Cutting all ties to Bob Huff proved more difficult.
“I think Bob's her link to Vili and she's afraid to hurt that,” Kate said.
In prison, isolated from her children, virtually ignored by her siblings, Mary Kay Letourneau saw the lawyers as her family.
“You know how you have members of your family and you might not agree with everything they've done or said, but you still accept them because they are family.”
When she heard a particular photo had appeared in a magazine that she hadn't authorized, she suspected it had been taken from her storage locker. She was both disappointed and exasperated. But she knew who was responsible.
“I kept asking them [the lawyers] for a copy of the article,” she told a friend later, “but they never sent it to me.”
They were family and she could almost forgive them.
Bob Huff maintained there had never been any theft from Mary Kay's storage locker or anywhere else. He recalled how in the summer of 1998 he and ghostwriter Bob Graham accompanied Vili to retrieve some of Mary Kay's belongings from a mini-storage unit.
“She would say Vili should make decisions, then he would go and do stuff and she'd get mad. You couldn't win with her,” he said.
According to the lawyer, Mary Kay was upset because a cheerleading photograph showing her spread-eagled in midair turned up in the media.
“She was mad because she said it was the wrong shot. It showed her in some kind of flawed position,” he said. “She told me, 'Anyone who knows anything about cheer-leading can see it… it is so obvious!' “
Chapter 75
REPORTERS LIVE AND die by the tips that come their way. On the morning of a legal conference with lawyers to discuss their next move in the lawsuit, the television reporter at the center of the legal storm got a tip that Vili Fualaau and Mary Kay Letourneau were on the front cover of the Globe. A few calls later, the grainy image from a fax machine spit out the pages from the May 5, 1998, issue.
JAILED TEACHER'S 6TH GRADE LOVER TELLS ALL!
The four-page “special report” detailed how Vili and his teacher had had sex in every room of the Letourneau home, on the deck, even on a yard swing. The boy who Bob Huff had said wanted nothing but to be left alone was blabbing about the most intimate details of his life. And his mother, who had wrung her hands with worry over the impact of the KIRO interview, was spilling her guts, too. As if she hadn't even paid attention to the sexual escapades described by her son, Soona told the world how Vili's “romance with his teacher was based on true love, not lust.”
Karen O'Leary waved the fax in front of the lawyers. She knew the law. Her estranged husband was a lawyer. So were her father and her brother. Everyone in the room was aware that the article had been of the type where money had changed hands. But just how much? They knew Soona had been paid a few thousand for the American Journal interview, but this was a bigger deal. Twenty-five thousand dollars? Fifty thousand? Maybe more?
One thing was certain. Bob Huff's lawsuit was toast.
“It was a bombshell that totally undermined their case about violating this boy's privacy, with the boy plastered all over this tabloid about losing his virginity,” Karen said later. “This was manna from heaven. It just showed the lies that was their case.”
Michelle Jarvis couldn't bear the sight of Steve Letourneau on television. She refused to watch Oprah Winfrey's talk show earlier in the year because she knew that Steve was appearing on the program. She saw him as a man whose primary purpose was to destroy his wife, to make her pay. She remembered what Mary Kay had told her he said when their battle turned ugly: “I will win.”
“He hasn't finished with her yet,” Michelle told a friend. “Every minute that he torments her he's happy. That's his motivation to go on living. She says that he's a good father. I don't know that he cares about those kids. I don't know that she does.”
If Michelle couldn't face watching Steve Letourneau on television, Kate Stewart stayed up late one night to catch Steve and his girlfriend Kelly Whalen on one of the tabloid shows that had claimed them as their “exclusive” prize.
The whole idea of Kelly appearing on TV sent Kate reeling.
“Why would she ever put her face out here? Standing by her man, like Hillary. He's going through a divorce and has a live-in lover!”
As time passed and the media frenzy continued, Steve's comments in the newspapers and appearances on television not only irritated Kate, but she felt they gave the world a true and unflattering glimpse at the man behind the woman and the boy.
“Look what he's done to his family,” she told a friend, her voice rising to stress the importance of what she had to say. “Why did he have to try his wife in the press at his children's expense? Let's have the world look at that one. That's the one thing from a religious standpoint that he's going to come down and die on that one. He could have handled it in private. They were going to. His ego couldn't take it.”