Case File: Amy Fisher

Amy Fisher was born in August 1974, and grew up in Merrick, N.Y. An only child, she outwardly lived a comfortable suburban Long Island life. However, Fisher later described an unhappy childhood in which she often felt ignored and emotionally neglected. She also alleged that her father was physically abusive toward her and her mother and said she experienced sexual abuse by a relative as a child, claims that became part of her later account of the years leading up to the shooting.

Fisher was a 16-year-old high school student when she began a relationship with Joey Buttafuoco, a married auto body shop owner nearly 20 years her senior, after bringing a car to his shop for repairs in 1991. Fisher later described his attention as intoxicating after years of feeling overlooked at home, saying he treated her well, bought her gifts and made her feel important. Looking back, she has characterized the relationship as grooming; the two began having sex while she was below New York's age of consent.

Later that year, Fisher began working for an escort service. According to Fisher and her defense attorneys, Buttafuoco helped connect her with the agency after she told him she needed money. Still a teenager, she began having sex with clients for money while continuing her relationship with him.

As Fisher became increasingly attached to Buttafuoco, she wanted him to leave Mary Jo and their two children. He refused, and Fisher increasingly came to view his wife as the obstacle preventing them from being together.

By early 1992, Fisher had become increasingly fixated on removing Mary Jo from Joey's life. She later claimed Joey knew she was considering violence and encouraged the idea, allegations he consistently denied. Investigators established, however, that Fisher had discussed harming Mary Jo with others and had made preparations before the attack.

Fisher eventually obtained a .25-caliber semiautomatic handgun from Peter Guagenti, an acquaintance who agreed to drive her to the Buttafuoco home in Massapequa, N.Y. On May 19, 1992, Fisher, then 17, arrived at the house while Guagenti waited nearby. When Mary Jo answered the door, Fisher gave a false name and claimed Joey was having an affair with her younger sister, showing her a T-shirt from Joey's auto body shop as supposed proof.

As Mary Jo turned away, Fisher pulled out the handgun and shot her in the head at close range before fleeing with Guagenti. Neighbors rushed to Mary Jo's aid, and she was taken to the hospital in critical condition. Despite a severed carotid artery and severe injuries to her face and head, she survived. The bullet could not be removed safely, leaving her with permanent facial paralysis and hearing loss.

Suspicion turned toward Fisher almost immediately after the shooting. Joey told police about the teenager who had been coming to his auto body shop and suggested she might be responsible. When Mary Jo was able to communicate with investigators, she identified Fisher from a photograph as the young woman who had appeared at her door. Police arrested the 17-year-old on May 21, two days after the shooting, and charged her with attempted murder and criminal use of a firearm.

Detectives soon uncovered evidence that the attack had been planned. Guagenti, the acquaintance who drove Fisher to Massapequa, was accused of helping her obtain the .25-caliber handgun and accompanying her to the Buttafuoco home. Investigators also learned that Fisher had previously discussed harming Mary Jo with other acquaintances. In August, police recovered a .25-caliber pistol and a pair of stolen license plates from a storm drain near Fisher's Merrick home. Authorities investigated whether the plates had been used to conceal the identity of the car during the attack and whether the weapon was the gun used to shoot Mary Jo.

Fisher initially pleaded not guilty and maintained in a written statement that the gun had discharged accidentally. Prosecutors rejected that account, arguing that the preparations before the shooting—including obtaining the weapon, arranging transportation and concealing the car's license plates—pointed to a deliberate attempt to kill her.

At the same time, Fisher made allegations about Joey's role in the events leading to the shooting. She said they had begun a sexual relationship when she was 16 and claimed he knew she intended to harm his wife and had encouraged her. Joey denied both having a sexual relationship with Fisher and participating in any plot against Mary Jo. Prosecutors ultimately found insufficient evidence to charge him in connection with the shooting, but Fisher's claims about their relationship prompted a separate investigation into whether Joey had committed statutory rape.

Fisher was charged with attempted murder and weapons offenses and initially held on $2 million bail. Almost immediately, the prosecution became entangled with an extraordinary media frenzy. New York tabloids branded the 17-year-old the "Long Island Lolita," while television programs aired reports about her relationship with Joey and her work for an escort service. Reporters surrounded both families, and publishers and television producers competed for rights to their stories before Fisher's case had even reached trial.

Fisher initially pleaded not guilty, and her attorneys sought to portray the shooting within the context of her relationship with Joey, arguing that the married man nearly 20 years her senior had begun having sex with her when she was 16 and exerted considerable influence over her. Joey publicly denied having a sexual relationship with Fisher or knowing anything about a plan to harm his wife, while Mary Jo stood by her husband and rejected Fisher's allegations. The conflicting accounts increasingly played out in the press as well as in the criminal case.

