Getting It Through My Thick Skull (5 page)
The Fishers brought in a high-priced, big-mouth lawyer named Eric Naiberg to represent Amy. He was faced with a big problem: his client had already admitted to committing the crime. It was basically an open-and-shut case, so he came up with a very effective defense:
Joey made me do it. All of it!
Eric, who loved the spotlight, was a master showman. He immediately began a relentless campaign to portray his client as a sweet, innocent girl, languishing in jail, who had been led astray by the big, bad auto mechanic. This defense was played out not in a courtroom, but in the media. And the press ate it up. He could have easily settled the matter quickly and legally by pointing out that his client hadn’t even been read her rights, among many other problems with her arrest. Instead, he went straight to the media to demonize Joey.
The story already had all of the juicy elements of a cheesy soap opera or a massive train wreck, and reporters were relentlessly seeking out every dirty detail they could about Amy Fisher’s life (as short as it was), and by default, ours. A couple of days after Amy’s arrest, Joey and I sat in my hospital room and watched ourselves on every channel. The five o’clock news teaser echoed, “Joey Buttafuoco admits he had a brief relationship with Amy Fisher.” Now
that
was certainly news to me and a shock to my already traumatized system.
Joe was sitting right next to my bed, holding my hand. He was so indignant, so outraged that he leaped to his feet like he’d been electrified. “What are they saying? What are they saying?” he shouted. “I didn’t tell them that! I never said
anything
like that!” It was less than a week after I’d been shot in the head, but my mind was still working well enough for me to ask, quite reasonably, “But Joe, then why are the police announcing that at a press conference?”
“I don’t know! But I’m gonna get to the bottom of this!” He was practically foaming at the mouth. He ran out of my room into the outside waiting area, where my mother was sitting. “Mom!” She looked up and thought I had taken a sudden turn for the worse; he looked that upset. “You are not going to believe what they are saying about me on the news. They’re saying I had an affair with Amy Fisher! I didn’t, I didn’t!”
“What?” my mother could hardly take this in.
“They’re lying; the cops are lying! I never had an affair with that girl, and I never told them I did! How can they lie like this?!”
My mother’s protective instincts kicked in immediately. Hadn’t we had enough trauma lately? It was the start of a huge rally around Joe by family, friends, and neighbors who knew us personally. To the rest of the world, it might have looked obvious, but no one close to us believed for a minute that Joe had had an affair with her. His denials were extremely convincing; his arguments completely justifiable. You see, up to this point in my life, everything was very simple and black-and-white. Burglars and killers were bad guys; cops were good guys. I’d never had any dealings with the police, but I assumed they generally did the right thing, helped people, and told the truth. Unfortunately, they were not doing so well on this particular case. And lawyers? Eric Naiberg was apparently free to go all over television and make the most outrageous accusations against Joey. No one ever issued a gag order. No one from the district attorney’s office ever told him to cool it. The man was everywhere, fanning the fire.
Joey was absolutely hysterical in his denials. It was a very persuasive portrayal of a wrongly accused man. “Show me a statement! Play me a tape where I said that! They won’t because they don’t have one! They are making this up.” Overnight, Amy and Joey had become the biggest story in the country. The burly auto mechanic and a sweet little schoolgirl! It was
Fatal Attraction
with a teenager! Joey and Amy had plotted to get rid of me! He had given her the gun! Amy shot me when he tried to break off their affair! With a name like Buttafuoco, we must be involved with the mob! Day after day, the stories kept coming, feeding off each other, one more outlandish than the next. We found ourselves the subject of an absolute media circus.
I lay in my hospital bed watching the round-the-clock coverage in disbelief. Every daytime talk show in the country did shows on the “affair”: Geraldo, Sally Jessy Raphael, Jackie Mason, Phil Donahue. Newscasters broke into the daily soap operas to report the latest breathless rumor or official update. Joey and Amy were the top story on every news broadcast. Editorial pages all over the country weighed in on this irresistible scandal in suburbia.
I had no choice but to confront my husband after several days of this. The police were reiterating their assertion on television, every single day. Joe screamed loudly and publicly to anyone who would listen that they were lying—he had never touched Amy—but his denials were always a single sentence at the end of a salacious story: Joseph Buttafuoco denies these allegations.
“Come on, Joey,” I said one afternoon. “This is ridiculous. Why do the police keep insisting that you had an affair with her? They’re not telling Naiberg to shut up! The press is only running with what they keep officially stating!”
“Because
they’re lying
, Mary Jo.”
“Why would they lie about that, Joe?”
“I don’t know, they just are. They’re making this up! The only time sex ever even came up was that day at the house, when I made the call to get her out to meet me. I asked the cops if it was against the law to have sex with a sixteen-year-old!”
Gravely injured as I was, hard as it was to concentrate or even hear anything clearly, this remark really jolted me. “
JOEY
. . . Why would you feel the need to ask that?”
“Hey!” He shrugged his shoulders and threw up his hands. “They kept talking about how she was only sixteen, so I just asked if having sex with a sixteen-year-old was illegal, or what. I just wanted to know; doesn’t mean I did anything!”
I was too frazzled to pursue it. A week into life with my new neighbor, Mr. .25 Caliber, was exhausting me. My body was starting to come back to life and protesting every step of the way. Ironically, it seemed that as I healed, the pain became more excruciating. I was literally sweating out the hours between doses of pain medication—that is, when I wasn’t screaming bloody murder as my wound was probed. I physically didn’t have the strength to argue, but the question nagged at me. Why
would
he ask such a thing? I worried about it for a few minutes, until the pain obliterated any rational thought.
