Having no such constraints, Fualaau, now 21, had already met his public. In New York City for a Today show appearance on Aug. 5, he made a grand entrance at the trendy nightspot Suede. Arriving with friends at 12:30 a.m., according to a club source, Fualaau asked to be seated in the VIP area with Ricky Martin, 'N Sync's Joey Fatone and actress Gabrielle Union. "He got more attention than any of those people," the source said. "He was enjoying it." Fualaau ran up a $400 tab, paid in cash and left in high spirits, summoning the club's owner at 3:30 a.m. "He said, 'Get my people, I want to leave,'" says the source. "The kid was being kind of a diva."
Back in Seattle the next day, a superior court judge granted Fualaau's request to lift a 1997 court order forbidding the couple from seeing one another. As of Aug. 10, they had not seen each other face-to-face. But a reunion is not only inevitable; it's a reality show waiting to happen. Is their love, as Fualaau told Today's Matt Lauer, "a nonstop moving thing, like air...forever"? How will the couple's daughters Audrey, 7, and Alexis, 5, react—and who gets custody of them? (For now they're in the custody of Fualaau's mother, Soona, in Des Moines, Wash.) "Everything in this case is for sale," says Letourneau's friend, Seattle lawyer Anne Bremner. "The circus continues."
The Washington State Corrections Center for Women did its best to avoid that. On Aug. 4 officials used several blonde decoys to fool media awaiting Letourneau's release. Later that day Letourneau registered at Seattle's King County sheriff's office as a Level Two sex offender, rated "likely to re-offend." Though pleased to be on the outside, she misses her prison pals. "She was a bit teary-eyed when we talked about friends she left behind, some for life," says Dress, 38, a convicted forger. But Letourneau's chief concern, Dress says, was for any trauma she has caused her six kids (four, ages 10 to 19, live in Alaska with her ex-husband Steve and visited her in prison). "She wants to make things right for them. They've been through a lot."
So have all the players in this grand drama of dysfunction. "Everyone is pushing for this Romeo and Juliet saga," says Gregg Olsen, author of If Loving You Is Wrong, a case history, "but that didn't exactly end well, did it?" And if it doesn't? "Mary," predicts Dress, "will hold her head high and come out on top."
Richard Jerome. Ken Lee, Melissa Schorr and Stacey Wilson in Seattle, Mark Dagostino in New York City and Lorenzo Benet in Los Angeles
- Contributors:
- Ken Lee,
- Melissa Schorr,
- Stacey Wilson,
- Mark Dagostino,
- Lorenzo Benet.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