Rather than face trial for attempted murder, Fisher reached a plea agreement with Nassau County prosecutors in September 1992. She pleaded guilty to first-degree assault and agreed to cooperate with the continuing investigation into Joey. The agreement called for a sentence of five to 15 years in prison. Mary Jo strongly opposed the deal, believing Fisher was receiving unfairly light treatment.

The publicity surrounding Fisher only intensified while she awaited sentencing. A boyfriend, Paul Makely, secretly videotaped her discussing prison, sex and the money she hoped to make from her notoriety, then sold the recording to the syndicated tabloid program Hard Copy. Its broadcast generated another wave of damaging headlines. After seeing the tape, Fisher attempted suicide and entered psychiatric treatment. After her release, she voluntarily returned to custody rather than remain outside jail amid the relentless media attention.

On December 1, 1992, Fisher was sentenced to five to 15 years in state prison. At the hearing, Mary Jo described the permanent injuries and upheaval the shooting had caused her and her family.

Questions surrounding Joey's involvement did not disappear with Fisher's imprisonment. Although prosecutors initially declined to charge him over his relationship with Fisher, the investigation was revived in 1993, and a Nassau County grand jury returned a 19-count indictment that included statutory rape, sodomy and endangering the welfare of a child. In October 1993, after roughly a year and a half of denials, Joey pleaded guilty to third-degree rape. He was sentenced to six months in jail, five years' probation and a $5,000 fine and ultimately served about four months behind bars.

Fisher, meanwhile, spent nearly seven years in prison. During that time, she pursued challenges to her original plea and sentence, arguing that she had received ineffective legal representation. By the late 1990s, she had also begun corresponding with Mary Jo. In April 1999, Fisher apologized to her in court and accepted responsibility for the shooting. Mary Jo, citing her religious faith, said she had forgiven Fisher and supported a reduction in her sentence. With support from Mary Jo and prosecutors, a judge reduced Fisher's sentence, and she was released in May 1999.

She initially attempted to build a life away from the notoriety surrounding the case, eventually marrying, having children and working as a columnist for the Long Island Press. In 2004, she published the memoir If I Knew Then..., reflecting on the shooting, her relationship with Joey and her years in prison.

Fisher returned to tabloid attention in 2007 when her estranged husband, Louis Bellera, sold a private sex tape of the couple to an adult-video company. Fisher initially fought its release but later accepted a six-figure payout and participated in promoting the video. By 2010, she had entered the adult entertainment industry professionally, signing a deal to appear in a series of adult films. She also reunited publicly with Joey on television, once again drawing attention to a relationship that had dominated headlines when she was a teenager.

Mary Jo continued living with the permanent physical effects of the shooting, including facial paralysis and hearing loss. She remained with Joey for years after his guilty plea, but the couple eventually divorced. She later became an advocate for people affected by facial paralysis and has spoken publicly about survival and forgiveness, while making clear that forgiving Fisher did not mean excusing the attack or the damage it caused.

The Amy Fisher case became a national sensation almost immediately, fueled by its combination of suburban violence, adultery and the involvement of a teenage girl. Joey and Mary Jo also became household names as reporters chronicled the shooting, Fisher's prosecution and the increasingly public dispute over Joey's relationship with her.

The extraordinary attention helped make the case a landmark of early 1990s tabloid culture. Television newsmagazines and talk shows competed for interviews, while Fisher and the Buttafuocos became frequent targets of late-night television and comedy sketches. Most unusually, all three major broadcast networks rushed competing dramatizations into production, with three different filmed versions of the case airing during the 1992-93 television season—less than a year after the shooting.

The coverage also shaped how the public understood the people involved. Fisher was widely portrayed as an obsessive teenage seductress, while Mary Jo was often reduced to the role of the betrayed wife, and Joey initially maintained that no sexual relationship with Fisher had occurred. His later guilty plea to having sex with Fisher when she was 16 complicated that narrative and brought greater scrutiny to the nearly 20-year age difference between them. In later interviews, Fisher has characterized the relationship as grooming and argued that the sensational coverage largely ignored the power imbalance between a teenage girl and an adult married man.

Interest in the case continued long after the original prosecutions ended. Several years after Fisher published her memoir, Mary Jo told her own story in Getting It Through My Thick Skull, published in 2009. The case has also been revisited in numerous documentaries, television specials and retrospective interviews, including Growing Up Buttafuoco, which examined the shooting from the perspective of Mary Jo and Joey's daughter, Jessica, and the 2026 Lifetime film I Am Mary Jo Buttafuoco, which placed Mary Jo's experience at the center of the story.

More than three decades later, the case remains both a notorious attempted murder and a defining example of the true-crime media culture of the 1990s. Later accounts have increasingly looked beyond the "Long Island Lolita" headlines to examine Fisher's age and relationship with Joey, Mary Jo's lasting injuries and the impact of years of publicity on the Buttafuoco family. That reassessment has added complexity to a story that was originally presented to millions of Americans largely as a sensational love triangle.