Inside Amy Fisher's life after shooting lover Joey Buttafuoco's wife Mary Jo at 17 - from jail to se

Publish date: 2024-06-17

THE INFAMOUS Long Island Lolita Amy Fisher became a household name in the 1990s after shooting her lover's wife in the head.

When she was 17 years old, the schoolgirl turned up on Mary Jo Buttafuoco's doorstep on May 19, 1992, in Massapequa, New York, and shot her.

Fisher was having an affair with Mary Jo's husband, Joey Buttafuoco, who was 36 years old at the time.

She initially told Buttafuoco that her husband was having an affair with her younger sister, who she made up, and showed her a T-shirt from Joey's auto body shop as evidence.

However, once the conversation between the pair got heated and Buttafuoco turned away to go back into her house, she was shot in the temple with a .25 caliber pistol.

Surgeons worked on Buttafuoco all night to save her life but the incident left her with partial facial paralysis, deafness in one ear, and the bullet still lodged in her body.

Fisher was initially charged with first-degree attempted murder, but she later pleaded guilty to assault and was sentenced to seven years in jail.

Following her release in 1999, she married Louis Bellera in 2003, and the couple had three children before divorcing in 2015.

In 2004, she wrote the memoir If I Knew Then, which was about her life experiences.

She also worked as a columnist for the Long Island Press for a brief period.

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Her life took a different route in 2007 when a sex tape was released, and Fisher embarked on a brief career as a porn star until 2011.

During this stint, she released a number of pay-per-view adult films including Amy Fisher: Totally Nude & Exposed, which earned her millions.

Alongside this, she also took part in a number of interviews about the shooting and the love triangle.

Speaking to Chaunce Hayden in a 2008 interview for Steppin' Out magazine, as reported by Fox News, she said: "People are angry at me because I'm a millionaire.

"But guess what? So is Mary Jo! She made more millions off of what I did than what I made."

Meanwhile, following the shooting Joey Buttafuoco was indicted on 19 counts of statutory rape, sodomy, and endangering the welfare of a child.

He changed his not-guilty plea after admitting he had sex with Fisher and knowing that she was only 16 at the time.

Following his six-month stint in jail, he, Mary Jo, and their children attempted to move on. However, the couple ultimately filed for divorce in 2003 after 26 years of marriage.

Joey married Evanka Franjko two years after his divorce and was featured in a number of movies and television shows.

He was also arrested in 1995 for soliciting a vice cop posing as a prostitute and he pleaded no contest and was fined and put on a two-year probation.

In March 2004, he plead guilty to insurance fraud and was sentenced to a year in jail and five years' probation.

He then served three months in prison in 2007 for illegally possessing ammunition.

According to his daughter who spoke to ABC in 2019, Joey started therapy and was changing his path in life.

She said: "He's in a growth phase where he's in therapy and he's healing...I hope he’s not using it to justify why he made so many poor decisions. I like this new man he's becoming."

However, last year, Jessie Buttafuoco who was only 9 years old at the time of the shooting, told The Toronto Sun that in 2020 she "cut him off completely" due to "his toxicity" which "had been bleeding into my life for way too long."

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Meanwhile, Mary Jo remarried in 2010 and relocated to California after struggling with addiction issues due to the medication she was given following the shooting.

Mary Jo had surgery on her facial paralysis and works to raise awareness for those struggling with the issue.

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