Getting It Through My Thick Skull (12 page)

I made it home and eventually recovered. All three TV movies aired on the same weekend. The worst year of my life came to a close. The whole case and its attendant publicity should have been over and done with. But with Amy securely behind prison bars, public opinion once again swayed. Now there was a strong, lingering feeling among the general public that Joe had gotten away with something. Given the inflammatory press headlines about him, I could see why. He had been portrayed as a rapist, a conspirator to murder his wife, the worst kind of cheater and liar in the headlines for months.

The outcry had risen to such a fever pitch that Michael Rindenow advised us to retain a criminal attorney, just in case. Marvyn Kornberg, a prominent attorney best known for representing cops in trouble, entered our lives. He and Joey became very close.

The official announcement that Joey had been cleared did nothing to stop the coverage. Matters got to the point where Geraldo Rivera actually held a mock trial on his show, playacting what the charges would have been if Joey had been indicted, complete with a judge and jury. Legal experts were all over the airwaves slamming Joey, insisting that he had had everything to do with this girl’s actions. We saw it differently, of course. The story was over, but it had been such a ratings bonanza for months that the media was going to find every angle they could to keep this story going.

This crucifixion by media was very upsetting to all our families and it wasn’t going away. Marvyn convinced all of us that we needed to take the offensive. This meant a media blitz to clear Joe’s name. Joe was all for it. He liked the press; he had become friendly with many of the reporters covering the story. He actually used to bring pizza to the reporters camped out on our lawn! They enjoyed talking and kidding around together. It didn’t escape my notice that Joe thrived on the attention and had especially loved being on a movie set in L.A.

“Enough, Joe,” I told him wearily, several times. “It’s over. Let’s try to get back to a normal life.”

“Oh, no, Mary Jo—I need to clear my name!” Getting his good name back became a huge mission for him, and he soon became obsessed with the idea. Now, let’s think for a moment how a normal person in this situation would behave. He was getting away with no legal repercussions, not to mention that he had the full support of both our families and an entire neighborhood full of people standing firmly behind him. His wife was alive and functioning, and our friends and neighbors went out of their way to insulate us from the harshness that awaited us outside of our community.

Wouldn’t a normal person say to himself, “Whew, I dodged a bullet on that one,”
shut up
, and put the incident behind him, no matter what the press said? Maybe think about devoting the rest of his life to being a good partner to his badly injured spouse? That’s what I would have done; I think that’s what most people would do in such a situation. But fame—or notoriety might be a better term—had come to us, a very unwanted and unwelcome development for me, but not for Joey. Whenever he started in about his mission to clear his name, all I could rationalize was,
Huh! He
must
be innocent, or he’d let this thing die. He really does want to vindicate himself like any normal, innocent person who gets falsely accused of something.

I agreed to join him for an appearance on
The Phil Donahue Show
in this misguided campaign in January 1993, less than eight months after I’d been shot. I was in no shape to make a public appearance anywhere, but I had made the commitment and felt I should honor it. I was mainly there to support Joey. I knew he was very far from the monster the press continued to portray. I liked
The Phil Donahue Show
and had watched it for years. From what I’d seen, Phil seemed like a warm, engaging man who really listened and was polite and respectful to his guests.

Both sets of parents, several family members, and a few neighbors showed up to sit in the audience at the show, where the other audience members proceeded to vilify Joe and attack me, too. “Yes, I knew her. Yes, I drove her home, but I never did anything . . .” was the gist of what he said over and over. The audience wasn’t buying it. All the viewers felt very free to berate me for what they saw as my stupidity as I sat there frozen like a deer in the headlights. This audience whipped themselves into an absolute finger-pointing, name-calling frenzy. It was horrible. I felt as close as I could to being trapped on an episode of
The Jerry Springer Show
. What happened while we were sitting on that stage was the furthest thing imaginable from the calm, reasonable, back-and-forth discussion I had envisioned.

