Joey & Mary Jo Buttafuoco & Daughter Tell All Years After Amy Fisher Shooting
Permanently maimed former wife said, 'Thank God I'm still here to talk about it.'
Nov. 9 2019, Updated 11:10 p.m. ET
Joey and Mary Jo Buttafuoco and their only daughter Jessie have told all to the ABC TV show 20/20, years after Amy Fisher's crime.
On last night's episode, called "Growing Up Buttafuoco," the family remembered the aftermath of Joey's teen mistress Amy Fisher shooting Mary Jo in the head in May 1992, which sparked the notorious "Long Island Lolita" media circus.
Miraculously, the New York auto body owner's wife survived the attack.
"Imagine the audacity of her," Mary Jo remarked to her daughter as they returned to the old family home where Amy shot her on 20/20.
"Thank God I'm still here to talk about it," she said and hugged Jessie.
While at first Joey denied having an affair with Amy, which she claimed began when she was just 16 years old, he later confessed.
On December 2, 1992, Amy was sentenced to 5 to 15 years in prison for shooting Mary Jo. She served seven years and was granted parole in May 1999 after a judge vacated her guilty plea and shortened her sentence.
Amy went on to star in porn movies and Mary Jo publicly forgave her.
Joey wound up being charged with statutory rape and pleaded guilty in October 1993. He served six months in prison.
"I colored a lot of coloring books so he could put them on the jail wall," Jessie said.
Mary Joe and Joey's daughter, who was just 9 when her mom was attacked, said she believed her parents had "an ideal relationship" before the shooting.
But he'd cheated on her mom with Amy.
"I asked Joe a million times did you have sex with her and a million times he denied it," recalled Mary Jo, who stood by her husband him at the time. "Joey is a fabulous liar."
Mary Jo said of Amy confronting her at the door of her house and opening fire, "I turned my head…that's the end of my life as I knew it."
Looking much different from his '90s fame, Joey, 63, told the ABC cameras his wife was near death: "That bullet had gone in, broke the jaw and severed the carotid artery. For whatever reason, that bullet wound up at the base of her brain above her spinal column."
Incredibly, Mary Jo, 64, endured, although she was permanently disfigured.
"Half of her face is drooping," Jessie recalled of her mother's return from the hospital.
Joey sighed of having sex with Amy that it "went where it went and it was over real fast but with bad results. My relationship with Amy was inappropriate and that's as far as I'm going to go with that."
Mary Jo said she became suicidal during her ordeal, contemplating overdosing on pills or asphyxiating herself and Jessie and her brother, who stays out of the spotlight.
"I never knew that," Joey told 20/20. "But I now understand that" due to Mary Jo's "stress."
Mary Jo said she got clean of drugs at the Betty Ford Center and the Buttafuocos ultimately divorced in 2003.
As RadarOnline.com readers know, in 2012, Mary Jo found love again and tied the knot with Las Vegas resident Stuart Tendler. But shocking court documents showed that Mary Jo endured a tumultuous divorce from her second husband just months before he died. In fact, she was omitted from his obituary.
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Jessie told viewers of her father's post-Amy life, "My dad's always getting into mischief."
Sadly, she says she's "hurting and in pain" and has "a complete inability to love somebody" after her parents' scandal that stunned America.
