Joey Buttafuoco | |
---|---|
![]() Joey Buttafuoco | |
Born | Joseph A. Buttafuoco March 11, 1956 Massapequa, New York, U.S. |
Occupation | Auto body shop owner |
Spouses | |
Children | 2 |
Joseph A. Buttafuoco (born March 11, 1956) is an American auto body shop owner. In 1992, Buttafuoco was convicted for his statutory rape of a minor, 17-year-old Amy Fisher, after Fisher shot his wife, Mary Jo Buttafuoco, in the face. Tabloid news coverage labelled Fisher the "Long Island Lolita". [1]
Buttafuoco later pleaded guilty to one count of statutory rape and served four months in jail. [2]
![]() | This section needs expansion. You can help by adding to it. (January 2023) |
Buttafuoco was born on Long Island, New York. He graduated from Massapequa High School. [3]
Buttafuoco first met then-15-year-old Amy Fisher when her father took his car to be repaired at his garage in 1990. The two began a sexual relationship around July 1991, when Fisher took her vehicle to Buttafuoco's auto body shop in Baldwin, Nassau County, New York. [1] Fisher later said she had damaged the car several times as a pretext to see him. [4]
On May 19, 1992, Fisher confronted Buttafuoco's wife, Mary Jo, at the Buttafuocos' home. When Mary Jo answered the door, Fisher—posing as her own (fictitious) sister Ann Marie—offered, as proof of the affair, a T-shirt that Joey had given her with the logo of his auto body shop on it. The front porch confrontation escalated, and when Mary Jo demanded that Fisher leave and turned to go into the house to call Joey, Fisher shot her in the face with a .25 caliber semiautomatic pistol. Once Mary Jo regained consciousness, she identified Fisher as her assailant. [1]
The subsequent court cases involving a series of conflicting claims received significant news coverage in both mainstream news outlets and tabloids. [5]
Buttafuoco's lawyer maintained that Buttafuoco was never involved with Fisher and Fisher had invented the affair, while Fisher's lawyer portrayed Fisher as a victim whom Buttafuoco manipulated into committing the assault. [6]
After Fisher's assault conviction, Buttafuoco was indicted on 19 counts of statutory rape, sodomy, and endangering the welfare of a child. He initially pleaded not guilty. [7] He later changed his plea to guilty, admitting he had sex with Fisher when she was 16 and that he knew her age at the time. [8] He was sentenced to six months' jail time and was released after serving four months and nine days of the sentence. [9]
After his release from jail, Joey and Mary Jo Buttafuoco moved to California, where Mary Jo filed divorce papers in Ventura County Superior Court on February 3, 2003. [10] In 2005 Buttafuoco married Evanka Franjko. [11]
In July 2009, seventeen years after the incident, Mary Jo published a book titled Getting It Through My Thick Skull: Why I Stayed, What I Learned, and What Millions of People Involved with Sociopaths Need to Know. In the book, she characterizes Buttafuoco as a sociopath, and says that her son helped her come to that conclusion. [12]
Buttafuoco has been convicted of crimes since the 1992 shooting incident:
The significant coverage of the shooting incident made Buttafuoco a minor celebrity. During Fisher's trial, Buttafuoco appeared frequently on mainstream and tabloid news programs and talk shows and gave multiple interviews to all forms of media. [6] David Letterman, in his last year of hosting Late Night with David Letterman , discussed the incident so often that Buttafuoco's name was a recurring punchline, [22] while Saturday Night Live parodied the case in multiple sketches. [23] The Critic parodied Letterman's obsession with the scandal in the episode "Sherman of Arabia" with the number one reason on his Top 10 Reasons Jay Sherman Is Still a Hostage being "Buttafuoco, Buttafuoco, Buttafuoco!" [24]
During an appearance on Saturday Night Live in January 1993, Madonna performed her single "Bad Girl" from her fifth studio album, Erotica (1992). At the end of the performance, she ripped up an 8-by-10 photograph of Buttafuoco, while yelling to her audience "Fight the real enemy!". This action was a spoof of the actions taken by Sinéad O'Connor when she acted on the program in October 1992, in which she ripped apart a photograph of Pope John Paul II and yelled the phrase as a protest against sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church. [25]
On Season 4 Episode 18 of Friends , Buttafuoco is referenced as hurting the cause of people named Joey. [26] He was also referenced in an episode of NewsRadio , where one of the characters is sanctioned for doing a story on Buttafuoco, not because the story was not true, but because he accidentally mispronounced the surname as "butta-fuck-o". [27]
The American Correctional Association is a private, non-profit, non-governmental trade association and accrediting body for the corrections industry, the oldest and largest such association in the world. The organization was founded in 1870 and has a significant place in the history of prison reform in the U.S.
