by Gregg Olsen
“I don't think I've signed away my rights,” she told Kate, who passed along the information.
After that Chicago visit, things improved considerably. Mary called James Kent “fifteen or twenty” times.
Bob Graham and the Fixot project be damned. It didn't seem to matter, not when the BBC had Mary Kay Letourneau calling the shots from prison herself—or so James Kent had believed. But just as others found out, with the Mary Kay Letourneau story, nothing lasts forever.
Bob Graham employed tabloid tactics to ensure that his story was protected. James Kent was appalled when he learned that the ghostwriter had told principals in the Letourneau story that Inside Story was tabloid trash akin to Inside Edition. Nothing could be further from the truth. Inside Story was a documentary series of which there was probably no American counterpart in terms of quality. It got back to him that Bob Graham had told sources that the BBC “did hatchet jobs” on people.
Another time, James Kent received a disturbing call from the author.
“I did receive a very threatening phone call from him, telling me that I had gone around telling interviewees that it was all right for them to talk to me, the BBC, because Laffont had no objections. I never told one interviewee that. He said if that continued, he'd sue me and the BBC.”
At the same time, Bob Graham made it clear that he—not Mary—was running the show.
Mary Letourneau kept James Kent and the BBC on a string for as long as she could. No one could confirm her motives, other than that she wanted to keep her options open; she wanted to control something in which she could not fully participate. But she pulled back, away from the one producer who seemed sympathetic and genuinely concerned about her.
“That was to me a broken promise,” he said.
Something else crossed James Kent's mind. He wondered if the love affair had run its course and that was the real reason for Mary Kay's silence, and indeed the silence of others close to the case. Maybe people were keeping mum because Vili Fualaau was no longer pining for his teacher, the mother of one baby, with another on the way.
If Vili Fualaau has already found someone else, it is a bit of a mockery, isn't it? It undermines Mary Kay's case that there was a deep and meaningful love relationship, James Kent thought.
The manner in which those closest to Mary Kay doled out their attentions made many feel they were doing reporters and producers a personal favor by even entertaining the possibility of an interview. The distrust and animosity from those who were speaking on Mary Kay's behalf was uncalled for and undoubtedly detrimental to her position.
“You are so lucky! The BBC is so lucky! You are going to get the chance to speak to Mary Kay Letourneau.”
“Mary Kay needs the media more than the media needs Mary Kay,” James Kent said later. “This is something her attorneys fail to recognize, apart from David. She's the one in jail. No one seems interested in getting her out.”
Chapter 79
A FUNNY THING had happened to Mary Kay Letourneau on the way to prison. She had become the center of a freak show, Globe's favorite cover girl, an editor's antidote for flagging sales, a producer's favorite incarcerated “Get.” Mary Kay Letourneau went from person to property. Moneymaker. All she had wanted to do was get her message out. Bipolar or not, she wanted the world to know that she loved a boy and he returned that love. No matter what people thought the story was, she said, it was about two families and it was about love. She was hopeful that the French book would change the way some viewed her.
Lawyers Bob Huff and David Gehrke had repeatedly insisted Paris-based Fixot was a publishing company without peer in the entire world and there'd be no selling Mary Kay's story short. Bob Graham, they also said, was the right writer for the job of taking her words and formatting them into a book. But when the ghostwriter left the women's prison after a pair of interviews in 1998, she had been left holding the bag.
“I remember when Bob Graham was leaving and I told him,” she told a friend later, “ 'we haven't touched on a big part of the story.' ” According to Mary Kay, he never returned.
Mary Kay recalled how her biographer said he didn't feel she “trusted” him enough. It was true that she did have an uncomfortable feeling about the writer, but the publisher chose him. She'd had no choice. There had been no interview to see if he was compatible or even if he was a writer worthy of her story from a literary point of view.
“I was reluctant,” she said. “I have to follow my heart on some things, and I have a good sense about people… and I didn't feel good about Bob Graham from the beginning.”
As the weeks passed, Mary Kay's pregnancy brought a fullness to the gaunt features seen when she was arrested in January. Mary Kay told friends she was grateful for the baby. The pregnancy was a diversion from her own troubles as she waited for the writer to return. She had ideas; things that she wanted to say.
The summer ran into the fall, and an upbeat Mary Kay told other prisoners that she would be getting out just after the baby came. She'd be given a pardon or a trial. Something would free her. She saw that something as the French memoir.
As the due date of her second baby with Vili grew closer, Mary Kay began to worry and maybe even accept that freedom wouldn't come as quickly as hoped. She was suspicious that her stubble-bearded lawyer Bob Huff was not forthcoming about the French book and its publication schedule. When the lawyer visited her a day or two before leaving Seattle for Paris in the fall of 1998, Mary Kay would later say he was evasive. He told her he was thinking about going to France to determine what was going on with the book. His remarks were so casual, so off-handed. What he didn't tell her was that the book was already finished, and he had a copy.
“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
VILI 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 ni
ghts 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.”
