abdomen while reportedly fooling around with a gun with a cousin. The seventeen-year-old's injuries were severe and he was hospitalized for several weeks, reportedly with the loss of a kidney, damage to his spleen and other serious injuries. Vili, his children, and Soona were not home at the time. Family members said they were living in a hotel paid for by
Inside Edition
.

When KIRO News crews got there, David Gehrke told them the family had no comment.

Later, Karen O'Leary wondered why David would have been there at all. Mary Kay had fired him after she hired the Boston lawyer Susan Howards and filed her appeal in the spring. And, as far as she knew, he never directly handled anything for the Fualaaus.

“He just doesn't want to be left out, that's all,” Karen suggested.

Mary Kay went ballistic at the news of the shooting. Her daughters were living in an unsafe environment. She told a friend that she even phoned in a complaint to the authorities to have her kids removed from Soona's care, but nothing happened.

She also worried about Vili.

“I'm hurting for Vili, the lack of support he is getting. I don't expect Soona and the others to support Vili
and
me. Why would they do that? But they should support who he is and what he should be doing with his life. Vili deserves the recognition for his talent, his genius. I'm struggling with my loyalty to them, when they show none to me,” she told a friend.

Though it wasn't fast enough for her lawyer and the Fualaaus, Mary Kay spent most nights during the first part of 1999 working on the English language translation of the Fixot book. She told friends she was distressed by the gross inaccuracies she found in the manuscript. At night, she pulled out a little aqua trunk as a table and slid a reading lamp close to her bed and worked into the early morning, revising, commenting, and even laughing. A few times she read the passages out loud to her cellmate and the two would nearly roll on the floor in hysterics. It was ludicrous. The last line was the topper. Bob Graham had written a scene that smacked of an old Susan Hayward movie. She was calling out through the bars for understanding. “I beg of you... this is love...
I beg of you...

From her prison phone—her lifeline to the world-Mary Kay told a friend perhaps the most shocking aspect of her story. Her children were being kept from her, she claimed, because she hadn't finished the revisions for the English version of
Only One Crime, Love
.

Bob Huff bristled at the idea that anyone was keeping the children away from Mary Kay. He remembered seeing paperwork associated with arranging prison visitation with Mary and her babies. It was proof, he believed, of Soona's desire to allow Mary Kay to see Audrey and Georgia Alexis.

“I don't think Soona is that diabolical to pull off this big scam of creating the letters and acting like she's trying if it wasn't really true.”

Mary Kay also feared that they'd release the book without her input. “I will say it's not me... if they step over the line like that. I'll call every news media person I know and they'll put me on the air. I will go down the line on this and Bob and David know it.”

Ghostwriter Bob Graham used his interviews with Mary Kay Letourneau one more time in the winter of 1999 when he wrote a pair of pieces for the London
Sunday Times Magazine
and a London tabloid. The article quoted Bob Huff as saying that Mary Kay had threatened to say Vili had raped her, if he didn't do the right thing and marry her. “That's Mary for you,” Bob Huff reportedly said, “She wants her way, no matter what happens.”

Mary Kay said she wanted to call Bob Huff to ask why he would say such a thing.

“But I can't. He doesn't have a phone that works... at least one that I know of. Can you imagine having a lawyer who doesn't have a phone number?” she asked.

In January 1999, Mary Kay spoke on a Seattle radio show hosted by a DJ known as the “T-man.” A few days after she told the world how much she loved Vili, a letter was dispatched to the station. The prison considered the radio interview third-party contact with the victim, a violation of Mary Kay's sentence. Vili hadn't been on the show at the same time—not even on the same day—but the prison saw it as Mary using the media to get her message of love and hope for marriage out to the teenage father of two.