Joey Buttafuoco

• 1. Introduction

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  In January 1993, Madonna finished performing her song "Bad Girl" on Saturday Night Live and tore up an 8-by-10 photograph of Joey Buttafuoco. She yelled "Fight the real enemy!" at the audience. The stunt spoofed Sinéad O'Connor, who had ripped a photograph of Pope John Paul II on the same program in October 1992. O'Connor's protest was aimed at sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church. Joey Buttafuoco, whose surname is pronounced butta-FEW-kaw, was born on the 11th of March 1956 and ran an auto body shop. So how did a Long Island repair man become a recognizable face for a pop star to mock on national television? And what did the public remember about him, and what did it leave out? The answers begin in Nassau County, New York.

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• 2. Long Island Roots

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  Massapequa, in Nassau County, is where Buttafuoco was raised after being born on Long Island. He graduated from Massapequa High School in 1974.

  In 1990, a man brought his car to Buttafuoco's garage for repairs. That visit is how Buttafuoco first met the man's daughter, Amy Fisher, who was 15 years old at the time.

  In July 1991, Fisher took her own vehicle to his auto body shop in Baldwin, Nassau County. Buttafuoco began sexually abusing her then. Fisher later said she had damaged her car several times as a pretext to see him. Less than a year later, a visit to his front door would turn all of this into national news.

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• 3. The Front Porch

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  On the 19th of May 1992, Amy Fisher went to the Buttafuoco home and confronted his wife, Mary Jo. Fisher gave a false identity, posing as her own made-up sister named Ann Marie.

  Fisher offered proof of the affair: a T-shirt that Joey had given her, printed with the logo of his auto body shop. The conversation on the porch turned heated. Mary Jo demanded that Fisher leave and turned toward the house to call her husband.

  Fisher then shot her in the face with a .25 caliber semiautomatic pistol. When Mary Jo regained consciousness, she named Fisher as the person who had shot her. That identification set a long run of court cases in motion.

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• 4. Two Competing Stories

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  Buttafuoco's lawyer told the courts that his client had never been involved with Fisher at all. By that account, the girl had invented the affair. Fisher's lawyer offered the opposite picture, describing a young woman whom Buttafuoco had manipulated into the shooting.

  The clashing claims drew heavy coverage from mainstream news outlets and from tabloids alike. The tabloids labelled Fisher the "Long Island Lolita." The coverage made both Fisher and Buttafuoco famous across the country.

  After Fisher was convicted of assault, prosecutors indicted Buttafuoco on 19 counts. They included statutory rape, sodomy, and endangering the welfare of a child. He first pleaded not guilty. He later changed his plea to guilty on one count of statutory rape, admitting that he had sex with Fisher when she was 16 and knew her age.

  He received a six-month sentence and was released after four months and nine days. The couple at the center of the case would soon leave New York for California.

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• 5. Aftermath in California

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  Ventura County Superior Court received divorce papers from Mary Jo Buttafuoco on the 3rd of February 2003. The filing ended a marriage that had moved west with the couple after Joey's release from jail. In 2005, Buttafuoco married Evanka Franjko.

  In July 2009, seventeen years after the shooting, Mary Jo published a book. Its title is Getting It Through My Thick Skull: Why I Stayed, What I Learned, and What Millions of People Involved with Sociopaths Need to Know.

  In it she describes her former husband as a sociopath. She also says that her son helped her arrive at that conclusion. Meanwhile, Buttafuoco's own record with the law had been growing, beginning with a charge in 1995.

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• 6. A Growing Record

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  A solicitation-of-prostitution charge in 1995 brought Buttafuoco a no contest plea, a fine, and two years of probation.

  In 2004, he pleaded guilty to auto insurance fraud. The judge sentenced him to a year in jail and five years of probation. One condition reaches far past the sentence itself. He is barred for the rest of his life from working in the auto body industry in California.

  Then came August 2005, when he was charged with illegal possession of ammunition. As a convicted felon, he cannot legally own it. Probation officers found the ammunition during a search of his home. He pleaded no contest and began serving his sentence on the 8th of January 2007. He was released on the 28th of April 2007.

  Through those same years, he kept turning up on television.

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• 7. Television and the Ring

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  Judge Judy hosted Buttafuoco in 1997, in a case that paired him with a woman named Ruth Webb.

  In 2002, he signed on for Celebrity Boxing. His opponent was supposed to be John Wayne Bobbitt. Bobbitt dropped out after an arrest for domestic abuse, and the female pro wrestler Joanie "Chyna" Laurer took his place.

  The crowd booed Buttafuoco. He still won, by a majority decision with scores of 29-28, 29-27, and 28-28.

  In 2006, he and Fisher were reunited at the Lingerie Bowl, where they appeared together for the coin toss.

  On the 5th of March 2009, he appeared on Judge Pirro and sued an adult film actress who had failed to pay an auto body bill. He won. The case that closed this run of appearances was about the same trade he had worked in when this all began.

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• 8. A Punchline Everywhere

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  During Fisher's trial, Buttafuoco showed up often on mainstream and tabloid news programs and talk shows. He gave multiple interviews to every kind of media, and the exposure made him a minor celebrity.

  David Letterman, in his last year hosting Late Night, mentioned the case so often that Buttafuoco's name became a recurring punchline. Saturday Night Live parodied the story in several sketches.

  The cartoon series The Critic poked fun at Letterman's fixation in the episode "Sherman of Arabia." The number one entry on its list of Top 10 Reasons Jay Sherman Is Still a Hostage was "Buttafuoco, Buttafuoco, Buttafuoco!"

  In 1996, Nas referred to Buttafuoco on the song "The Set Up," from his second album, It Was Written. Season 4, episode 18 of Friends joked that Buttafuoco had hurt the cause of people named Joey.

  On NewsRadio, a character faces sanctions for a story about Buttafuoco. The problem is not that the story is false. He had accidentally mispronounced the surname in a crude way on air.

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