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The zealous husband

Poised. Polished. Handsome. Owen Lafave, former spouse of the infamous Debra, is the well-cast star of his own tell-all TV gig.

By SHANNON COLAVECCHIO-VAN SICKLER
Published February 20, 2005

[Times photos: Melissa Lyttle]

Owen Lafave waits to tape a segment for CBS’s The Early Show at his Riverview townhouse Feb. 9 as sound mixer Jim Siler, rear, rearranges furniture to appear in the background. Lafave, 26, once refused interviews about his wife, Debra, who is accused of having sex with a 14-year-old Greco Middle School student.

	Owen Lafave is pictured on a TV monitor during the taping of The Early Show segment at his townhouse. Lafave, who now has a publicist, has become a poised media presence after appearing on many news programs.
	As CBS correspondent Tracy Smith, left, waits under the lights to conduct the interview, sound mixer Jim Siler adjusts the microphone for Owen Lafave, who now must balance his work as a banker with TV appearances and work on a documentary.
	Says his publicist of Owen Lafave: “This is like the dream guy. Handsome, adorable, smart, sweet. People wonder: Why would you throw him away?”
	Debra LaFave leaves Judge Wayne Timmerman's courtroom after her pretrial hearing on Nov. 30, 2004.
	[Times photo: Ken Helle]

TAMPA - Owen Lafave was finishing another busy day at Mercantile Bank near downtown Tampa when the call came.

"A teacher in Tennessee was just arrested on charges she had sex with a 13-year-old boy," the CBS producer told him. "Her name is Pamela Turner. She's young. She's pretty. She's blond. And she was married at the time. Just like Debra."

The Early Show wanted Lafave to talk about Turner's arrest in a live interview at 7:30 the next morning.

When the CBS crew arrived at Lafave's Riverview townhouse before dawn, he greeted them with fresh coffee. For his latest television appearance, he dressed in a crisp dark suit with a striped burgundy tie. He tousled his sandy blond hair with just the right touch of Paul Mitchell styling cream.

"My heart goes out to the husband," Lafave told Early Show anchor Rene Syler. "I know exactly what he's going through."

Then Lafave, 26, looked directly into the camera and urged Turner's husband to call him.

It was one cuckolded man reaching out to another on national television. One humiliated husband saying to the next: Hey, my wife cheated on me with a teenage boy, too. Let's talk.

"He just has to remain strong," Lafave said. "Don't let pride get in the way. Don't be embarrassed."

Hours after the Feb. 9 interview, the CBS crew returned to Lafave's townhouse to tape a longer segment about the case against his soon-to-be ex-wife, Debra Lafave, 24.

She was arrested in June on charges she had sex several times with a 14-year-old student at Greco Middle School, where she taught reading. Police were waiting for her in Temple Terrace when she drove up to the teen's house.

As a producer moved Lafave's living room furniture around to create a TV-ready backdrop, he talked to CBS correspondent Tracy Smith about his busy upcoming weekend.

He would fly to New York for appearances on CNBC's The Big Idea with Donny Deutsch and on the Fox network shows of Geraldo Rivera and Rita Cosby. He would stay an extra day to work on the documentary After School (for which he'll serve as narrator and interviewer), about teachers who have trysts with their students.

Already that week, Lafave had taped an interview for the Fox News Channel show Hannity & Colmes. Last month, he went on Larry King Live. He has in the past few months appeared on ABC's Good Morning America and Primetime Live, and on Greta Van Susteren's Fox show On The Record.

It is quite a media blitz, considering Lafave shunned media attention after his wife's arrest. Not that anyone blamed him for wanting to disappear.

Police records made public after Lafave's arrest included an interview with the teenage boy, in which he said she described her groom as sexually inadequate. Local radio hosts seized on that nugget and mocked him, questioning his manhood. Web site chatter posited that Lafave - good-looking, buff and well-dressed - must be gay.

Lafave became depressed. He says he maintained a facade of calm at work and also when he was around his wife, but inside the anger and tension mounted. Driving to work he would break down in tears during those few minutes of solitude.

"I just wanted to crawl into a hole and not see the light of day," he said. "I thought my life was over. I really had no intention of ever talking."

Today, Owen Lafave talks. And talks and talks.

