It was, in the words of the Material Girl, just like a prayer. On January 16, 1993, a white limo idled outside Jessica Buttafuoco’s bayfront house in Massapequa, New York, waiting to whisk her to Saturday Night Live featuring her musical heroine, Madonna. Jessie was 9 going on 16, a budding jazz dancer who’d recently performed her version of the “Vogue” video before a tingling audience of girlfriends at Adventureland, the local amusement park. She had a doll face, a raspy voice, and the spunk of Marisa Tomei in My Cousin Vinny. And she was one of my best friends.
Jessie had willed the night into existence. “My dad’s on that show all the time,” she reasoned. “He could probably hook up tickets.”
Eight months earlier, while Jessie sat in Ms. La Marca’s third-grade class on a Tuesday afternoon in May, her mother, Mary Jo Buttafuoco, 37, a down-to-earth Irish Catholic homemaker, answered the doorbell to find 17-year-old Amy Fisher wielding a .25-caliber pistol, spouting a story about a sexual relationship with Jessie’s dad, Joey Buttafuoco, a body shop owner with a bravado as big as his salt-and-pepper hair. Neighbors—mercifully, firefighters—heard the gunshot. In the blur of days that followed, Mary Jo awoke from lifesaving surgery to the bullet still lodged just above her spinal column and her husband’s staunch denials. The teen assailant was just an obsessed client, he insisted. Jessie’s mom stood by her dad, sparking the sanctimony of a generation of fellow housewives. The Buttafuocos have lived the long tail of a National Enquirer story ever since. “The stigma of this story has woven itself into every fabric of my being,” Jessie tells me.
With its themes of sex and violence, the crime fed the burgeoning tabloid beast of the ’90s, sandwiched between the Menendez brothers and the Bobbitts. But a trashtastic new multimedia machine—Hard Copy and Cops, Jerry Springer and nascent cable news—blasted scandal to the masses round the clock, alongside Oprah and the evening news. The new landscape reveled in dirty details—pubic hairs on Coke cans and Prince Charles’s tampon fetish—as if news, gossip, and soaps had a threesome. The Buttafuocos were a boon to the era, part of laying the scene for true crime as a national pastime.
The rags gave Fisher an alliterative nickname: Long Island Lolita, zeroing in on the beeper she used as a sex worker. Letterman, Leno, Stern, and the New York Post pounced. Only the Gulf War got more publicity that year, according to a 1992 New York Times analysis.
Jessie watched as her parents became nationally infamous. Jim Carrey aped Joey on In Living Color. Danny DeVito played him on, yes, SNL. The week before Madonna, the show devolved into a Buttafuoco bonanza with four sketches on the saga, including DeVito as an infomercial host spraying hair dye on the shaved side of “Mary Jo’s” head, where the bullet entered. “A crazy teenage bitch tried to kill me,” repertory player Jan Hooks cracked as Jessie’s mom, mocking her facial paralysis. (Years later, Tina Fey would too.) On its 50th anniversary special, SNL aired an “In Memoriam” montage for poorly aging sketches, but there was no mention, Jessie notes, of punching down at crime victims.
From the second-floor windows of Jessie’s bedroom, we peered at the Eyewitness News vans camped below like the St. Rose carnival coming to town. I don’t remember her crying or complaining or otherwise opening up about any of it, ever.
Jessie and I pretended to guzzle water like bubbly in the limo that night, but the marble halls of 30 Rock felt off on arrival. After an adults-only huddle, our chaperone, Mary Jo’s sister, Eileen, told Jessie that SNL planned to joke about “Dad” and asked if she wanted to leave. Jessie dismissed Eileen. Then Madonna didn’t do the hits. Glowing on the tiny stage, she only clasped the mic, cabaret-style, and sang her cover of “Fever.” We had hoped for The Immaculate Collection while Madge sold Erotica. Jessie and I were already deflated when the Queen of Pop wrapped her second song, the somber “Bad Girl,” reached behind her back, and pulled forth a black-and-white photo of Joey Buttafuoco.
Madonna, a complex Catholic, parroted Sinéad O’Connor. “Fight the real enemy,” she declared, vaguely smirking as she tore Jessie’s dad’s face again and again, stomping on the pieces as the crowd cheered, mocking O’Connor’s pope shredding only months earlier. I squirmed a little, looking over at my friend, but Jessie just laughed.
Jessie would live that night many times—watching the crime become a punch line, plastering a smile on her face, convincing everyone, maybe even herself, she was fine. Infamy blurred with fame, and the specter of her father’s transgression stole her joy.
Over the years, the Buttafuocos took on an air of personal legend for me. They came up every time I told anyone I was from Massapequa, the kind of colorful working- and middle-class town Billy Joel might sing about, exceptional for producing both Jerry Seinfeld and Rex Heuermann, the alleged Gilgo Beach serial killer. I’d long felt a desire to understand what I witnessed as a tween but wasn’t compelled until I reconnected with Jessie on Instagram last fall. She was pursuing a PhD in media psychology and researching a richly personal subject: the true cost of true crime to victims and their families.
