The 61st New York Film Festival will kick off with Todd Haynes’ “May December,” a juicy drama starring Natalie Portman as an actor preparing for a film about a years-ago tabloid scandal.

SEATTLE Mary Kay Letourneau, a teacher who married her former sixth-grade student after she was convicted of raping him in a case that drew international headlines, has died. Letourneau was a married mother of four having difficulties with her marriage in 1996 when Vili Fualaau was a precocious 12-year-old in Letourneaus class at Shorewood Elementary in Burien, a south Seattle suburb. Letourneau, then 34, initially told officers the boy was 18, raising suspicions that something sexual was going on. Letourneau and Fualaau married on May 20, 2005, in Woodinville, Washington, after she finished serving time in prison. Bremner said of Letourneau and Fualauus relationship: Everyone said it wouldnt last, but it did, at least for 20 years.