Mary Kay Letourneau died in the summer of 2020 when Covid-19 was still a huge issue. Yet, she didn’t pass away from that but colorectal cancer. The image of a blonde woman teacher in her 30s who looks like she could be anyone’s teacher from small-town America is what made the case one of those things the tabloids exploded. The Internet was just becoming very popular so it was common for people to e-mail it to others and the 24-hour news cycle needed something that would’ve very easily have stayed local to the Seattle area where she lived.
I mean, it wasn’t like there was a murder like the Pamela Smart case. This was just a teacher who had an affair with her student and had a child which I found out in the past few years this was something that was all too common in schools. I know I had read a few criminal cases but the predator was a man. One case was a softball umpire. Another was a police officer who also did security duty at the high school.
Yet other schools were getting in the news for women teachers having affairs with young male students. My successor at the Wagoner Tribune went into teaching and has been accused of lewd molestation of a minor female student. It’s crazy. Some people are just predators who go into education so they can be close to younger kids. But there’s a line between a teacher giving a student a hug for encouragement or sympathy for having a bad day or is the hug too much that might get the school in trouble. Some school districts did away from corporal punishment because some administrators and teachers got off on it too much.
It’s sickening, but it seems it wasn’t questioned too much until Letourneau. And it was a discussion that was long overdue. Maybe it’s because a lot of people who went through this creepy time who had enough and felt a younger generation shouldn’t have to go through it. What was once considered hazing on some sports/athletic teams is now considered sexual assault. The old dates where boys would pop the training bras of young girls are no longer acceptable. They’re even telling people that boys don’t bully or harass girls because they like them anymore. Well, some places don’t.
I remember a few times, the woman coach of my middle school P.E. class would walk into the boys room if we were too loud. There was always another male coach and sometimes we had two. But it wasn’t like we were fighting or someone needed help which would have necessitated a teacher/coach rushing to help. No, she would just walk in as boys aged 11-13 were shirtless and without pants or shorts on. We weren’t nude. But today, it would’ve resulted in her being suspended and maybe even terminated. Granted, the coach thought her shit didn’t stink. Maybe it was because she thought her then-husband was a Georgia state trooper, she could do anything, like have an affair with another educator that was all the gossip.
But the real question is where does the line be drawn? Letourneau got off easy at the beginning. She got a mere three months in prison sentence for second-degree child rape. It was six months but three months was suspended. Imagine if it was a 34-year-old man teacher and a 12-year-old girl. He would’ve gotten something that lost longer than the college football season. Unfortunately, Letourneau didn’t learn her lesson and was caught with the young student, Vili Fualauu, upon her release and went back to prison for seven and a half years. Letourneau and Fualauu got married in 2005 and divorced in 2019 but he remained in contact with her until her death.
Fualauu has spoken out against May December, a movie on Netflix that is loosely based on their marriage with some similarities, but probably enough differences to avoid any legalities. The whole student-teacher element has been eliminated. Law & Order and its spinoffs have been doing it for years. Set in the Savannah, Ga. area in 2015, it involves a popular actress Elizabeth Berry (Natalie Portman) contacting the family and spending time with them as she prepares for a indie film biopic.
Grace Atherton-Yoo (Julianne Moore) is a Savannah-area successful baker who has been married to Joe Yoo (Charles Melton) since her release from prison. They appear happily married and are preparing for the upcoming high school graduation of their fraternal twins, Mary (Elizabeth Yu) and Charlie (Gabriel Chung). They have an older daughter, Honor (Piper Curda), who is away at college. Elizabeth interviews Grace and Joe and says she will portray their story honestly and even gets closer to them. There’s a scene in which Grace applies make-up to Elizabeth you can feel the sexual tension between them.
Todd Haynes, whose directed Moore in prior movies, doesn’t shy away from portraying how manipulative and controlling Grace can be and Moore lays it on in a way that makes you hate her but also sympathize with her a little. During one scene, Grace is broken down in her bedroom crying because a special cake she made for a customer is going to go to waste. Even though they offered to pay for it, an emergency has come up, she is still to to have to junk it. But it’s so she can get the sympathy from Joe she craves.
