On July 7, 2020, People magazine reported that the previous day, Mary Kay Letourneau had succumbed to colon cancer:
“Mary Kay Letourneau, the Washington middle-school teacher who raped 12-year-old student Vili Fualaau and later married him, has died of stage 4 cancer, PEOPLE confirms. She was 58…. Letourneau was a sixth-grade teacher when she began the illegal relationship with Fualaau, who was then just 12 years old. Ultimately, she was sentenced to more than seven years in prison for child rape. She twice became pregnant with Fualaau’s children before he was 15, despite court orders aimed at keeping them apart.”
Other than the matter-of-fact quoting of the Letourneau and Fualaau families’ mourning the death, it was a largely unsympathetic piece and drove home the reality that Mary Kay Letourneau repeatedly raped a minor.
Except that is not how People reported it 22 years earlier.
No, the cover story on that same magazine on March 30, 1998, featured Letourneau holding the first of two children she would conceive with her student. It read: “The Teacher and the 6th Grader: Their Bizarre Story of Obsessive Love.”
And “Pregnant again after trysting with her former pupil, Mary Kay Letourneau, 36, is back in prison—and still defiant.” The picture was captioned, “Letourneau with the couple’s baby Audrey, born May 1997.”
Yes, People referred to a 36-year-old woman and a teenage boy as a “couple.”
Over and over again, as Ej Dickson meticulously reported in Rolling Stone two days after Letourneau’s death, the tabloid media reported the sexual abuse in sensationalistic or even glowing terms. Those same outlets could report disapprovingly after the fact, but they could not erase their shameless, enabling coverage two decades prior.
As with all things sex, the question then became about, well, sex. What if the roles were reversed? Would a 30-something male teacher impregnating a female junior high schooler get such a positive shake in the media? It’s doubtful.
Even today, when the media correctly note the outrageous double standard, the coverage is typically salacious. Case in point: In October 2020, when news reports broke that 33-year-old flight attendant Melissa Nosti of Sydney, Australia, was sentenced to 18 months in jail for having sex with a 15-year-old boy at a school where she worked—only to be freed on bail after just one week—it was all but impossible to find media coverage that did not feature pictures of Nosti in suggestive or otherwise compromising poses.
Indeed, it was South Park, of all shows, that picked up on the disturbing sexual double standard accepted not merely by the media, but by society at large.
In the vulgarly but accurately titled episode, “Miss Teacher Bangs a Boy,” one of the main characters, Kyle, discovers that his younger brother, Ike, is having a sexual relationship with his kindergarten teacher. Kyle runs to the police to report the abuse under the pseudonym “Brad,” and the scene plays out:
Police Sergeant: You did the right thing telling the police, Brad. Now, who is the teacher? What’s his name?
Kyle: Well, it isn’t a guy teacher. It’s a woman.
Officer No. 1: A woman?
Kyle: Yeah. She’s having sex with a boy.
Sergeant’s Partner: Oh. But, but she’s ugly, right?
Kyle: Well, no, not really. It’s the kindergarten teacher, Miss Stevenson.
Police Sergeant: The blonde?
Kyle: Yeah.
Officer No. 1: Some young boy’s having sex with Miss Stevenson?
Kyle: Yes.
Officer No. 1: Nice.
Police Sergeant: Nice.
Kyle: What?! No, you don’t understand!
Officer No. 1: Are you sure they’ve had sex?
Kyle: Yeah!
Officer No. 2: Has she performed [a sex act] on him?
Kyle: I think so.
Officer No. 2: Nice.
Officer No. 1: Niccce!
Officer No. 2: Niccccce.
Police Sergeant: So, wait, what’s the crime?
Officer No. 1: The crime is she wasn’t doin’ it with me!
(Everybody but Kyle laughs.)
Kyle: Hey! He’s totally underage! She’s taking advantage of him!
Police Sergeant: You’re right! We’re sorry. This is serious. We need to track this student down and… give him his “Luckiest Boy in America” medal right away.
(Everybody but Kyle laughs again, and Kyle runs out of the room screaming furiously.)
Worth noting: This episode first aired October 18, 2006, 14 years before Letourneau’s death, and about a decade before the #MeToo movement highlighted seemingly countless cases of sexual abuse and harassment of women, men, girls, and boys.
What a Difference a State Makes
We are still peeling back the layers of the foul-smelling onion that is the Jeffrey Epstein/Ghislaine Maxwell scandal, and the Harvey Weinstein and Ron Jeremy court cases continue to bear rotten fruit. But still underreported is how the laws governing minors having sex, undergoing abortions, and even marrying intersect in a dangerous way that can lead to covering up multiple abuses.