O
ne of the most prominent and telling traits of many sociopaths is their fantastic ability to manipulate others and lie for profit, to avoid punishment, or seemingly just for fun. As someone who faced a firestorm of public anger, disapproval, and just plain incomprehension over the years from those who asked, “How could she stay with him after
that
?” all I can say is that if you haven’t ever been under a sociopath’s spell, be grateful. They can charm the birds out of the trees and tell you black is white, and have you believing it.
I was far from alone in my outrage at what I saw as nothing but a slanderous, hurtful campaign against my husband and family. Every friend and family member who visited my hospital room was equally aghast by our sudden infamy and what they were seeing about Joey on TV and the front page of every newspaper. “A hardworking, affable guy . . . the life of the party,” one neighbor described him in
Newsday.
“Even the guys say there was never a hint of him fooling around.” But these viewpoints were buried in a sea of innuendo, rumor, and outright lies, fueled by Eric Naiburg’s antics and popularized by seemingly every journalist in the country, from the
New York Post
to
People
magazine. Joey was right by my side, of course, swearing it was all lies.
Both families picked up the gauntlet and stuck firmly behind Joe’s story: the cops lied when they claimed that Joey and Amy had had an affair of any kind. There was no official signed statement by Joe; they hadn’t taped Joey in any interviews; it was a he said/they said situation. At most, I thought that Amy might have developed a crush on Joe at the garage and fabricated this whole “affair” in her mind. I wouldn’t put anything past a girl who could ring a doorbell and then shoot somebody in the head. She was clearly unstable, and her lawyer wasn’t helping her. He was exploiting her—and destroying my family along the way.
After eleven days in the hospital, the doctors agreed I was well enough to check out and continue recovering at home. The doctors in charge of my case gathered in my room that morning to prepare me for what was to come.
“Your eye, which is stuck open, will eventually close, and the patch can come off. Your vision in that eye should eventually be all right. Your balance will continue to improve as your equilibrium readjusts itself. The facial paralysis is permanent, but we will continue to work on it in therapy and hopefully the muscles will relax somewhat over time. Same thing with your esophagus; it’s paralyzed, but the left side of your throat will eventually learn to compensate and you’ll be able to swallow real food. For now, only liquids or puddings. Your speech will similarly improve.” The senior doctor paused.
“The cleaning and packing of the wound must continue at home for several more weeks,” he said. I groaned, but it was about to get much worse. “The hearing in your right ear is gone forever, Mary Jo,” he said bluntly. “The eardrum was shattered, and there’s nothing we can do to fix that damage. You will be permanently deaf on that side.”
I’d realized I was deaf in one ear, of course, but I had been holding out hope that this was a temporary condition. It’s difficult to describe the sensation of deafness in one ear; it’s not the equivalent of losing half your power to hear. It means complete disorientation as to what direction a sound comes from. It means being bothered by background noise that everyone else automatically tunes out. It’s living with a strange hollowness inside the head. In practical terms, it meant that for the rest of my life I would have to sit with my “good” ear near the person I was with, or look at them face-to-face if I wanted to hear and understand their words. And I’d have to get real good at lipreading. I wept as I sat in my wheelchair waiting for Joey to pull the car around.
Thankfully, the hospital made no public announcement that I was being released. Joey and I were able to drive home and get inside without being bothered by the press. Joey carried me up the stairs, and I got myself settled into my own bedroom. Several close friends and neighbors stopped by to welcome me home, bringing flowers and hugs and news. In a touching and beautiful gesture, one of our friends, wanting to help out in any way she could, canvassed our street asking people if they would sign up to bring us a hot meal or casserole for dinner each night. Sixty families signed up. For two months after I came home from the hospital, friends stopped by our house every afternoon and brought us the most delicious meals. It was a show of kindness and concern that I will be forever grateful for.
Everyone protected us at every turn. The media became a constant presence in front of our house in the summer of 1992. Intrusive journalists, news vans, cables, wires, and curious crowds became a fact of life, something we all had to live with on a daily basis. Reporters invaded our quiet little community, bothering and questioning everyone who came by to visit or help. The more allegations that got hurled at Joey by Amy’s defense lawyer, the more crazed the media attack became. Just getting the kids out of the house and around the corner to the beach club without being attacked by the press became impossible, and the club was the only respite that we had. Its board—I had been corresponding secretary until I got shot— held a meeting and voted to break through the fence and put a gate up with a lock that only our family had the keys to. This way we didn’t have to go out through the front door and be engulfed by the media fray. Nobody could have asked for better friends and neighbors than the ones that Joey and I had.
I was home where I belonged, surrounded by family and dear, supportive friends. These people
knew
me and Joey and our kids and our life. Not a single one believed what they were hearing or reading about Joey and Amy. Michael Rindenow, the attorney who’d assisted us on the closing of our house, offered to act as our family spokesman and accompany me to any meetings with the police and the district attorney’s office. We happily accepted. He and many others stepped in and did their best to stand by me in the eye of the tornado. It was about to get even crazier.
Amy Fisher was the lead story in every newspaper and television show in the country, and it didn’t take long for worms to start crawling out of the woodwork. It soon came to light that Amy had worked as an escort. Indisputable proof was right there on a homemade videotape, surreptitiously recorded by her client. He pocketed a tidy sum for selling the tape— which was soon broadcast to all of America on
A Current Affair
.