On the way home from what had been a trying ordeal, I said, “I’m done. Joey. I
am done
with all this. No traveling, no appearances anywhere. I just want to concentrate on getting better.” I was such an easy target for the press. My paralyzed face, garbled speech, and devotion to Joey had been mocked endlessly nationwide on
Saturday Night Live,
newspapers, television shows, and radio. Not only did this hurt my feelings terribly, but it made me angrier. We were out of our league when it came to the media, and I had the sense to realize it.

That was it for me, but Joe and Kornberg continued on the great Joey Buttafuoco “I’m Clearing My Name Tour.” The whole idea was absurd. He wasn’t facing any charges; therefore my husband had no need for a lawyer. But Kornberg loved seeing his own face on television and wanted to extend his fifteen minutes. There was no good reason for Joey to be anywhere talking about anything; the whole episode was over and done with. But he and his lawyer egged each other on. Some of these appearances were paid, which I had no problem with—
that
I could at least understand. What I did have a problem with was how much he loved the publicity. Joey and Marvyn were a terrible match, and the harm he did Joey was incalculable.

When Larry King called, they were both quite anxious to appear. Both did their best to convince me to join them, but I absolutely refused. So, Dumb and Dumber showed up on
Larry King Live
saying, “The cops messed this case up . . . they’re stupid . . . they’re morons . . .” and denigrating them at every turn. Larry, meanwhile, asked a question about the receipt Joey had supposedly signed at a local motel. “Well, what about this motel receipt? It looks like you signed it.”

“Oh, that’s not my handwriting!” Joey went on and on about how he’d been framed. It was clear that he believed he could talk anybody into anything. In fact, I believe he had talked
himself
into believing his own version of events. It had worked pretty well so far, anyway.

Joey’s behavior was a textbook example of a very interesting phenomenon: the inability of many sociopaths to close their mouths and resist the spotlight, even when it’s clear to the whole world that they should just lie low and
shut up
. O. J. Simpson and Scott Peterson, for example, would later display this same trait—rambling on and on in the misguided belief that their version of events made sense, with the absolute conviction that given the chance to talk long enough and explain it well enough, they could convince everyone of the “truth.” But back then this was all uncharted territory. We had the dubious distinction of being the hottest “real people” crime story to catch America’s imagination in years.

Joey simply could not stop talking—the downfall of a sociopath. The district attorney and cops back on Long Island, meanwhile, were far from pleased with this barrage of bad publicity. They were already being bombarded with angry phone calls and letters from people all over the country asking, “How could you let this child molester/rapist/murder plot participant
off
?” Meanwhile, there he was on TV every night, badmouthing these very same authorities. Prosecuting Joey hadn’t been worth the DA’s time. Because Amy’s crime had been so egregious and her behavior so callous, they really didn’t want to bother going after Joe once they realized she had acted alone. That feeling sure changed after a few nationwide appearances from Joe and his lawyer. Behind the scenes, a grand jury convened to investigate Amy’s allegations of statutory rape. The authorities started pulling together an indictment.

In April 1993—ten months after I was shot and five months after the decision that Joey would not be charged in connection with the crime—the DA’s office announced to the press that they were going after Joey: sixteen counts of statutory rape, twelve counts of third-degree sodomy, and one count of endangering the welfare of a child. Each count was a felony carrying a possible penalty of one to four years. He could conceivably be put away for more than ninety years—a situation I blamed entirely on the fact that he and his lawyer could not manage to close their mouths. The two of them, and their big mouths, and their spotlight. This is what had come of the great campaign.

I literally lost my mind when Marvyn called to break the news. I started screaming like a banshee, never mind that the children were in the house and my outburst was scaring them to death. No matter what, I had kept up a strong front for Paul and Jessie. I refused to let my behavior traumatize them further. I had told them a hundred ways and a million times that I was going to be all right. Not this time. I completely lost control. Joe raced into the room and tried to put his arms around me to calm me. I flailed away at him in a white-hot rage, wailing and cursing at the top of my lungs. I was making so much noise that our next-door neighbors could hear me and came running over. I screamed at them, too, and pushed them away when they tried to approach. Eventually, I fell to the floor, pounding and kicking and screaming even louder.

