According to what Sharon told Nadine, the friend said the boy “ 'didn't have to pay any attention to anyone about his schoolwork, it doesn't mean nothing. You don't have to do it.' He was failing! Steven sent him to summer school. She was a teacher giving him this kind of advice!”
After that, Steve pulled the plug on the AOL address for his son.
And as mad as she was at Mary Kay, Michelle, like Kate, didn't give up on the idea that a new lawyer could fix the mess that David Gehrke had made of everything by the guilty plea and the acceptance of the sexual deviancy program. She drove up from Costa Mesa to Orange one Sunday morning and met with one of the lawyers who had defended one of the Los Angeles police officers involved in the Rodney King beating. Michelle gave the lawyer a list of legal concerns compiled by Mary Kay while in jail. He seemed impressed and saw potential in an appeal. The lawyer told Michelle to have Mary Kay call him. But she never did.
“It was apparent after she didn't get in touch with him that she was not going to listen to good advice. She was determined to do it her own way. He didn't want to waste his time with an uncooperative, high-profile client.”
A referral to a constitutional law specialist reviewing the case brought the same results. Mary Kay Letourneau didn't call him back, either.
Though thousands of miles from Seattle, Tony Hollick continued to be a major player in the Mary Kay Letourneau saga. He e-mailed the day and night away and spent countless hours on the telephone with the zeal of a true believer. He was so persuasive in his arguments, so damn charming and convincing, that whatever he said was rarely challenged by Mary Kay and her close friends. And because he was so staunch, the fact that he also was in love with Mary Kay was somehow overlooked. He held power. Even Tony's assertion of a far-reaching conspiracy rooted in hatred for sixty-seven-year-old John Schmitz and his political beliefs, which stripped Mary Kay of her constitutional rights, was accepted by the inner circle.
Only Michelle Jarvis began to have doubts.
“When I'd pin him to the wall—'Tony, send me an e-mail with the exact issues regarding the Constitution'—he never could do it. He kept pleading Constitution, conspiracy, and Constitution. 'Send me precise information that I can use with an attorney.' He never came up with it. And Mary Kay was hanging on that as a lifeline in her thread of hope that she'd be able to fight this thing and it never came true.”
Tony had convinced Michelle, Abby Campbell, and even Mary Kay that their phones were tapped, cars were bugged, or that people were following them.
“Be careful what you say on the phone,” he'd tell them.
Perhaps Tony's greatest influence was his suggestion that the antidepressant Depakote would min Mary Kay's creative vitality. It would crush her like a cracker. She should not take it. It was part of the conspiracy, part of why she was more a political prisoner for daring to love beyond the limits of society.
Free Mary Kay. Do not take the drugs. It is a conspiracy. Mary Kay, listen!
Outside of a paid appearance by Soona (“I'm a very private person”) Fualaau on American Journal in November, the gravy train the lawyers had sought hadn't come through. Even Mary Kay was disappointed; she wanted an A-list star to play her in a movie, but even a sitcom actress looking to stretch her acting abilities didn't seem as certain as it had. Bob Huff was having a hard time with his negotiations with publishers. According to David Gehrke, publishers said they liked the story of the teacher and the student, but the ending left them flat. There was also something else at work. Some publishers felt a little squeamish over the idea of a grown woman in a sexual relationship with a young boy. That fall a new version of Lolita was in the news, too. It was a critical success in Europe, but American distributors were reluctant to touch it because its content suggested to some a kind of acceptance of the sexual exploitation of a child.
Mary Kay and Vili had wanted the story sold as a love story, not a woman-in-jeopardy or a true-crime shocker. If it was a love story, how could it be written so that it would have a happy ending?
Chapter 66
IN THE FIRST week of January 1998, Mary Kay Letourneau was released from jail. She moved into a spare room at the Seward Park home of former Shorewood Elementary colleague Beth Adair. She was angry that she couldn't see her children, still exiled in Alaska and out of her reach for at least another court-ordered six months. “I don't care what anyone says, I will see my children.” Jacqueline had turned five years old the week before her mother's release. The little blonde, like her three Letourneau siblings, had been without her mom since the spring. Mary Kay was also burdened and upset by a no-contact order with Vili and his mother; and visits with Audrey had to be supervised by a third party. To those who had not seen her for a while, the photograph taken for the registered sex offender's leaflet to hand out to neighbors would have been shocking. Mary Kay wore a teenager's zippered sweatshirt, baggy pants, and T-shirt two sizes too big. Her hair was pinned in back, but unkempt and disheveled. She looked lost and bewildered.