The Amy Fisher Case: What Actually Happened, and What Came After
- 8 minutes ago
- 8 min read
On 19 May 1992, a 17-year-old named Amy Fisher rang the doorbell of a house in Massapequa, Long Island, and shot the woman who answered it in the head. The woman, Mary Jo Buttafuoco, survived, permanently disfigured and partially deaf. The man at the centre of it, Mary Jo's husband Joey, a 35-year-old auto body shop owner, had been sexually abusing Fisher since she was sixteen. Almost none of that framing made it into the coverage that followed. Tabloids branded Fisher the Long Island Lolita, treated a grown man's crime against a child as a scandalous love affair gone wrong, and turned the whole case into one of the defining media circuses of the early 1990s.
Quick Answers
Who is Amy Fisher and why is she famous? Amy Fisher was a 17-year-old from Long Island who shot Mary Jo Buttafuoco, the wife of Joey Buttafuoco, in 1992. Buttafuoco, then in his mid thirties, had begun a sexual relationship with Fisher when she was sixteen, a crime under New York law regardless of how the media chose to frame it.
What happened to Amy Fisher and Joey Buttafuoco? Fisher pleaded guilty to reckless assault and served seven years in prison. Buttafuoco pleaded guilty to statutory rape and served four to six months. Fisher was paroled early in 1999 after Mary Jo publicly forgave her in court.
Are Amy Fisher and Joey Buttafuoco still alive? Yes, both are alive. Fisher lives on Long Island and has worked as a columnist, author and, at times, in adult entertainment. Buttafuoco moved to California, remarried and has had further brushes with the law over the years.
A Sixteen Year Old and Her Family's Mechanic
Amy Fisher grew up in Merrick, on Long Island, and by her own later account had already survived childhood sexual abuse and a rape by a family contractor before she ever met Joey Buttafuoco. In December 1990, her father took the family car to Buttafuoco's auto body shop for repairs. Fisher was sixteen. She later admitted to damaging her own car more than once specifically to have a reason to keep going back.
By the following summer, Buttafuoco, then in his mid thirties, married with two young children, had begun a sexual relationship with her. Under New York law at the time, the age of consent was seventeen, which made what Buttafuoco was doing statutory rape from the outset, not an affair between two consenting adults, whatever language the press later reached for. Fisher was a high school student at John F. Kennedy High School throughout the entire relationship.
What the Law Actually Called It
It's worth being direct about this, because so much contemporary coverage wasn't. A grown man in a position of some authority over a teenage girl, her family's mechanic, someone her parents trusted, began a sexual relationship with her while she was still legally a child. The tabloid nickname Long Island Lolita did a great deal of work to reframe that reality as a story about a dangerously seductive teenager rather than an adult who broke the law. It's a framing problem that shows up again and again in how the media handled women and teenage girls throughout the 1990s, and Fisher's case became one of the starkest examples of it.
19 May 1992
Mary Jo Buttafuoco has described the morning in vivid detail even decades later. She got her two children off to school, cleaned the kitchen, made the beds, and planned to spend the day painting in the backyard. When the doorbell rang, she found a teenager standing there holding a t-shirt from Joey's auto shop, telling her it proved her husband was having an affair. Raised, in her own words, as a polite Irish Catholic girl, Mary Jo didn't shout or argue. She was startled more than frightened, she's said, genuinely unsure what to make of the girl on her doorstep. As she turned to go back inside and call Joey to sort it out, Fisher pulled a .25 calibre pistol and fired.
Mary Jo has said it didn't feel like being shot at all. "I turned my head and it exploded," she recalled. Her first thought was that she'd been hit with a bat. She dropped, unconscious, within seconds. Fisher fled the scene. Neighbours called 911, and Mary Jo was operated on through the night. Surgeons managed to save her life but judged the bullet, lodged near her brain, too dangerous to remove, and it stayed there for the rest of her life, leaving her permanently deaf in one ear and with lasting paralysis on one side of her face.
The couple's nine-year-old daughter, Jessie, wasn't told the truth that day. Pulled out of school early, hours before she was due to audition for her third grade play, she was informed her mother had fallen on a nail while painting in the backyard. It was only from the terrified expressions on her aunt and uncle's faces, she said years later, that she understood something far worse had actually happened.
The gun itself had been bought for Fisher days earlier by a 21-year-old acquaintance, Peter Guagenti, who was later sentenced to six months in jail for supplying it. The sentencing judge told him his part in the case had started a chain reaction that caused agony and pain to a great many people.
Two Investigations at Once
When police first interviewed Joey Buttafuoco, he denied any relationship with Fisher entirely and suggested to investigators that she might be the shooter regardless. Once Mary Jo regained consciousness and identified Fisher from a photograph, Fisher was arrested and charged with attempted murder. Her family sold the rights to her story for 80,000 dollars, using the money to help post her two million dollar bail.
Fisher's attorney, meanwhile, was building a second case entirely: that Joey Buttafuoco was the real predator in the story. In June 1992 he filed a formal statutory rape complaint against Buttafuoco and, in court filings, described him as having introduced Fisher to prostitution through an escort service. Nassau County's district attorney initially declined to prosecute Buttafuoco at all. That decision didn't survive what happened next.
