May December is now available to stream (on Sky Cinema in the UK and on Netflix in the US), which means many viewers will be wondering if this is a real story.
Todd Haynes's latest work is a fictional movie, but it has a very real (and scandalous) true story at its centre.
The movie follows Elizabeth Berry (Natalie Portman), a famous actress who decides to follow the real person behind her next on-screen part. That means bursting into the lives of Gracie and Joe Atherton-Yoo (Julianne Moore and Charles Melton), a married couple whose relationship started buried in scandal — he was 13 and she was 36.
Some will find their story rather familiar, since it takes inspiration from the real-life case of Mary Kay Letourneau and Vili Fualaau.
Director Todd Haynes told The Hollywood Reporter that even if he kept away from the real story at the beginning, "there were times when it became very, very helpful to get very specific about the research and we learned things from that relationship, even in the ways that it differed from the relationship between Gracie and Joe in our film."
If you are curious to know more about this story, here's what happened.
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May December true story: Who was Mary Kay Letourneau?
The '90s tabloids hit the jackpot when Mary Kay Letourneau's story came to light in 1996.
Originally Mary Kay Schmitz, she met her first husband, Steve Letourneau, while attending Arizona State University. They had four children over the years and moved to Seattle's suburbs.
In 1989, she started working as a teacher at Shorewood Elementary School, where she first met Vili Fualaau, as he was one of her students in second grade.
Over the next few years, Letourneau was impressed with Fualaau's "extraordinary artistic ability", and she introduced him to the piano, bought him art supplies and they even visited museums together.
"There was a respect, an insight, a spirit, an understanding between us that grew over time," she later said to The Seattle Times in 1997.
"There was a bonding that was pretty instantaneous. It was the kind of feeling you have with a brother or sister – a feeling that they're part of your life forever. But I didn't know what it meant. I felt that one day he might marry my daughter."
Their teacher-student relationship evolved into a friendship. "He was my best friend. We just walked together in the same rhythm," she said.
In the summer of 1996, when Fualaau turned 13 and Letourneau's life was a bit of a mess (she had a miscarriage, her father had terminal cancer and her marriage was going through a rough patch), they started having sexual encounters.
When Mary Kay's husband Steve Letourneau found love letters she had written to her student in February 1997, it was a matter of time before their secret affair was exposed. But it wasn't Steve who sounded the alarm, but a relative he had informed of his findings, who notified Child Protective Services.
In March 1997, Letourneau was arrested for child rape.
At that moment, it was also revealed she was six months pregnant with Fualaau's child. She gave birth in May, right before the trials and her imprisonment.
Letourneau pled guilty to two counts of child rape and was sentenced to seven-and-a-half years in prison. However, she was offered a six-month sentence on the condition that she "enter a treatment program for sex offenders, take medication for her bipolar disorder and have no contact with Fualaau" (via People.)
Apparently, she did none of that.
She stopped taking the medication as soon as she was released from prison on January 2, 1998, and she rejected any help from her therapist. Additionally, she started seeing Fualaau again the next month.
During one of their encounters, she got pregnant again. She was immediately sent back to prison, where she gave birth to their second daughter in October 1998.
After all that prison time, the couple wanted to stay together, so they ended up marrying after Letourneau was released in August 2004 and all legal matters were sorted. Fualaau was 21 at the time.
Where are Mary Kay Letourneau and Vili Fualaau now?
The couple were married for twelve years and raised two children together.
They openly offered details about their relationship on a couple of occasions – a 20/20 interview with Barbara Walters in April 2015, and A&E's 2018 documentary Mary Kay Letourneau: Autobiography.
However, their marriage ended when Fualaau filed for divorce in May 2017.
"They've been having issues for a while now," a source close to the couple told People. "They tried to work through them, but it didn’t work. They’re still committed to being good parents to their children."
On July 6, 2020, Letourneau died of colon cancer at age 58.
Fualaau has kept his life private from the public eye since then. He became a father again in November 2022, when he welcomed his third daughter with a new partner.
Now, with May December coming to Netflix in the US and Sky Cinema in the UK, their story is being rediscovered by audiences, although the movie's team wants to make clear this is not a faithful adaptation of their relationship.
"Certainly that’s the seed of it, the big picture thing, but it was important to me that this wasn’t the Mary Kay Letourneau story," writer Samy Burch told The Hollywood Reporter at the film’s Los Angeles premiere in November 2023.
"It wasn't the same details – I certainly don’t want anyone to assume that we're trying to say all these conversations happened behind closed doors, it's not. This was just a jumping off point and a way that something like this made sense to me emotionally," added Burch.
Director Todd Haynes added that May December is more than the true story that inspired it, with '90s tabloid culture being a big focus of the movie. "It’s about the way that we look at ourselves as stories are told and we navigate and question our expectations and moral positions that we bring to the stories we watch."
May December is now available to watch on Netflix US, and on Sky Cinema in the UK.
Readers who are affected by the issues raised in this story are encouraged to contact the NSPCC on 0808 800 5000 (www.nspcc.org.uk). Readers in the US are encouraged to contact the Childhelp National Child Abuse Hotline on (1-800-422-4453) or the American SPCC (www.americanspcc.org).
Mireia (she/her) has been working as a movie and TV journalist for over eight years. Based in the UK, she is a former deputy movies editor at Digital Spy, and previously worked for the Spanish magazine Fotogramas. Mireia's work has been published in other outlets such as Esquire and Elle in Spain, and WeLoveCinema and GamesRadar+ in the UK. She is also a published author, having written the essay Biblioteca Studio Ghibli: Nicky, la aprendiz de bruja about Hayao Miyazaki's Kiki's Delivery Service.
During her years as a freelance journalist and film critic, Mireia has covered festivals around the world and has interviewed high-profile talents such as Kristen Stewart, Ryan Gosling, Jake Gyllenhaal and many more. She's also taken part in juries such as the FIPRESCI jury at Venice Film Festival and the short film jury at Kingston International Film Festival in London. LinkedIn
