Vili Fualaau has filed for legal separation from Mary Kay Letourneau, RadarOnline.com has confirmed. However, the infamous teen lover said he’s still totally head over heels for his former teacher! 
 
 Fualaau confirmed the news to Radar, and Washington State court records filed on May 9 show that he asked a judge for a legal separation on that date. 
 
 But Fualaau told Radar that the filing does not mean the marriage is over. 
 
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 “It’s not necessarily what you think,” Fualaau, 33, claimed. “Everything is fine between us.” 
 
 “All the rumors that you hear between us. It’s fine,” he said. “Of course [we are still in love]. A piece of paper doesn’t break someone’s feelings!” 
 
 According to Fualaau, he’s made the move to protect his business interests. 
 
 After working as a DJ – DJ Headline – for years, Fualaau is now looking to get licensed as a distributor for “Cigaweed” marijuana cigarettes, he said. 
 
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 “When you want to get licensend, they do background checks on both parties,” Fualaau explained. “If I decide to be a part of it I have to be licensed and I have to be vetted and so does a spouse. She has a past. She has a history.” 
 
 Indeed, Letournea, now 55, served more than seven years in prison for having sex with Fualaau when he was her sixth grade student back in 1996. 
 
 They married in 2005, and have two children. Letourneau has four kids from a previous marriage. 
 
 Story developing. 
 
 We pay for juicy info! Do you have a story for RadarOnline.com? Email us at tips@radaronline.com, or call us at 800-344-9598 any time, day or night. ||||| Former schoolteacher Mary Kay Letourneau and husband Vili Fualaau, with whom she began a sexual relationship when he was her sixth-grade student in Seattle in 1996, have legally separated and a reconciliation seems unlikely, PEOPLE confirms. 
 
 “They’ve been having issues for a while now,” says a source close to the couple. “They tried to work through them, but it didn’t work. They’re still committed to being good parents to their children.” 
 
 There is no third party involved in the relationship, the source says. 
 
 Letourneau’s friend and former attorney David Gehrke says it was Fualaau who filed for separation. 
 
 “She could try to contest it, but that’s legally tough to do,” he says. “Perhaps if they want to figure out about the children and child support, but their kids are getting pretty old now.” 
 
 “When one person is unhappy in the relationship, the other person can’t be happy either,” he continues. “And there are two people in this relationship.” 
 
 Their initial affair — which began while Letourneau was a 34-year-old mother of four and Fualaau was 12 — ignited national controversy and revulsion, particularly after she defied a court order to stay away from Fualaau. “The two of them want to be together,” a friend of Letourneau’s told PEOPLE in a 1998 cover story. “They’re drawn together like magnets.” 
 
 Prosecutors took a different view, arguing at the time that Letourneau “doesn’t believe she did anything wrong.” 
 
 After the relationship was revealed, she pleaded guilty to two counts of second-degree child rape and was sentenced to seven and a half years in prison. 
 
 She and Fualaau married in May 2005 after she was released, and they have two children. 
 
 “I’m convinced they were totally in love,” Gehrke says. 
 
 Mary Kay Letourneau in 1996 AP Photo/Seattle Post-Intelligencer 
 
 Mary Kay Letourneau in court in Seattle in February 1998 Alan Berner/AP 
 
 A March 1998 PEOPLE cover story on the Mary Kay Letourneau case 
 
 The couple’s second child, Georgia, was born while Letourneau was behind bars. 
 
 They sat down with PEOPLE for an extensive interview in 2006. Fualaau, then 22, said he sometimes wondered about the past. 
 
 “I think, What would my life have been like if I had never made a move on Mary?” he said. “What if I had kept it as a crush and left it at that? Where would I be and where would she be — what would life be like?” 
 
 But he said he didn’t see an answer to such speculation. “I can never see more than the question.” 
 
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 Vili Fualaau in October 1998 John Froschauer/AP 
 
 Vili Fualaau and Mary Kay Letourneau (center left and center right) with their two daughters, Audrey (far left) and Georgia (far right), in 2015 Heidi Gutman/ABC/Getty 
 
 Nearly a decade later, in 2015, Fualaau and Letourneau sat down for an interview with ABC’s Barbara Walters, where they discussed their relationship, marriage and parenting. 
 
 Letourneau revealed then that she would like to get her name taken off the sex offender registry, though officials in Washington state tell PEOPLE she is still a registered offender. 
 
 “There is a story of us that has a life of its own, but it’s not our story,” she told Walters. 
 
 When Walters asked Fualaau how he’d feel if the girls came home and said they were sleeping with their teacher, he responded, “I don’t support younger kids being married or having a relationship with someone older. I don’t support it.” 
 
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– Vili Fualaau says he and wife Mary Kay Letourneau are still in love, despite the fact that he recently filed for legal separation. Fualaau says he's only separating from Letourneau—who spent more than seven years in prison for having sex with Fualaau when he was her 12-year-old student and who is still a registered sex offender—to protect his business interests. He's looking to become a licensed marijuana cigarette distributor, he tells Radar, and "when you want to get licensed, they do background checks on both parties ... I have to be licensed and I have to be vetted and so does a spouse. She has a past. She has a history." He says the couple is still in love. Meanwhile, TMZ reports that Letourneau has filed what the gossip site calls "a bizarre petition" to have her husband's separation filing dismissed.