The ‘prostitute with a gun’ was a middle-class high school girl

For background on the Amy Fisher story, please read Panic Around Pagers: Old and New (5 min read)
Thirty years ago, parents worried bad people would place beepers on their kids. The risks have mutated.
When we were reading Amy Fisher headlines 32 years ago and worrying about what pagers might do to our lives, most of us did not imagine them as explosives.

Anyhow:

After Fisher was sentenced to prison on Dec. 2, 1992, media attention continued. There were to be multiple movies and books, as well as the trial of Joey Buttafuoco.

Several movies aired on network television. NBC aired "Amy Fisher: My Story" on Dec. 28. CBS aired "Casualties of Love: The 'Long Island Lolita' Story" on Jan. 3 during the same hours that ABC aired "The Amy Fisher Story", which, according to Sheila Weller, was a competitive approach "unprecedented in TV history." All of the movies received high Nielsen ratings.

Additionally, Fisher's memoir Amy Fisher: My Story, written with Sheila Weller, was released in 1993 while she was in prison. The book reported huge amounts of detail about her affairs, her prostitution, and her premeditation of the murder attempt, but it did not have much to say about feelings of remorse, other than a grunting acknowledgment (filtered through Weller) that she knew she deserved to be in prison.

Joe Buttafuoco initially said he knew Amy Fisher only insofar as he'd serviced the Fisher family's cars at his auto body shop. But on Oct. 5, 1993, he pleaded guilty to one count of statutory rape for having sex with Fisher while she was still 16. He served several months in prison for it. Even after this revelation, the Buttafuocos remained married. They moved to California and stayed together until Mary Jo filed for divorce in 2003. The shooting had left her with permanent nerve damage and chronic pain.

When Amy Fisher was released from prison in 1999, she married Lou Bellera, a former cop, and they had three children. She took a job as a columnist for the Long Island Press and released her memoir If I Knew Then in 2004.

Following the Buttafuocos' divorce, Amy Fisher and Joey Buttafuoco came back into contact. In 2006, they participated in the coin toss at a football game, and in 2007, they appeared on television together. At this late date, however, a decade and a half after the original events, it seemed there was little of great national interest to add to their story.

On Feb. 11, 2008, Fox News published an interview in which Fisher called her shooting victim a "nonentity" and complained that she was making money off her ordeal:

"I feel no sympathy for Mary Jo the multimillionaire! The fact that Mary Jo has a bullet in her head means nothing! I still have silicone in my boobs, and you don't hear me complaining. She can't feel her bullet, and I can't feel my silicone."

(Fisher also bragged that she'd recently had sex with Joey Buttafuoco during a week-long affair and that she didn't enjoy it because he'd aged.)

The following month, she appeared as a commentator on truTV's "The Smoking Gun Presents: World's Dumbest..." show. Former figure skater Tonya Harding has also appeared as a commentator there. Similar to Fisher, Harding became a notorious media figure in the 1990s after rival figure skater Nancy Kerrigan was attacked with a tire iron. Harding denied knowing of the attack before it happened, but she admitted to helping her ex-husband and bodyguard cover up their involvement. The implied bad-girl comparison between Fisher and Harding – neither of whom managed to regain successful careers, and who have been reduced to performing in degrading verbal and physical fights on television – was not promising for either of them.

In 2009, Mary Jo Buttafuoco, by then engaged to marry a new man, released her book Getting it Through My Thick Skull: Why I Stayed, What I Learned, and What Millions of People Involved With Sociopaths Need to Know, written with Julie McCarron.

In 2011, Fisher appeared on "Celebrity Rehab" discussing her pornographic performances and use of alcohol. The televised charity fundraiser "Celebrity Fight Night" pitted Buttafuoco against Fisher's husband Bellera in the boxing ring, while Fisher was matched against Nadya Suleman (famous only for deliberately having fourteen children as a single mother).

In 2012, Joey Buttafuoco claimed he was writing his own memoir. “It's going to have every single detail that hasn't been out there yet," he said. "It's called 'Closure' because I think without full disclosure you have no closure." Whether the memoir will ever be completed and published, and whether there will be a market for it over twenty years after his various crimes – both the alleged and the admitted – remains to be seen. Public interest has moved on. As of 2024, it seems no memoir has been published.

Image: You never know who might be standing on your doorstep. Photograph of a doorbell by Jim Kuhn, Wheaton, Md. Uploaded by Yarl. © [CC-BY-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.