He has become a news-of-the-moment celebrity, with the kind of sudden fame that's only possible in today's culture of 24-hour television headlines.

In restaurants and nightclubs and bars, Lafave runs into local news anchors he now knows by first name. He chats up attractive women, and inevitably they recognize him from one of his recent interviews.

Even his furniture is a result of this unlikely turn.

Outlaw 92.5, a local FM country station, gave him two couches, a bed, a dresser and a night table after hearing that Debra Lafave moved out in August and left him with an empty townhouse.

His Valentine's Day lunch hour is spent at Bella's in Tampa with a woman his age. But she is married, and she is a newspaper reporter there for an interview.

Producers call him whenever there are developments in his wife's case. They seek him out as a spokesman for cases of female teachers who have sex with adolescent boys. If the teacher is attractive, like his own wife, even better. He doesn't get paid for these appearances, but they have come to dominate his life.

"Little did I know I'd become the spokesperson for infidelity and child molestation," Lafave said wryly. "That was definitely not what I had planned for my life."

But this is what life dealt Lafave. So he sits before the cameras and defends his sexual prowess. He says that he's still struggling to understand what makes women have affairs with teenage boys.

Then the cameras stop rolling, and he wonders if all these interviews are a good idea.

"You know," he admitted before his Early Show appearance, "sometimes I feel like a media whore."

Lafave is a commercial loan officer, but he could just as easily be the guy delivering the 6 o'clock news.

He stands 5 foot 10 and has a muscular 185-pound frame that comes from hours spent at Gold's Gym in Brandon.

His big, almond-shaped hazel eyes are complemented by a flawless complexion and a warm smile of straight white teeth.

"Oh, he's superb!" said CBS producer John D'Amelio. "I told him he's better-spoken, more composed, more articulate, and has better hair and teeth than most of our anchors."

As much as the nation's fascination with Debra Lafave is largely because of her Barbie-doll good looks, Owen's recent television success comes in part because he carries himself with such finesse.

Lafave might still be a sought-after interview subject even if he didn't look like a catalog model, but odds are viewers (females in particular) would not embrace him with such sympathy and admiration.

Lafave is now seen as a brave victim, the promising young guy who is using a documentary to help others learn from his ordeal. He is the sexy catch that Debra Lafave foolishly tossed aside.

After his Jan. 25 Larry King Live appearance, 100,000 hits flooded the After School documentary Web site, www.afterschooldoc.com Lafave's publicist - yes, he has one - received 700 e-mails.

Many were from women who wanted to say they think Lafave is great "for telling his story," said the publicist, Karen Ammond of KBC Media Relations. Lafave said he hasn't paid her anything for her services.

"This is like the dream guy," Ammond said. "Handsome, adorable, smart, sweet. People wonder: Why would you throw him away?"

"He's become, really, a model for other people," she went on. "Someone who's so young, and so strong."

Lafave is more humble than the woman whose job is to promote him and the documentary.

"The thought of being admired for a situation like this is unsettling," he said. "I don't feel comfortable with it. It's just how I've chosen to react to it.

"No," he said, shaking his head. "Definitely not a hero."

Hero or not, he is well-composed and upfront about a topic that would send many men running for the door.

"No sexual inadequacy at all?" Larry King pressed during his recent interview.

Lafave: "We had no problems."

King: "Unless she was faking it to you or something."

Lafave: "I guess that's always a possibility."

Later, King came back to the sex question.

King: "The speculation about you, what has that done to you, people had to say, what are you, gay? Did you not have a good sexual life?"

Lafave: "That obviously was humiliating. . . . For the record, I'm not gay. I have no trouble performing."

"It's not exactly the kind of thing you want to talk about," Lafave said later to a reporter.

Yet there he is in front of thousands of strangers, talking with Larry King about his bedroom skills.

Lafave visibly recoils when asked whether he likes being on television, whether there isn't a little bit of vanity fueling his many appearances.

"Oh, God, no," he insists. "I never thought of myself as a TV person. I mean, I'm a banker. Can you think of a more conservative profession?

"But I've been thrust into this."

Thrust, he says, in a moment of raw anger at the college sweetheart he once considered the "perfect wife."

It was a Wednesday afternoon in late August, as he remembers it. Debra Lafave was no longer living in their Riverview townhouse.