Mary Katherine "Mary Kay" Fualaau, was an American teacher who pleaded guilty in 1997 to two counts of felony second-degree rape of a child. Letourneau was 34, and the child, Vili Fualaau, was 12 years old when she initiated the sexual abuse. He was her sixth-grade student at an elementary school in Burien, Washington. While awaiting sentencing, she gave birth to Fualaau's daughter. With the state seeking a seven and a half year prison sentence, she reached a plea agreement calling for six months in jail with three months suspended and no contact with Fualaau for life, among other terms. The case received national attention.
Jessica Hahn is an American model and actress. She frequently appeared on The Howard Stern Show throughout the late 1980s and into the 2000s.
Casualties of Love: The "Long Island Lolita" Story is a 1993 American television crime drama film based on the story of Amy Fisher and Joey Buttafuoco, written and directed by John Herzfeld. Alyssa Milano and Jack Scalia played the main characters. It aired on CBS on January 3, 1993, the same night and time as ABC's film The Amy Fisher Story, though the latter film was much higher rated in the TV ratings and critically praised.
The Federal Medical Center, Carswell is a United States federal prison in Fort Worth, Texas, for female inmates of all security levels, primarily with special medical and mental health needs. It is operated by the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP), a division of the United States Department of Justice. The facility also has a prison camp for minimum-security female inmates.
Mary Jo Buttafuoco is an American author and motivational speaker. In 1992, she was shot in the face by Amy Fisher, a teenager with whom her husband had an affair.
Celebrity Boxing is a FOX television show that aired in 2002, in which celebrities whose careers and/or notoriety had diminished were pitted against each other in exhibition boxing matches. The contestants wore headgear during the fights, which were scheduled for three rounds apiece. Two episodes of the show were aired.
Massapequa High School is a public high school located in Massapequa, in Nassau County, on Long Island, in New York, United States. It serves students in grades 10 through 12.
Amy Elizabeth Fisher is an American woman, who, in 1992, at the age of 17, shot and severely wounded Mary Jo Buttafuoco, the wife of Joey Buttafuoco, with whom Fisher was in a sexual relationship. Initially charged with first-degree attempted murder, she eventually pleaded guilty to first-degree aggravated assault and served seven years in prison. Due to her age and her affair with a much older man, she became known in the tabloid media as "the Long Island Lolita". Fisher was paroled in 1999 and became a writer, a webcam model, and a pornographic actress.
Joseph "Jo Jo" Corozzo, Sr. is a New York mobster who was the reputed consigliere of the Gambino crime family.
The Amy Fisher Story is a 1993 American television film dramatizing the events surrounding Amy Fisher's teenage affair with Joey Buttafuoco and her conviction for aggravated assault for shooting Buttafuoco's wife. The film was produced by ABC and originally aired on that network; in 1993, it was released on VHS and in 2001 on DVD.
Molly Shattuck is an American socialite, convicted sex offender and child rapist. She is the former wife of businessman Mayo A. Shattuck III. She came to national prominence when she became the then-oldest cheerleader on record for the National Football League when she began cheering for the Baltimore Ravens Cheerleaders at age 38.
Robert Joel "Joe" Halderman is a television news writer, director, former producer for CBS News, and convicted felon. Halderman was found guilty of attempted extortion of talk show host David Letterman.
John Wayne Bobbitt and Lorena Bobbitt were an American former couple, married on June 18, 1989, whose relationship received international press coverage in 1993 when Lorena severed John's penis with a knife while he was asleep in bed; the penis was successfully surgically reattached. Lorena, an Ecuadorian immigrant, claimed that her husband John, a bar bouncer and former U.S. Marine, had raped and abused her for years. John was charged with rape later that year but was acquitted and, subsequently, starred in two pornographic films. The next year, Lorena was acquitted of assault by reason of insanity and went on to start a foundation for domestic abuse victims and their children. The couple divorced in 1995.
Amy Sauber Berman Jackson is an American attorney and jurist serving as a senior United States district judge of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia.
Anthony Kirkland is an American serial killer. Between 2006 and 2009, Kirkland murdered two women and two girls in the Cincinnati area, following a 16-year prison term for the 1987 killing of his girlfriend.
Kylie Maria Antonia Maybury was an Australian schoolgirl from Preston, an inner-city suburb of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. Maybury was kidnapped, raped, and murdered on 6 November 1984, the date of the 1984 Melbourne Cup Day; and she was nicknamed in the Melbourne tabloid newspaper The Sun News-Pictorial as the Cup Day Girl.
Amy Fisher: My Story is a 1992 American drama film directed by Bradford May and written by Phil Penningroth. The film stars Ed Marinaro, Noelle Parker, Boyd Kestner, Pierrette Grace, Lawrence Dane, Kate Lynch and Kathleen Laskey. The film premiered on NBC on December 28, 1992.