Although the general marriage age is set at 18 or higher in all 50 states, as of September 2020, the minimum statutory age (that is, the age when a minor might be able to marry once all legal hurdles are overcome) is only 18 in four states: Delaware, Minnesota, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, as well as American Samoa.
It is 17 in 10 states: Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Nebraska, Nevada, New York, Ohio, Oregon, and Tennessee.
It is 16 in 21 states: Alabama, Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana, Maine, Missouri, Montana, New Hampshire, North Dakota, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, and Wisconsin, as well as the District of Columbia and Guam. The Northern Mariana Islands and Puerto Rico both set it at 16 for females but 18 for males.
It is 15 in three states: Hawaii, Kansas, and Maryland.
And in two states, the minimum age is just 14: Alaska and North Carolina. The U.S. Virgin Islands set it at 14 for females but 16 for males.
In addition, 10 states have no minimum at all: California, Massachusetts, Michigan, Mississippi, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, Washington, West Virginia, and Wyoming. Circumstances for minors marrying typically require parental consent and a court hearing, but it is worth noting that in Massachusetts, common law dictates a boy as young as 14 and a girl as young as twelve could theoretically marry. In 2017, Human Rights Watch noted that in some parts of the United
States, the standard for child marriage was less strict than that of Afghanistan.
Although children of both sexes are legally married, 87% of minors married between 2000 and 2015 were girls, according to a Frontline investigation. The investigation covered 41 states, plus three major counties; at least 207,459 minors were married in those jurisdictions. Most of them were 16 or 17 years old, but among the cases surveyed, 985 children were 14; 51
were 13; and six were just 12 years old. The advocacy group Unchained at Last estimates that across the entire United States, 297,033 children were married between 2000 and 2018—some as young as 10 years old. That number includes 232,474 based on actual data, plus 64,559 based on estimates.
North Carolina, in particular, with its 14-year-old minimum age, is reportedly becoming a common destination for adults to take children when their marriages would be illegal in their home states. The International Center for Research on Women found that of the 8,781 minors listed on state marriage license applications between 2000 and 2015, 93% were marrying
an adult, as opposed to another minor.
As reported in Ms. magazine, “ICRW estimates 9,127 marriage license applications involving minors were submitted in North Carolina between 2000 and 2019. In completed marriages involving a child under age 15, 30 percent had partners that were four or five years older than them—where non-marital sex between the two would be a Class-C felony.” The legal bounds of marriage thus provide a loophole where statutory rape laws do not apply. Perhaps the most egregious case was a marriage between a 57-year-old and a 17-year-old, a four decade difference. And it was completely legal.
The number of states and territories forbidding child marriage has inched up in recent years, but not without opposition. Indeed, California, one of the aforementioned 10 states with no statutory marriage minimum, attempted to criminalize child marriage in 2017 but was blocked by legislators, the American Civil Liberties Union, and Planned Parenthood, the largest provider of abortions in the United States.
Who Will Protect Teens from Abortion?
California has set an absolute minimum age of sexual consent at 18, yet it offers no safeguards for parental consent if a minor seeks an abortion—or is coerced into one. The Golden State is also one of a handful of states that does not voluntarily report its abortion statistics to the Centers for Disease Control. As a result, the CDC’s annual abortion estimates are more than 200,000 lower than those of the Guttmacher Institute, Planned Parenthood’s former research arm, whose figures are
generally respected on both sides of the abortion divide.
Predictably, Planned Parenthood and other abortion clinics are wary of being transparent about minors consenting to abortion, since it cuts into their business. In 2020, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against the state of Louisiana in June Medical Services, LLC v. Russo. Louisiana had attempted to impose numerous medical regulations on abortion clinics, but the high court felt the state imposed an undue burden on the ability of a woman—or girl—to receive an abortion. Dozens of girls under the age of 17, the minimum age of sexual consent in Louisiana, received abortions, but state clinics did not note this and thus did not report possible statutory rape charges. The Louisiana attorney general’s office said the state’s abortion clinics have a disturbing pattern of failing to report rapes and that a survey it conducted showed that between 2013 and 2018, at least 66 abortions were performed on girls 11, 12, or 13 years old. Using Guttmacher’s own reporting, about 30,000
minors receive abortions in the United States nationwide. (This does not include teens using fake IDs or abortions induced illegally by traffickers.)
In light of these grim statistics, we must ask: Why? Why are children so often bearing the brunt of adults’ neglect, or worse, outright malice? Marriage, sex, and childbearing are adult responsibilities best left for actual adults, not teens and preteens. It is incumbent upon parents and other guardians to instill responsibility in our children before they reach maturity to make such important decisions, but where the law applies, it should reflect today’s standards of maturity and adulthood—and
protect the most vulnerable accordingly.