Fualaau says he lied in depositions
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"There's a lot of things I said that I just lied," he told a King County Superior Court jury, referring to four depositions taken during the last year and a half.
In the first day of cross-examination by Highline School District attorney Mike Patterson, Fualaau, now 18, was presented with example after example of how his current testimony conflicts with earlier testimony.
"You lied under oath?" Patterson asked.
"I didn't know I was under oath," Fualaau replied.
A key discrepancy was whether Fualaau and Letourneau — who is serving a 7-1/2-year sentence for child rape — had sex on school-district property while she was his teacher.
Fualaau now says they did, but he had denied it before.
Fualaau and his mother, Soona Fualaau, are suing the school district and Des Moines police for $1 million, alleging more should have been done to prevent Letourneau from raping him and becoming pregnant twice with his children.
One of his attorneys, Lori Guzzo, said during a recess that Fualaau was 17 when three of the depositions were taken and he was confused.
During cross-examination, Patterson portrayed Fualaau as a sexually advanced youth, who hid beneath bleachers in the second grade to see Letourneau's underwear and drew pictures of her panties. His drawing was shown in court.
He testified that in the sixth grade, he bet a cousin that he could have sex with Letourneau, 34.
"Who won the bet?" Patterson asked.
"I did," Fualaau replied.
Patterson also contended that Fualaau lied when he testified last week that Letourneau had offered to strip for him for every history-test question he got right.
Patterson suggested Fualaau posed the question to Letourneau — based on a movie he had seen — and not the other way around. Fualaau denied it.
In testimony, Fualaau described his home life as full of noise and violence, which often caused him to be depressed and aloof from his family.
His mother worked in a bakery and his father — whom he scarcely knows — has spent much of his life in prison and has 18 children by five women.
As a young child, Fualaau said he watched pornographic movies with his great-grandfather.
"It was how we lived and the things we talked about in the house," he said — and it contrasted with Letourneau's middle-class, educated world.
Letourneau, he testified, was the only one who encouraged him. After she went to prison, he dropped out of school.
Patterson said the school district supported Fualaau when he was a student, writing notes home to his mother when homework wasn't turned in, asking that he be encouraged to visit the library and improve his reading, and telling his mother he had an artistic gift that could make scholarships possible.
Soona Fualaau is now raising Fualaau's two children and with her son netted about $180,000 from book and other media deals about his story.
The money, however, is now gone.