Mary Kay Letourneau and the true story that inspired 'May December'

"May December" is a term for a relationship where one partner is significantly older than the other.

It's also the title of a new Netflix film starring Julianne Moore and Natalie Portman, and directed by Todd Haynes. "May December" follows actor Elizabeth Berry (Portman) as she travels to Savannah, Georgia to research her role as Gracie Atherton-Yoo (Moore) in an independent film.

Gracie became a tabloid fixture 20 years earlier after she was caught having sex with her 13-year-old co-worker, Joe Yoo (Charles Melton), who was her son's best friend at the time.

Elizabeth begins interviewing those in Gracie's circle over the course of the week — including her now husband Joe, their three children, and her ex husband — to help her portray Gracie as accurately as possible.

Director Todd Haynes says the film is loosely based off of the story of Mary Kay Letourneau, a teacher who was convicted of raping a 12-year-old student, Vili Fualaau, whom she later married and had two daughters with. Letourneau and Fualaau divorced in 2019, a year before her death.

"When Julianne and I were talking a lot about ... Gracie and Elizabeth and their dynamic, we were wondering how this could have happened — this relationship," Haynes tells TODAY.com. "Looking back at Mary Kay Letourneau’s story and interviews really were of concrete help in trying to formulate that backstory, and Julianne really led that process."

Haynes was also inspired by other movies when creating "May December," including "The Graduate."

While "May December" is a fictional story and has different characters, here's more about Letourneau's story.

Who is Mary Kay Letourneau?

Letourneau worked as a teacher in the Seattle area in 1996 when she was 34 years old, according to NBC's "Dateline." At the time, she was married to Steve Letourneau and had four children.

In the summer of 1996, police found Letourneau in a parked minivan with her sixth grade student, Vili Fualaau, around 1:20 a.m., according to the Associated Press.

Police questioned Letourneau and she told them she was babysitting Fualaau, who was 12 at the time. She also told officers there had not been any "touching" in the vehicle, according to the AP.

NBC's "Dateline" reported Letourneau's husband suspected "something illicit" occurred, and that one of his relatives tipped off the authorities. But by the time Letourneau was arrested in 1997, she was pregnant with Fualaau's child.

Fualaau said on NBC's "Dateline" he initiated their relationship: "I wanted her. So I wasn’t gonna stop." In the same interview, Letourneau said she didn't think what she was doing at the time would be illegal, and that she was most worried about what Fualaau's mother would think.

Letourneau only got to spend a couple of months with their daughter Audrey before she pleaded guilty to child rape and was sentenced to seven and a half years in prison, according to the Associated Press.

Letourneau served five months in prison before she was released on probation, contingent on her attending counseling and staying away from Fualaau, according to NBC's "Dateline."

"It was wrong and I am sorry. I give you my word, it won’t happen again," she said in court at the time.

But less than a month after Letourneau was released, police caught her and then 14-year-old Fualaau together in a car at 3 a.m., according to NBC's "Dateline."

She was then sent to medium security prison to serve her full sentence while pregnant again with Fualaau's second child, a daughter they named Georgia.

In 2004, Letourneau was released from prison, where she had been since 1998, and registered herself as a sex offender the day after her release, NBC's "Dateline" reported. A couple days later, Fualaau said on TODAY he had plans for a future with Letourneau.

"I want to go on a boat cruise. I want to go to the Bahamas or something, or Miami. I don’t know. Somewhere tropical, really hot. Or maybe somewhere really cold," Fualaau said.

On Aug. 6, 2004, 21-year-old Vili petitioned the court to lift an order prohibiting Letourneau from having contact with him, and by Valentine's Day in 2005, the pair were engaged, according to NBC's Dateline.

The couple married in a ceremony in Woodinville, Washington, on May 20, 2005, according to the Associated Press. But in May 2017, Fualaau filed for legal separation from his wife after 12 years of marriage, according to NBC News.

Despite their divorce, Fualaau, then 37, was by her side when Letourneau died of cancer in July 2020 at age 58, her attorney David Gehrke said on TODAY.

Julianne Moore on Mary Kay Letourneau

Moore says she used elements of Letourneau's story for her role as Gracie, but cautions "May December" is not a film about Letourneau and Fualaau.

"Well, certainly this is not the story of Mary Kay Letourneau. I think Sammy Burch, our screenwriter, used it as inspiration, but I wasn’t playing her," Moore tells TODAY.com.

"I did do a lot of reading about the case and I looked at some documentary footage, and I think what really struck me when I was watching it was how beautiful she was, how dedicated she was to her children, how very feminine she seemed and her fragility," she continues. "Those, to me, seemed to be the really salient points of what she was presenting to the world."

This article was originally published on TODAY.com