Vili Fualaau, the student Mary Kay Letourneau raped, gave cancer-stricken ex-teacher ‘24-hour care’ after their divorce
MARY Kay Letourneau was reportedly given 24-hour cancer care by her former student and ex-husband Vili Fualaau before she died.
The ex-Seattle middle school teacher had sex with Fualaau, who was her sixth-grade student in 1996, before they married, had kids together, and divorced last year.
On Tuesday, Letourneau's attorney David Gehrke said Letourneau died surrounded by family after her secret nine-month battle with stage four colon cancer, reports say.
The lawyer told reporters Fualaau had been by her side every hour of the day in the hospice for the past month, providing round-the-clock care, before she died sometime on Monday.
"Evidence[d] by him coming back up here and being with her and by her side almost non stop for the last couple of months, they still obviously loved each other, and she would’ve done the same for him if he was the one who had cancer," Gehrke told Q13 News.
Sources told People Letourneau experienced severe weight loss and exhaustion in the final months of her life.
Letourneau, 58, made global headlines in the '90s at the age of 34 when it was discovered she'd been bedding her 12-year-old student Fualaau.
LOVE AND MARRIAGE
At the time, he was a troubled Samoan boy from a broken home living in a rough part of the Emerald City in Washington state.
Fualaau had a difficult relationship with his mother and his dad had done time for armed robbery.
After his teacher's conviction and imprisonment, Letourneau married Fualaau in 2005, he filed for a separation on May 9, 2017, and the couple divorced last August.
Letourneau was married with four kids when they first met in her second grade class in 1992 and began a sexual relationship with the child four years later.
They enrolled in summer classes together in the summer of 1996 and went out for dinner one day after class.
In 2018, Fualaau recalled this was the night he asked to kiss Letourneau in her car and she allowed him to do so.
DENIAL
That summer, they had sex for the first time when her husband, Steve Letourneau, was away.
Police found them together in a minivan parked at the Des Moines Marina at about 1:20 am on June 19, 1996.
Letourneau jumped into the front seat as officers approached them and Fualaau pretended to be asleep.
They denied any "touching," provided false names, and Letourneau said Fualaau was 18.
Letourneau took the boy away in her van while she babysat him once day after a fight with her husband but no action was taken at the police station.
DISCOVERY
But in February, 1997, Steve Letourneau found love letters between them before confronting Fualaau and demanding he end the relationship or he would tell his parents.
But Steve's relative informed the school authorities and police arrested Letourneau on statutory rape charges.
Steve later filed for divorce, received full custody of their four children and moved to Alaska.
Letourneau was sentenced to three months in jail in a November 1997 plea agreement in which she agreed not to contact Fualaau – but she was pregnant with his child at the time.
Letourneau was paroled in 1998 and later found having sex in a car with Fualaau on February 3 that year.
SENTENCING
Her plea agreement was then revoked and she was sentenced to seven years behind bars on second-degree child rape charges, where she gave birth to Fualaau's second child; he hadn't even turned 15 yet.
Fualaau petitioned in court for a judge to remove the no-contact order after her release and the restraining order against Letourneau was dropped.
But she had to remain a registered sex offender in Washington state.
Letourneau and Fualaau tied the knot in 2005 and were married for 12 years, until Fualaau filed for divorce three years ago.
The split was finalized in February 2019 so Letourneau and Fualaau began living apart.
In 2018, Letourneau likened the coverage of their relationship to "media carnage," "road kill," and "blood" on the A&E special "Autobiography."
MOST READ IN NEWS
The disgraced teacher also claimed she wasn't aware it was illegal to bed a child at the time.
Fualaau revealed "the age difference, all of that stuff wasn't going through my mind" during a 2018 interview.
He also told the program how difficult it was raising two kids as a single teen and how it resulted in dropping out of school, depression and alcoholism, saying "I'm surprised I'm still alive today.