In the true crime realm, Mary Jo is an anomaly. “Everyone else is dead in these stories,” Jessie says with characteristic bluntness. Mary Jo would later call herself a “living murder victim,” but staying with Joey made her an imperfect one.
We bring handwritten notes and trinkets tied with bows, still the girls who knew the purest versions of each other. But the truth is on the table now, sizzling with our fajitas. “I just have a vivid memory of looking around,” Jessie says, reenacting a cringing laugh, but as the SNL audience wooed, “my mind was going, Do these people know that I’m his kid? Do they know that I’m here?”
During our three days together in Calabasas, California, she explained how growing up as a child of infamy colored every aspect of her identity. We know from nepo babies, but what of the children of notoriety—noto babies? Those who bear the weight of their families’ misdeeds, forced to replay the worst moments in their lives?
There is no handbook, Jessie tells me. Many such children do not survive. Mark Madoff hanged himself in 2010, on the second anniversary of his father Bernie’s arrest. Bobbi Kristina Brown outlived her mother, Whitney Houston, by only three years. Daniel Smith, son of Anna Nicole Smith, died in 2006, five months before his mother.
“What happened to Jessica,” her best friend Chelsea Bray tells me a few nights later, “is her life got hijacked.”
Seven months after her mother was shot in the head, Jessie is face-to-face with another grinning Amy Fisher.
Not the real Fisher, who was by then in jail after striking a plea deal for first-degree aggravated assault, but Alyssa Milano, on the set of Casualties of Love, one of the TV-movie versions of Jessie’s life. Another idol—Samantha from Who’s the Boss?—tangled in her family saga. Jessie remembers Milano, then 19, gently explaining that she was nothing like Fisher. “My queen,” Jessie says while giving me a driving tour of Calabasas, “dressed as the enemy.”
Milano would later visit the Buttafuocos and indulge a gaggle of girls, myself included, with hugs and photos. Looking back, the perks—Madonna, Alyssa—deluded us. They made us believe everything was fine.
The letters arrived within weeks of the shooting: production companies sympathizing with Mary Jo, clamoring for the rights to the Buttafuocos’ story. Fisher sold her side to help fund her $2 million bail. That became ABC’s The Amy Fisher Story, a made-for-TV movie starring Drew Barrymore, one of three that the networks produced at breakneck speed, all ratings smashes watched by millions. Long Island was only too ripe for dramatization: the long vowels; the surname (it’s Butta-few-co, not foo-co) fit for a Scorsese capo; Joey’s signature zebra-print sweatpants, which swept the neighborhood like snap bracelets.
The Buttafuocos blessed CBS’s Casualties of Love, which depicted Joey as innocent in the Fisher liaison, if dense. The family cited Mary Jo’s mounting medical bills. Jessie’s mom was relearning to live with her hearing gone in one ear, a severed carotid artery sewn back together. Yet “the magic of it all was very powerful,” Jessie remembers. Her family flew to Los Angeles with a merry band of Massapequa friends (including my dad, who played an extra in the court scene).
Jessie had made it to Hollywood, but not in the way she wanted. The production desensitized and disoriented her. The house didn’t look like her house, which was pristinely white and dotted with bowls of candy. The pictures on the walls weren’t of her or her brother, Paul, who was three years older and a local heartthrob, but of child actors cast as them. Jessie, not allowed to play herself, settled for clapping the film slate.
“This is when my reality is starting to shatter,” Jessie tells me. “What is life? Everything I know it to be is fake.”
No one called it trauma back then. Shortly after the shooting, a school psychologist called Jessie out of class. There were already whispers in the hall. Jessie didn’t trust the counselor, not with reporters in her bushes and a neighbor at the Biltmore Beach Club, where she swam the butterfly, selling intel. Sitting, defiant, in the office, Jessie remembers being told that she didn’t have to come back, as long as no one saw her slipping. She committed to perfection right there.
“Even though I was unraveling,” she tells me, “I was keeping it together the best I could.”
At home, Mary Jo modeled stoicism. She was in chronic pain, increasingly reliant on prescription pills while contending with a crush of lawyers and district attorneys.
When Jessie and Paul were around, “Mommy was fine!” Mary Jo imitates her younger self. “Everything’s fine!” Sometimes the Buttafuocos made a game of the media fracas, flicking their lights while news crews filmed live shots outside.
Mary Jo, at 70, her formerly feathered blond hair cut into a bob, is sitting at the dining table of the modest blue house she shares with Jessie. It’s as pristine as ever, with hanging plants and a curio cabinet filled with tiny Swarovski crystal frogs and butterflies. She suffers complications like chronic fatigue but also hits the gym daily. Jessie learned black humor from Mary Jo, who titled her 2009 memoir Getting It Through My Thick Skull, sharing her belief that her by-then ex-husband was, in fact, a sociopath. She calls Jessie and me girls, even though we’re older now than she was in 1992.
