Hot for teacher, headed for Playboy

Of all the very attractive school teachers who wound up getting arrested for having sex with young male students in recent years, Debra Lafave is by far the most beautiful, sexy, confounding and sympathetic, especially after we were subjected to the appearances by her curiously fey husband, who coped with the pain of wearing the horns of the cuckold by divorcing her and teaming up with a documentary company.

Owen Lafave has got interesting material to work with (and if he’s stashed away a honeymoon sex tape in one of his closets, all the more power to him). This a great story. It's bigger than his fetching ex-wife, and still hasn't been handled as it should.

We were close, though. During the brief lamented return of A Current Affair, the Lafave case was always a priority.

The show’s executive producer Peter Brennan saw the teacher-student sex phenomenon as a major issue across the nation, and actually made an attempt to get past the sensational aspects to find a way to understand why Lafave and other women were responding to abuse or mental illness by having sex with teens (most all of these women acted like school-age “girlfriends” of the kids, looking up to their “boyfriends”). Surely, these women differed from the male sexual predators. Surely, the effects on the victims were different and there's a reason for the "double standard" applied here. Surely, there is a rich story amid the shouting. Unfortunately, at a time when a show like Entertainment Tonight takes a break from vomiting studio p.r. to throw a wedding for sad Mary Kay LaTourneau, we don’t expect anyone in television to rise above Geraldo’s or Diane Sawyer's shtick. We’ll wait for Vanity Fair.

Meanwhile, Debra Lafave says she wants to be a journalist.

Welcome aboard.

She also denies she’ll be posing for Playboy (she already posed for police, who took graphic photos of her to corroborate the kid's story). Time will tell. The clock is ticking. Her portfolio can be found here.