Bathed in warm light, with her blond hair softly curling and her brown eyes doleful, Letourneau could easily have been confused with the subject of a generic Sears portrait, if you didn’t read the accompanying headline: “The Teacher and the 6th Grader: Their Bizarre Story of Obsessive Love.” “Pregnant again after trysting with her former pupil, Mary Kay Letourneau, 36, is back in prison — and still defiant,” the cover line read, beneath a line about Bruce Willis and Demi Moore’s battle with their former nanny.

Despite the couple’s claims that the relationship was consensual and that they were deeply in love, according to any moral or legal definition Letourneau had raped Fualaau, and putting her beatific maternity photo on the cover of People Magazine would be akin to publishing beefcake prison shots of Jeffrey Epstein.

(Often, as the People cover demonstrates, it was a combination of the two.) Perhaps more than any other figure in recent history, the media coverage of Mary Kay Letourneau is responsible for perpetuating the gendered double standard associated with child rape, or the idea that, while a male teacher having sex with an underage female pupil is reprehensible, a female teacher sleeping with an underage male pupil is not only forgivable, but worthy of a high five.

To scholars of mid-Nineties tabloid ephemera, the details of the case are well-known: Letourneau, a teacher in Seattle, Washington, met Fualaau when he was in her sixth-grade classroom (a little-regarded yet unspeakably icky footnote to the story is that she taught him when he was in second grade as well).

Letourneau initially pleaded guilty to charges of second-degree rape, serving a reduced sentence of three months, only to return to prison for a seven-year sentence after violating a court order to keep away from Fualaau.

Yet by and large, the irrefutable facts at the heart of the story — that Letourneau had raped an underage child while she was in a position of power and authority over him — took a backseat to the narrative that a pretty, delicate-featured, upper middle-class white woman had fallen madly and hopelessly in love with the wrong person, at the wrong time.

Since the 1990s, when Letourneau and Fualaau became tabloid fixtures, we have consistently seen coverage of female sexual predators undermine the severity of their crimes, focusing instead on the question of why an attractive older woman would exhibit sexual interest in an underage boy (and the perceived “luck” of the underage boy being subject to such an initiation).

As our understanding of sexual abuse has gradually evolved, so too has our perception of female sexual predators like Letourneau

While tabloids and bro blogs still breathlessly document underage sexual abuse cases, with Barstool Sports issuing a nauseating annual “sex scandal teacher starting lineup,” it is relatively rare to see such offenders achieve the notoriety of a Letourneau or a Lafave

Thanks in part to shifting cultural mores and the relatively even-handed, sober coverage of accused female sexual harassers like Asia Argento, there appears to be a growing understanding that sexual abuse is sexual abuse, regardless of the physical appearance of the accused or the gender of the victim

Female sexual predators in teacher-student cases face far less punitive sentences than male sexual predators, according to a 2013 analysis, and judges continue to make elaborate justifications for such sentences, with one British judge telling a babysitter who sexually abused an 11-year-old, “it was quite clear he was a mature 11-year-old and you were an immature 20-year-old so that narrows the arithmetic age gap between you.” While few publications would dare to put an idyllic photo of a convicted predator on the cover, we still have a long way to go in terms of our understanding of the complex dynamics of sexual abuse

Mary Kay letourneau, rape, sexual assault