BRISTOL, Va. – A female teacher. A sexual liaison with 13-year-old male student. Prison time. A tell-all book by her husband.
That’s the abridged version of James Deel’s recent publication about his estranged wife, former Virginia Middle School teacher Melissa Deel, and her affair that made national headlines three years ago.
His cathartic release is titled “Scandalous Lessons.” In it, the tormented husband-turned-writer offers lines he said comes from her saved letters.
“I don’t really know how or when our conversations took on a sexual nature. I certainly didn’t set out to seduce a kid, and I wasn’t looking for him to replace you – at least not consciously I don’t think,” she wrote.
Her sexually explicit e-mails to the unidentified teen would have made it into the book, but James Deel, 42, said the FBI persuaded him to destroy them.
Actual names would have made it into the book, too, but a lawyer advised against it.
James Deel couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep and just plain didn’t know how to beat the shakes during his wife’s 14-month prison stay.
She pleaded guilty to crossing from Tennessee to Virginia to have sex with the boy.
The distraught husband’s psyche took a real nosedive months after her release into his waiting arms. That’s when he claims to have caught her in the embrace of another man.
“It was hard for me to believe she would stoop as low as she did and do it again,” he said Friday.
Melissa Deel, 36, did not reply to requests for comment left with relatives and at her Bristol Tenn., home.
Divorce papers came next for the couple. So did therapy for James Deel.
“My doctor said it would help it I wrote it down,” he said. “I said if I was going to write it down, I was going to write a book.”
After more than a year and a hired ghost writer later, “Scandalous Lessons,” was published, and can be ordered at local bookstores.
“It was supposed to be ‘The Truth Must be Told,’ but [the ghost writer] liked this best,” James Deel said.
The book details his initial suspicions of an affair, and how he discovered on the home computer her e-mails to the boy.
How does an enraged husband lash out at an underaged other man? He calls the police.
Official accounts have always credited the boy’s parents with telling police, but James Deel said he was responsible for his wife’s arrest.
“There’s more to this story than ever was told” in the newspapers, he said. “You really don’t know what I’ve been through with this.”
After turning in his wife, James Deel said he lied to police and the news media to cover up her crime.
“I lied to take up for her because I didn’t want her to be gone [imprisoned] that long,” James Deel said. “I was really messed up then.”
mowens@bristolnews.com (276) 645-2549
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