Other scenes have her in a subtle way treating him more like one of her kids as she tells him to do things not the way a partner would say but the way a parent would. I think it’s kind of a commentary on the belief that a lot of married men just want to have an extension of their mother as a partner/spouse. It’s a commentary on the Madonna-whore complex. Later in the movie, when Joe and Grace question their relationship, Grace more or less “victim blames” saying he as a 13-year-old boy who wanted it. Just like the same interview between Letourneau and Faulauu, Grace says, “Who was the boss?” And this is how sexual predators like Grace and Letourneau function, young teenage boys all want to have sex with older women and Grace allowed Joe to have her sexually.
Grace became attracted to Joe as he was a school friend of her son, Georgie (Cory Michael Smith). Joe was working at a pet store where they were caught having sex in the back room. Both Georgie and Grace’s first husband, Tom (D.W. Moffett), still live in the area. Elizabeth talks to both of them and gets conflicting views on what they think as well as others in town. Elizabeth is surprised to know that many of the townspeople still support her business even though they more or less junk her pastries and baked goods.
It’s funny how communities will continue to support people who have done the most horrible things as long as they are considered part of the elite and prestige. As a news reporter, I’ve seen it happen. Someone from the wrong side of town or tracks gets addicted to drugs or steals a few bucks and everyone grabs their pitchforks. Someone from the nice neighborhoods commits violent and/or sexual criminal acts and it’s a “There’s two sides to every story” reaction as we’re advised not to pass judgment. It’s just like the relative in each family who’s a child molester or sexual predator and still invited to holiday dinners. Grace and Joe and their kids live in a nice house while Joe’s father lives alone in an apartment where he’s on oxygen. It’s probably another reason why Grace preyed on Joe because not many people would believe him.
Just as he did in the 2002 movie Far From Heaven, also starring Moore, Haynes paints a portrait of how people are expected to behave in a society versus how they really want to. That movie set during the 1950s is one of the rarest to really show how the conformity was tough on a lot of people as Dennis Quaid played a closeted homosexual trying to be the Ward Cleaver all expected and Dennis Haysbert and Moore’s characters had an emotional connection that was very prohibited in 1950. There might have been some attraction between the two but they both know it couldn’t happen.
And May December is the ying to that yang where a forbidden and illegal relationship becomes legal. Now, we call it grooming. But it happens a lot. And many famous people and politicians have even admitted to meeting their spouses/partners when they were teens, barely legal, or in some cases juveniles. Look at Dane Cook and Kelsi Taylor or especially Doug Hutchison and Courtney Stoddard. Patrick Dempsey’s first wife, Rocky Parker, was 26 years older. Other people such as Edward Furlong and Taran Noah Smith, of Home Improvement fame, dated older women when they were still minors. And Jerry Seinfield had a girlfriend who was underage, but since he had a hit TV show, it was something people frown about but no one really mentioned.
The performances by Portman, Moore and Melton keep this from becoming a cheesy family soap opera drama even though the final act doesn’t have the best pay-off as it should. It touches on a sensitive subject, so it’s hard to really care about a sexual predator but also wonder how Elizabeth is exploiting the story for her own gain. Being set in 2015, a crucial time before the MeToo movement went into high gear but also before Donald Trump made his announcement that he was running for President, shows just how far we’ve come within 10 years and have a long road ahead.
I feel if the movie was set in present time, it wouldn’t work as correctly. This was still something a lot of people talked about in private, behind people’s backs. The affair between Grace and Joe began in the early 1990s in the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill and Bill Clinton/Paula Jones era so the notion of any type of sexual predator who didn’t look like a scruffy dirty old man.
It’s an ok movie and even has some good scenes saved by good performances. But the Grace’s children aren’t used the best way they could have been in a story like this. But I think many people will find it hard to watch as Haynes and the writers don’t really know how to make it work the best from beginning to end.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 