But it wasn't so cut-and-dried.
“In some states she'd have done a hundred months per each act. In Wisconsin,” he said, “I think she'd be doing twenty years.”
The letter angered Michelle Jarvis. She called it “scathing” in its tone and content.
How does he presume to know what advice I'm giving her? she wondered.
“Dump him,” Michelle had told her friend when the lawyer first pushed the sex deviancy treatment as her only option. “I don't think he's doing well for you.”
“I have no choice,” Mary Kay told her.
“Who's telling you don't have choices?”
“David.”
“You need another attorney and you need other options.”
If not SSOSA, what could be the way out of the nightmare? Michelle discussed the ramifications of Mary Kay saying she was mentally incompetent when she offered her plea.
“You were not able to understand what the plea meant at that time,” Michelle said, trying it on.
“No,” Mary Kay said. “I will not tell people that I was not all there mentally.”
The SSOSA program was designed for degenerates, not Mary Kay, and Michelle couldn't bear the thought of how her friend would fare with the program for three court-mandated years. It was brutal.
“He didn't give her any other options. This is the only way you are going to stay out of jail. You plead guilty, you take the lie detector, you go to SSOSA, you tell them what they want, you see the therapist once a week, and take your drugs. What he didn't tell her was that going to SSOSA was worse than prison to her. How do you tell your family and kids that you're a sex offender? She'd rather cut off her arm.”
Treatment was for pedophiles and baby-rapers, not a schoolteacher in love with one of her students. Mary Kay thought she was misunderstood by a legal system that did not have insight into her heart. She told friends like Michelle Jarvis that once in a program, she was certain the so-called counselors would see the truth—there had been no victim. She was hopeful they'd modify treatment for someone who didn't belong there.
“Certainly,” Mary Kay admitted later, “I don't deny that there are dangerous people who violate other people. Is there really a place for them in this society? You have a disorder and you cannot be cured. We can help you control your impulsive behavior. But you cannot be cured.”
They wanted her to tell her children that she was a child molester. Mary Kay refused. She wouldn't do it. She worried that by doing so, she'd alter their understanding of what had really happened between their mother and Vili.
“How can you take a child's perception of reality and abuse it? I would lay down my life,” she said, “before I ever said those things to my children.”
The groupies blamed David and David blamed the groupies. He saw them as enablers who told Mary Letourneau what she wanted to hear—not what she needed to hear.
“If your friend comes to you with a horrible haircut, you don't say it's terrible. That's what they were doing with Mary. It takes a special friend to draw the line between commiserating with someone to 'Shut the fuck up, you got a bad haircut, it will grow back.' A real friend has to say, 'Get a grip.' “
David considered the Seattle ones gofers. The intellectual power and support came from Kate Stewart in Chicago and Michelle Jarvis in Costa Mesa.
“They're the ones whose opinions really mattered,” he said later. “Abby Campbell saying something meant nothing to Mary.”
When Kate told Mary that she understood how Steve had been a jerk, how unhappy she'd been all these years, and how alive she felt since she found Vili, it validated Mary's feelings.
“They didn't say, 'Gee, Mary, I don't care if you love him or not. He's a kid. He's your student. You're married. Get a grip.' “
The embattled lawyer thought that Mary Kay could have been brought back to reality if only Kate and Michelle had stepped in and told her that she couldn't love Vili. It was not going to work. It was going to mean the kind of trouble that would ruin her life. But they didn't.
It was hard for Mary Kay to get through to her children sequestered up in Anchorage, though she continued to try. Steve had done a good job of keeping Stevie, Jr., and Mary Claire away from the telephone whenever it rang. On a few occasions, the timing would be just so, and mother and the two oldest children would get a chance to talk. Their conversations were drenched in emotion and sometimes ended with a sudden click of the receiver.
Mary Kay's friends phoned too, trying to pass along messages of love from their mother, but Steve put a stop to those, too. One of the friends pulled an end run and contacted Stevie, Jr., through his e-mail account on America Online.