Notorious former elementary school teacher Mary Kay Letourneau has opened up about her illicit relationship with a former 12-year-old student-turned-husband, claiming that their first kiss “seemed very right.”
Sitting down with her former student and now ex-husband Vili Faulaau for A&E’s Autobiography, which aired Tuesday night, former elementary school teacher Mary Kay Letourneau opened up about the illegal relationship that sent her to jail not once, but twice.
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“Twenty years later, people ask how it turned into romance,” Letourneau said during the interview, according to PEOPLE. “Back in the day, I accepted the kiss, you know. I did. He wasn’t my student when that happened. For some reason, the kiss, it seemed very right.”
Letourneau’s relationship with Faulaau began with a kiss in 1996, when she was 34 and he was just a 12-year-old sixth grade student. That kiss quickly turned into a secret sexual relationship, which only became public when her then-husband discovered a love note written to Letourneau from her student.
Following a guilty plea for felony second-degree rape of a child, Letourneau received a light sentence of only six months in jail, with three of those months suspended. After being caught having sex with Faulaau in a car, she was again arrested and sentenced to seven years in prison, eventually being released in 2004.
By the time that Faulaau was 15, Letourneau had become pregnant with his child twice. The two eventually married and raised their two daughters together, keeping out of the public eye by living in relative seclusion in Washington.
“[It] sounds young, I get it. He was young, I get it. Am I sorry that he’s the father of my children? No I’m not,” she said. “Maybe I am just naive in that area of life. Maybe it could have stayed just a kiss. I always thought, ‘What if it could have?’”
In May of 2017, after 12 years of marriage, the couple filed for divorce, filing paperwork with courts in Issaquah, Washington. The documents, filed by Faulaau, asked for a clean split of their assets. Given that neither party asked for alimony, it was suspected that the separation was a mutual agreement.
Since their split, it has been reported that they are still living together, with the two having recently been spotted near their apartment in Des Moines, Washington. No longer able to teach due to being a registered sex offender, Letourneau now works as a legal assistant. Faulaau reportedly works at a home improvement store and as a deejay.
