Mary Kay Letourneau, a one-time teacher who became a tabloid fixture in the late 1990s after she raped a 13-year-old student and later married him after serving a prison sentence, died on Monday near Seattle. She was 58.
Her lawyer, David Gehrke, said she died of cancer. He said she had died at home surrounded by her children and Vili Fualaau, the former student she later married.
Ms. Letourneau and Mr. Fualaau had two children together before he turned 15. They both defended the relationship as consensual, and the couple married in 2005 after she had served a seven-year prison term.
She was widely condemned for her predatory behavior toward the child, but many people long held a fascination with their relationship, which continued well into Mr. Fualaau’s adulthood. The couple split in 2019.
Ms. Letourneau was a teacher in the Highline School District, near Seattle, where she taught Mr. Fualaau in the second and sixth grades. She was 34 when she began a sexual relationship with Mr. Fualaau in 1996, when he was 12 or 13.
They had their first child in 1997 as she awaited sentencing after pleading guilty to charges of second-degree child rape. After serving three months of a reduced sentence in prison, she defied court orders to stay away from Mr. Fualaau, leading to her return to prison for a seven-year sentence. She gave birth to their second child in 1998, shortly after beginning her second stint in prison.
That year, they co-wrote a book they titled “Un Seul Crime, L’Amour,” or “Only One Crime, Love.” Mr. Fualaau has maintained in recent years that he did not consider her abusive.
Upon her release from prison in 2004, Ms. Letourneau was required to have no contact with Mr. Fualaau, then 21. But he fought to have the order removed, and the couple married in 2005.
She had consistently portrayed the relationship as a forbidden love.
“Am I sorry he’s the father of my children, and that we’re married and this is the man of my life? No, I am not,” she said in an A&E documentary in 2018.
Ms. Letourneau, born in Tustin, Calif., attended Arizona State University, where she met Steve Letourneau, her first husband. The couple had four children together and divorced in 1999, while she was in prison.
Her father, John Schmitz, was an ultraconservative U.S. representative who ran for president in 1972 as a member of the American Independent Party. One of her brothers, Joseph E. Schmitz, was the inspector general of the Department of Defense, an executive at Blackwater Worldwide and a one-time foreign policy adviser for President Trump. Another brother, John P. Schmitz, was a deputy counsel to President George H. W. Bush.
Anne Bremner, a lawyer who was a friend of Ms. Letourneau for nearly 20 years, said that as she neared death, Ms. Letourneau hoped that people would be able to see her as someone who had served her time and gone on to raise two daughters with Mr. Fualaau and to have a positive impact on the people around her.
“She was always a really good person,” Ms. Bremner said. “She was always a really good friend.”
Mr. Fualaau said in the A&E documentary that “at the end of the day, it was a real love story.”
But, he added: “A lot of things that should have gone through my mind at the time weren’t going through my mind.”
Mike Baker contributed reporting.
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