She was a teacher who screwed her SIXTH GRADE student. We’re talking about a kid who hadn’t even graduated from elementary school.
On what planet is it okay for a teacher – a person in a position of authority – to do something like that? Is there a mother in the universe who thinks it’s just fine and dandy for her twelve year old to have an affair with anyone, let alone his teacher?
I hate when people minimize what she did. She was goddamned predator who deserved to be locked up. Our children deserve to be protected from people like her.
This a wedding between a victim and the person who committed a crime against him. It’s sickens me.
Last I knew, she had been locked up for it. For as long as her sentancing specified that she should be in prison.
I think this relationship is as fucked up as the next guy - but face it - Vili has had his chance to move on, to cut ties if he wanted to, to raise their daughters without her, and now at a legal age, he wants to be married to her. She’s paid for her crime, and he’s made his decision. It’s their right to do so, being both legal consenting adults.
As has been expressed prior, the ones I feel sorry for are the children involved, hers prior, and theirs current. How do you explain that to your kids?
Just because they’re getting married doesn’t make it right. He’s basically marrying his rapist. That’s sad for him and repulsive for her.
I hate to see what happened to him minimized as it has been to a certain extent on this thread. My next door neighbor has a twelve year old son who’s turning thirteen next week. Like all thirteen year olds, no matter what gender, he’s a kid. While he may be physiologically ready for sex, he’s not ready emotionally or mentally.
Statuatory rape laws do not exist because people are prudes. They exist to protect our children.
Incidentally the notion that the average age of marriage was historically much lower is inaccurate.
While it is true that some people married at an early age, particularly among the nobility and royalty, most people waited until they could set up a household by themselves.
lavenderlemon. It’s just hard for me personally maintain my original outrage and revulsion ten years later when both of them are adult parents hellbent on continuing their relationship. The fact that she’s an ex-con and still a former teacher placates me enough.
For a good chunk of the last 120 years or so, in many parts of the world, all it took to set up a household was an older man to be a successful breadwinner. I have three grandaunts now in their 80s who all married older men in their 30s and 40s when they were 15-17.
In 1970, my 17 year old mother took up with my 29 year old father her freshman year in college. In 1941, my 33 year old grandfather married my grandmother when she was 16, after courtiing her and getting permission from her parents to do so.
There may be an African-American ethnic component, and a southern rural farmer/sharecropping dynamic as well.
FWIW, I am the same age as Vili, and did not remember his name until the wedding came about. So, IMO, he could get to know girls his age without them knowing beforehand that he was that kid.
Also, from what a sixth-grade teacher that I know told me, you’d be surprised how many sixth-graders either have sex or feel that they are ready to have sex.
He’s not a minor anymore. He’s an adult, in the eyes of the law, with full capacity to make his own decisions, good or poor. Yes, she committed a crime, statutory rape, and she went to prison and served her time for it. Are you suggesting that Vili, as a rape victim, is so easily manipulated by the rapist that he is now unable to make his own decisions as a 22 year old (whose rapist has been behind bars for seven years)?
I presume that you do understand that we’re no longer talking about a 12 year old boy, but a 22 year old adult? She’s been in prison for seven years. Do you honestly think that if he were of a mind to put this all behind him, he didn’t have the opportunity? You might protest that he’s ‘not in his right mind’, but that’s what ‘legal age’ means. He can make all the bad life-changing decisions he wants at this point, and there’s nothing legally ‘wrong’ with that.
Again, I am not defending her - what she did in sleeping with her 12 year old student is not only illegal, immoral, and beyond my understanding. However, there comes a point where she has paid her legal debt to society, and he has to choose how he’s going to proceed in life. He’s apparently chosen to proceed with her. As fucked-up as I might think that is, he’s got every right to do so.
I am not a shrink, but I think Mary Kay is more obsessed than anything else. Big time obsessed with a child, which is just wrong. She was on probation, with one of the terms being she had no contact with him, yet she was literary caught “with the van a-rocking.” And conceived a second child. She obviously doesn’t think the laws apply to her and Vili’s relationship.
I think he has been totally brainwashed. He seemed very spacey during all the interviews, and if he ever wakes up, he will probably be horrified and want out of the relationship.
I don’t, in any way, condone anyone having sex with underage children… but she has served her time and he is obviously unaffected by what happened (so much so that they are married with kids…) …so IMO it’s none of my/our business what they get up to.
I’m actually quite offended in some ways… I was still in school when Chuck and I met. Does that mean he’s disgusting, a sexual predator/etc? We didn’t actually do anything until I left and was considered “legal”… but even so…
I’m not going to play amature psychiatrist with someone I don’t know personally. I don’t know. But given how widely publicized this case was I doubt he could walk away from her anymore than Nancy Kerrigan can escape her association with Tonya Harding.
Considering that she’s the mother of his two children, do you really think he would ever be able to untangle his life from hers?
And I never said there was anything legally “wrong” with this marriage. I said it was sad and repulsive when a rapist marries his victim. That is exactly what’s going on over here and it disgusts me.
Vili’s a high school dropout and a twenty-two year old with seven and eight year old daughters.
The issue I have here is her “apologists”; this well “she served her time” mantra.
Someone else said it before. If their sexes were reversed, you’d all be lining up to hang the guy. Rape is completely abhorrent, and so is this “double standard”.
Well, yeah, it’s a double standard. But I resent being cast as an apologist just because I’ve tempered my condemnation of this former teacher since this criminal act first happened. Nothing she’s done since first having sex with Villi excuses her actions for seducing a 12-year old boy. However the fact that she’s had two kids, been sentenced, did her time and is now married to him does mitigate circumstances somewhat now.
I didn’t buy this kid was a blameless victim ten years ago and I still don’t buy it now.
It’s very disingenuous to keep equating statutory rape with forced rape as if the two were equally reprehensible acts of violent sexual control. One is only a crime because someone’s underage. It’s more distasteful because she was a teacher and truthfully, that’s the one part of this whole action I find unforgiveable.
<<I hate to see what happened to him minimized as it has been to a certain extent on this thread. My next door neighbor has a twelve year old son who’s turning thirteen next week. Like all thirteen year olds, no matter what gender, he’s a kid. While he may be physiologically ready for sex, he’s not ready emotionally or mentally.>>
There are 20 year olds who aren’t mentally capable of having sex. She served her time. Who cares what they do? They’re adults.
I completely object to the suggestion that sleeping with an eager 13 year old boy deserves anywhere NEAR the prison term of dragging a child off the street and raping them while they kick and scream. They’re both crimes, but the latter is infinitely more repulsive and emotionally traumatic. She served her time. Are you suggesting anyone convicted of statutory rape should spend the rest of their life in prison? Because if that’s true, we better be ready to double the prison population.
From what I gather, even if they had been the same age, since she was his teacher at the time, a relationship would still have been a big no no. Teachers should NOT date students.
The thing that I find so repulsive about this is that the media feels the need to keep shoving all this down our throats. I do not want to see interviews with them about how happy they are, I do not want to see the wedding, I do not want to see the behind the scenes footage of Mary Kay getting ready for her wedding and I am getting tired of having to flip through the channels to find something that isn’t talking about it.
Technically she is a convicted child rapist, sure she served her time and is marrying her victim but why is this being treated as a big celebrity wedding? They are more infamous than famous. One show called it “The Wedding of the Century”, I almost vomited. I hope they toddle off into obscurity soon so I don’t have to hear about them anymore.