Everyone was horrified. No one knew how to handle this situation. “Mommy, you’re the fighting Irish,” nine-year-old Jessica pleaded, referring to a Notre Dame baseball cap I wore during my recovery. “You’ll be okay.”

“No!” I screamed at my wide-eyed, terrified daughter. “It’s not okay. Nothing is ever going to be okay again! This nightmare will never end!” Joe eventually called the police. My fit showed no signs of ending, and no one knew what to do for me. The officers said they were on their way (we were on a first-name basis with every cop in town by then), and advised Joey to call my doctor.

The doctor, who could hear me yelling in the background over the phone, told Joe to find the strongest sedative he could in the jumble of all my prescription bottles. There were some pills there I had never even used. Joey forced me to swallow two of them. “Sure! Give them all to me! I want to take them all and die! I can’t go on like this!” I screamed.

When the police entered the house, I immediately turned my rage onto them.

“This is all your fault, all of it! What the fuck is the matter with all of you? Some teenage hooker does her best to murder me, and this is what happens? Indicting my husband is how you all help me? Assholes!” My tirade lasted at least ten more minutes until I had completely worn myself out. At that point, of course, Joe had to comfort me, literally carry me to bed, and try to reassure me that everything would be all right. “You and that fucking lawyer of yours—he ought to go to jail with you!” I told him before passing out.

Our spring and summer were spent in legal limbo as we tried to figure out the best thing to do about this vengeful DA. The situation bordered on the absurd; the sheer number of separate counts was completely over the top. The authorities were really gunning for him. We truly believed Joey was being obviously and unfairly persecuted.

In the end, at the bargaining table, Joe agreed to plead guilty to one count of statutory rape and was sentenced to six months in county jail, a $5,000 fine, and five years’ probation. Joe painted this plea bargain as a sacrifice he was making to end all this madness. He was completely innocent, he swore, but plenty of innocent people rot in jail for things they didn’t do. He was the victim of overzealous prosecutors. I agreed with him completely on that point, but I didn’t bother to point out that he had brought this whole mess on himself.

The media circus was back on. Once again, the eyes of the world were fixed squarely on the Massapequa courthouse on the day Joe formally went before the judge and entered his plea. “On July 2, 1991, I had sexual relations with Amy Fisher at the Freeport Motel,” Joey said in court, sealing his image as a cheating, lying scumbag forever in the mind of the public.

Amy was let out of Albion Correctional Facility near Buffalo, where she was serving her time, to attend his hearing and make her own victim’s impact statement. Her hair was in ringlets, and she wore a demure dress with kneesocks like a little girl. And who was standing right by her side? Assistant District Attorney Klein—the same man who stood next to me when I, as the victim of attempted murder with a bullet still lodged in my head, made my statement at her trial—the man who had repeatedly referred to Amy as a “wild animal” and “not credible” in the press. I took it as a personal slap to my face.

Amy made quite a speech about Joe introducing her, a regular sixteen-year-old girl, to expensive restaurants and cheap motels. She didn’t look up once. She was clearly reading what someone had written for her. It was all utter crap. Her appearance and words absolutely enraged me as I watched her live on TV. There was nothing that could have induced me to accompany Joey to court that day. I refused to be present and compelled to lay eyes on her again. When this entire farce was over, I fired Marvyn Kornberg immediately. He had done nothing but harm.

In November 1993, Joe went off to serve his time in the local jail. My anger, never far from the surface, reached a fever pitch when I contemplated a winter on my own. Our house had become a target. Rarely did a day pass without a carload of gawkers who posed for pictures on the lawn, drove by and yelled insults, or, in many cases, threw eggs or trash at the house. Carloads of teenagers raced by at night, whooping and yelling. I was afraid to be alone at home with the kids all winter. It was certainly no secret to anyone in America where we lived. We had installed a massive security system with cameras and alarms, but that didn’t stop the circus outside on the street.