A Plea, and a Reopened Case
In September 1992, Fisher agreed to plead guilty to a reduced charge of reckless assault rather than risk trial on attempted murder. Part of the deal required her to cooperate fully with any investigation into Buttafuoco's relationship with her while she was underage, a condition Mary Jo herself was furious about, telling reporters at the time that Fisher was trying to destroy her family a second time. Fisher was sentenced that December to five to fifteen years.
The cooperation clause worked exactly as intended. In February 1993 the case against Buttafuoco was formally reopened, and Fisher testified against him. He eventually pleaded guilty to statutory rape and served between four and six months, depending on the source, a small fraction of the sentence handed to the teenager he'd abused.
Long Island Lolita
The case became one of the defining tabloid spectacles of the era. Fisher made the cover of People magazine that October, still awaiting trial, and nothing captured the media frenzy better than what happened the following January. All three major US television networks rushed out competing dramatisations of the story, and two of them, ABC's The Amy Fisher Story, starring a newly sober Drew Barrymore, and CBS's Casualties of Love: The Long Island Lolita Story, starring Alyssa Milano, aired in the exact same Sunday night time slot on 3 January 1993. A third version, NBC's Amy Fisher: My Story, aired that same week too, paired with an exclusive Fisher interview on Dateline. It's hard to think of another criminal case, before or since, that three competing television networks all decided was worth racing each other to dramatise within a year of it happening.
Seven Years, and an Apology in Court
Fisher served her sentence at Albion Correctional Facility in upstate New York. While incarcerated she alleged she'd been raped by a prison guard and pursued legal action over it for a period before dropping the case. Her early release in 1999 came about largely because of the person she'd shot.
Mary Jo Buttafuoco had spent years corresponding privately with Fisher's mother, and by 1999 was ready to say publicly what she'd apparently come to believe: that Fisher wasn't the calculating seductress the tabloids had built her into. "She needed to be punished, she tried to kill me, but Amy Fisher is not a Lolita. This is a sick girl," Mary Jo told the court. Fisher, in turn, apologised directly to her, telling her what had happened wasn't Joey's fault, it was hers, and that she was sorry. A judge vacated Fisher's original plea and resentenced her, clearing the way for parole. She walked out of Albion in May 1999 at 24 years old, seven years after the shooting.
What Happened Next
Joey and Mary Jo relocated to California and formally divorced in 2003. Joey's legal troubles didn't end with his statutory rape conviction. In 1995 he was arrested in Los Angeles and pleaded no contest to soliciting an undercover vice officer, which also triggered a parole violation back in New York and another ten months behind bars. He later served time for auto insurance fraud and picked up a separate conviction on ammunition charges. He tried, with limited success, to build a Hollywood career out of his notoriety, including a bizarre celebrity boxing match against Fisher's own husband, and remarried in 2005.
Fisher's path after prison was its own strange trajectory. She became a columnist for the Long Island Press, won a journalism award for it in 2004, and co-wrote a bestselling memoir, If I Knew Then, the same year. In one 2004 interview promoting the book, she offered her own explanation for what she'd done that morning in 1992, saying she'd taken a large amount of the club drug ecstasy beforehand, that it made her feel unusually strong and confident, and that what followed was a totally irrational act she still struggled to make sense of. It wasn't offered as an excuse, she said, just an attempt to explain a decision that rational people don't make.
She married a former NYPD officer, Louis Bellera, in 2003, and the couple had three children. In 2007, Bellera sold an amateur sex tape of the couple to an adult video distributor without her consent, an incident Fisher says pushed her toward a period working in adult films and strip clubs, something Bellera has publicly denied any role in. The marriage ended in divorce in 2015. Fisher later stepped back from adult entertainment, worked in real estate, and has spoken about her past both as a cautionary tale and, at points, in ways that read as genuine reflection on how young she actually was when it all started.
In 2006, Fisher and Mary Jo appeared together on television to discuss what had happened, with Fisher saying she wanted to heal and move on. Two years later she told reporters she felt no sympathy for Mary Jo without elaborating further, a reminder that whatever reconciliation had happened between them was never simple or complete on either side.
Rewriting the Narrative
Amy Fisher's case sits alongside a small, uncomfortable club of women whose real stories got flattened into punchlines by the media of their era, Lorena Bobbitt and Tonya Harding among them. In each case, a man's violence or a man's crime against a woman became, in the retelling, mostly a story about a woman behaving badly. Decades on, with more of the record public and more willingness to call statutory rape what it actually is rather than an affair, the Amy Fisher case reads less like a tabloid punchline and more like what it always was: an adult man's abuse of a child, followed by that child's own act of serious violence, followed by a media machine that found the first far less interesting to cover than the second.
You Might Also Like
For another 1990s case the tabloids badly mishandled, read What Happened to John and Lorena Bobbitt After 1993.
For another trial that became a media circus in the same era, see The Menéndez Brothers: A Tragic Tale of Wealth, Abuse, and Murder.
