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A former student of the late Mary Kay Letourneau spoke out about the teacher’s sex scandal with student-turned-husband Vili Fualaau, revealing the impact of Letourneau’s infamous affair which made headlines in the ’90s.
“It f–ked me up for a long time,” said Caitlin Steed, who was only 12 — just like Fualaau — when she attended Shorewood Elementary School in Burien, Washington, back in 1996.
“She was a mother figure for us because she was so nurturing,” Steed revealed about Letourneau, who was a 34-year-old married mom of four at the time, in an interview with The New York Post published on Friday, January 24. “And then we had to process all of this really when we’re just learning what sex is all about.”
Letourneau’s sexual involvement with her student Fualaau, now 41, sent shockwaves when the news broke.
“What people didn’t get is that we were sad,” Steed shared, noting that “no one should have to deal with this” as an elementary school student. “We were trying to make sense of it, and we missed our teacher.”
As In Touch previously reported, Letourneau was arrested in 1997 and pleaded guilty to two counts of felony second-degree rape of a child and served three months in jail.
The ex-teacher was previously married to Steve Letourneau. The former couple shared four children together and divorced in 1999 following the arrival of her kids with Fualaau.
Letourneau gave birth to her first child with Fualaau, daughter Audrey, in May 1997.
Despite her first jail stint, Letourneau decided to remain in contact with Fualaau, which led to her original prison sentence of seven and a half years being reinstated.
Letourneau welcomed her second daughter with Fualaau, daughter Georgia, in October 1998 when she was still incarcerated. The former teacher was ultimately released in 2004.
Fualaau and Letourneau got married in 2005, but called it quits more than a decade later. Vili filed for separation in May 2017 and they officially divorced in 2019.
The following year, on July 7, 2020, Letourneau died from cancer at 58.
In a joint statement released via X, formerly Twitter, the families of Fualaau and Letourneau said they were “deeply saddened” by her death, noting they did their “very best to care” for her.
“He lost a piece of himself,” Fualaau’s friend told People in an additional statement. “He understands how f–ked up everything was in how they got together. He’s not stupid. But he can’t turn off his feelings completely, and it’s a big loss for him. He talked to her right before she passed, and they said everything they needed to say.”
“They didn’t speak every day, but she would update him on her cancer treatment,” the friend added. “At the beginning, the talk was that she was going to beat it, that even though the prognosis wasn’t good, that she’d fight with everything she had, and that she had a shot of surviving it.”
Vili now has a third daughter, Sophia, whom he welcomed in 2022.
English (US) ·