Mary Kay Letourneau, a notorious parenting teacher, hurt her students when she was caught abusing one of her sixth grade classmates.
“It nurtured me for a long time,” said Caitlin Steed, a 12-year-old at Shorewood Elementary School in Burien, Wash., in 1996.
“She was a mother figure to us because she was so nurturing,” Steed, a 34-year-old married mother of four at the time, told the Letourneau Post. “And I really had to process everything, just learning what sex is.
“I think a lot of us ended up in counseling,” said Steed, now 41. “She literally ruined the whole sixth grade class.”
Letourneau began sexually abusing Willi when he was her 12-year-old student, and the pair first got involved in a minivan. She was ultimately sentenced to over seven years in prison for child rape.
Along the way, she became pregnant twice by Fualaau by the time she was 15, despite multiple court orders aimed at keeping it that way. The pair had two daughters.
As the incident grew into an international scandal, students at the school had to deal with news trucks in the parking lot and almost daily articles in the newspaper.
“What people didn’t get is that we were sad,” Steed said. “We were trying to figure it out, and we missed the teacher.”
By the time Letourneau was released from prison, the pair had two daughters, Fualaau, 21, and he petitioned the court to allow them to see each other. The restraining order against Letourneau was removed and the couple married in 2005. They settled in Washington and raised daughters Audrey and Georgia.
The marriage lasted until 2017, when Fualaau filed for official separation. The couple remained a friendly co-op until his death from cancer in 2020.
Fualaau, now 41, rarely speaks about his infamous wife. Their young daughter, Georgia, had a baby last year and made him a grandfather. Audrey is currently pregnant.
As a similar incident emerged in New Jersey, where teacher Laura Caron allegedly impregnated a 13-year-old student, Letourneau's former students say the memories of their ordeal are still too fresh. Ta.
“It's always Deja Vu,” Steed said. “I think this is going to happen, and I'm like 'those poor kids.' No one should have to deal with this in elementary school. ”
