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Mary Kay Letourneau Details How Affair With Vili Fualaau Began

Mary Kay Letourneau Details How Affair With Vili Fualaau Started
Mary Kay Letourneau detailed to Barbara Walters on 20/20, how her affair with her former middle school student-turned-husband Vili Fualaau began; plus, he opened up about struggling with depression while she was in prison.

More from Mary Kay Letourneau. The former teacher, who served a prison sentence for having an affair with her then-sixth-grade student Vili Fualaau, detailed her illicit affair with the man she now calls her husband in her Friday, April 10, interview with Barbara Walters on 20/20.

"The incident was a late night that it didn't stop with a kiss," Letourneau, now 53, claimed. "And I thought that it would and it didn't."

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Per ABC News, Letourneau's close interaction with Fualaau — they first met when she taught him as a second grader — started in her sixth grade classroom, when she saw that the 12-year-old had a knack for drawing. By the time summer vacation in 1996 rolled in, she and Fualaau were having a full-fledged affair.

When the new school year began, Letourneau was pregnant with Fualaau's child. In January 1997, Letourneau's husband found a love letter penned by his wife to Fualaau, which led to her arrest. She pleaded guilty to two counts of second-degree rape of a child.

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Walters posed the hard-hitting question of whether Letourneau ever felt disgusted with herself for having an affair with her student while she was a 34-year-old married mother of four. "I loved him very much," Letourneau told Walters. "And I kind of thought, 'Why can't it ever just be a kiss?'"

In the well-documented story, Letourneau gave birth to the couple's first daughter, Audrey, in 1997. She then violated her parole and was sentenced to prison, where she welcomed their second child, Georgia, from behind bars in 1998. The parents introduced their teen girls, ages 17 and 16, to the world during their sit-down with Walters on Friday.

"They seemed to already know [about the affair]," she told Walters of her girls. "Because they grew up with it… There's just never been a 'Wow, we better explain.'"

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Meanwhile, Fualaau's journey was equally marred with rough patches. "I went through a really dark time," he noted. The father of two — who grew up in an impoverished single-parent home — revealed that he had battled depression for many years and IS "surprised I'm still alive today."

In fact, he felt downright isolated at times. "I don’t even think the counselors knew how to deal with it. It was just weird," Fualaau, now 31, recalled. "I was like, ‘Why do I need to be on an antidepressant pill?’ And they said it was to level you out so they can have a conversation with you… It just kind of just really annoyed me through the years."

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As for his family and friends? "I don’t feel like I had the right support, the right help behind me … from my family, from anyone, in general," he noted. "I mean, my friends couldn't help me because they had no idea what it was like to be a parent, I mean, because we were all 14, 15."

The only person he could talk to at the time was Letourneau, whom he was forbidden to visit in prison. "I mean, if they gave me more options or choices to make, instead of just saying, ‘Oh, you can’t talk to her anymore,’" he reflected. "And I was like, ‘I really do want to talk to her, though.'"

The two are about to now celebrate their 10th wedding anniversary. The family's interview with Barbara Walters airs Friday, April 10, on ABC's 20/20.

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