But she had refused to sign a settlement agreement that he proposed as a way to end the marriage amicably and quickly, with less media attention than a drawn-out divorce.

Now she was calling Lafave at work to say she planned to take the furniture, much of it her family's, from the townhouse.

Lafave says he asked her if she would at least leave him the bed so he could sleep. She said no, she was taking that, too. "Debbie, you can't even leave the mattress?" he asked her. The answer was no.

That evening after work, he went to Wal-Mart and bought a queen-size air mattress. Then he called his attorney, Laurie Ohall, and told her to draw up the divorce papers.

Lafave and Ohall had dinner at Carrabba's Italian Grill, where he recalls he "drowned my sorrow in wine and bread."

Ohall called the Tampa Tribune and partner station WFLA-Ch. 8 that night to say that Lafave was ready to talk.

"Once I spoke to them, everybody came out of the woodwork," Lafave recalled. "They all wanted me to talk."

He refused interviews at first, still not ready to go so public.

"For most of my life, I've been a private person," Lafave said. "All this TV, it's not me."

Yet by September, Lafave had Ammond as his publicist.

He says he realized that if he didn't speak up, reporters and tabloid gossips would keep filling in the blanks. He knew his in-laws would be furious, and maybe his wife, too.

"But I figured, if anybody is going to talk about this, it's going to be me. I'm the one living through it."

Lafave did his first national interview Sept. 16 on ABC's Primetime Live.

He told Cynthia McFadden he could not "turn off" his love for Lafave, whom he began dating at the University of South Florida.

"I just stand here confused," Lafave said. "I struggle with everyday life."

The next day he was on ABC's bay area affiliate, ABC Action News.

And so began the cycle of local, cable and national television appearances.

In every interview, he is meticulously dressed and articulate. He seems at home in front of the camera. His charm comes through the screen.

But Lafave worries about the exposure. After one of the CBS interviews, he went back over a few things he said and hoped out loud that they wouldn't make the final cut.

"Every time I talk, I worry I'm making the wrong decision. I worry that I'm becoming part of the sensation. And the thing is, I am. I know it.

"But I'm just trying to defend myself."

He says the documentary is a "vehicle to be able to do some good, as nasty and sensational as the story has become.

"Part of it is me being able to take a bad situation and make it good, to give something back to help people.

"But I can't lie," he said. "I'm doing it for selfish reasons, too. It's therapeutic for me to talk it out. Because I've never really gotten an answer from Debbie."

At noon on a warm, cloudless day earlier this month, CBS correspondent Smith stands outside Lafave's townhouse and tries to find a spot of shade as she and a crew wait for Lafave to show up.

Fifteen minutes later, he pulls up in his silver Isuzu Rodeo.

"Sorry I'm late," he says as he unlocks the front door. "Go ahead inside."

The CBS crew starts setting up the lights. They move the coffee table - with Forbes, GQ and The Record neatly fanned out on top - and put Lafave's chair in front of the living room wall.

He slips into the downstairs bathroom and puts on a black polka dot tie, knowing Smith won't want him to wear the burgundy tie from that morning's Early Show appearance.

Then he changes his mind and ditches the tie for a more casual look.

Sitting under the hot lights a few minutes later, Lafave's forehead shows a trace of sweat. He pulls out a tissue and starts wiping off the shine.

"No! No!" sound mixer Jim Siler tells him. "Don't wipe, it makes your face red for the camera. Blot. You have to blot."

Smith leans closer to Lafave.

"Owen, you know what you need? Once you start the documentary? Blotting papers. Here."

She reaches into her makeup case and pulls out a small booklet of blotting papers.

"See," she tells him. "You just blot, and it'll keep you from being shiny."

An hour later, Lafave is driving back to work at Mercantile. The next day, he will be on a plane headed north. More cameras await.

This is the strange turn his life has taken: juggling his former 9-to-5 work schedule with television and all its rules about what to wear, what to say - and how to blot away the shine.

"I think after this weekend in New York I'm going on a break," he says, weariness in his voice. "I need a hiatus."

-- Shannon Colavecchio-Van Sickler can be reached at 813 226-3373 or svansickler@sptimes.com

[Last modified February 17, 2005, 11:02:03]