Mary Jo Buttafuoco: 'Getting Shot Was the Easy Part'

The shooting victim of Amy Fisher speaks out on 'Snapped'
By Neal Colgrass,  Newser Staff
Posted Aug 18, 2018 12:10 PM CDT
Mary Jo Buttafuoco: I Forgive 'Long Island Lolita'
In this July, 1992, file photo, Amy Fisher, jailed as a teenager for shooting Mary Jo Buttafuoco, the wife of her then-lover Joey Buttafuoco, is shown in Merrick, NY.   (AP Photo/Michael Alexander, File)

Would you forgive the "Long Island Lolita"? That, apparently, was Mary Jo Buttafuoco's cross to bear. "For a long time … I hated her," says the 63-year-old who was shot in the head by her husband's mistress, Amy Fisher, back in 1992, reports Fox News. "I hated what she did, I hated that she came to my house, interrupted my life. The audacity of this punk to come and do this. The medication would shut me up … Then you get the anger again." Talking on the Oxygen true-crime series Snapped, Buttafuoco says she went on raising her children with then-husband Joey despite his dalliance with Fisher, the 17-year-old who showed up at Mary Jo's Long Island door with a .25-caliber gun. But Mary Jo slipped into drug addiction and ended up at the Betty Ford Center.

"I had survived this gunshot wound, but I was now a drug addict if you will," she says. At Betty Ford, her rehab therapists asked if she wanted to carry this rage around her whole life. "I sobered up and I realized, 'You’re right… I can't feel like this anymore.' To move forward you have to forgive. You have to." Divorced from Joey in 2003 after a 26-year marriage, Mary Jo wrote a book about her experience called Getting It Through My Thick Skull, People reported in 2016. While Joey re-married and developed a TV/film career, and Fisher tried a stint in porn after serving seven years, Mary Jo preferred the quiet life. But she hasn't forgotten the media frenzy of 1992: "It was awful … The gunshot was the easy part. Getting shot was the easy part. I couldn’t believe what went on … I was in agony." (More Long Island stories.)

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