Back then, Mary Jo says, she wanted to protect her kids from her suffering. “They were the reason that I lived. They were the reason that I fought,” she tells me. As she lay on the ground that May day, the explosion reverberating in her head, she had a single thought: “Get up, Mary Jo. The kids are coming home from school.”
In the true crime realm, Mary Jo is an anomaly. “Everyone else is dead in these stories,” Jessie says with characteristic bluntness. Mary Jo would later call herself a “living murder victim,” but staying with Joey made her an imperfect one.
Weeks after our visit, Jessie texts me an image of Mary Jo’s face illustrated on a vintage “Major League Scandal” trading card. It notes she was “nearly traded to the Angels in 1992.” Among her listed weaknesses: “gullible.” Jessie says her parents were booked on Donahue in 1992 under the guise of telling their side of the story, only for Mary Jo to be ambushed by a live audience.
“I found myself, which now I realize was so wrong…defending him,” Mary Jo tells me of her ex.
That’s a story unto itself, but the family believed Joey over Fisher, whom a sentencing judge likened to a “wild animal stalking its prey.” I’ve heard more than one wife claim they would have divorced Joey from the hospital bed, and I wonder about this feminine urge: to judge a mother who’d been left to die on her front steps. It’s been long enough that the blowback makes Mary Jo laugh. “Where was I supposed to go?” she croaks. “I could barely breathe!”
For Jessie, it was a “weird sandwich” being the daughter of a victim and, soon, a perpetrator. In October 1993 Joey confessed to the relationship with Fisher that he’d long denied. In the eyes of the law, the so-called affair turned out to be criminal; Fisher wasn’t a lover but a child when the relationship began, a year shy of the age of consent in New York in 1991. Joey was arrested and indicted on 19 counts, including statutory rape and sodomy; I vaguely recall leafing through Newsday, asking my parents what the latter charge meant. As Jessie went to fourth grade, her dad reported to Nassau County Correctional Facility for a six-month sentence.
“I didn’t really have much of a mom anymore,” Jessie says. Now her dad—the fun dad who took us for too-fast rides on his speedboat, Double Trouble, emblazoned with twin dice—was gone too.
Visiting Joey right before Christmas 1993 shook 10-year-old Jessie. Her father was incarcerated, for a time, alongside Colin Ferguson, who committed the 1993 Long Island Rail Road massacre, and serial killer Joel Rifkin. Though Joey “was famous on the beach for being able to rip a telephone book in half,” Jessie worried: “Maybe they’d kill my dad too.” She remembers getting letters and gifts from her father, including a handkerchief stenciled with a butterfly, a teddy bear, and her name in cursive. It hung on her bedroom wall for years, torturing her: “I thought of my dad.… I thought of the serial killers. I thought of how you just never know who a person truly is.”
In March 1994 Joey left jail in a Rolls-Royce that took him to a 400-guest release party at Cafe Testarossa. Flashbulbs lit the parking lot; the cake was reportedly in the shape of Double Trouble. Like the Hollywood trip, it was splashy fun if you didn’t think too hard about the reason. My mom was one of the few in their circle who declined to attend.
The celebration proved short-lived. While visiting Los Angeles in 1995, Joey was arrested again, for soliciting an undercover police officer posing as a sex worker on Sunset Boulevard. It was a violation of his probation, for which he served another 78 days. A year later the Buttafuocos went west. There was nothing left for them on Long Island.
Landing in California at 13, “I was like Brittany Murphy in Clueless,” Jessie says. Her last name loomed even larger in a new school: “Are you friends with me because you think I’m funny or because you want to say you went to Joey Buttafuoco’s house?” We drifted apart, though neither of us remembers the details. There was no social media, only letters and cross-country phone calls.
Jessie kept her plates spinning. If she were to be known as Joey Buttafuoco’s daughter, she’d single-handedly rehab the family name with her own glittering reputation! At El Camino Real High School, she was crowned prom queen, captained the basketball team, ran track, played Ado Annie in Oklahoma!, sang in the elite choir, and won best personality and most talented. Her dizzying schedule left precious little time to think or truly connect. Everyone knew her, but no one cracked her hard candy shell.
After everything, Jessie’s parents separated in 2000. It had been the Buttafuocos against the world. Now, Jessie thought, “I literally have nobody.” She lived with Mary Jo in an apartment while Joey moved to Chatsworth, “the porn capital of the world,” Jessie says with cheerful disdain, citing a local production of The Sopornos. In the Chatsworth milieu, she says her jewelry was stolen, and she found herself at a group dinner with Ron Jeremy, who asked: “When are you going to be in my movies?”
For Jessie, love and sex were too tinged with violence. She didn’t date. The two times she tried, it raced like a ticker through her mind: I can’t trust you. “Even if you think it’s perfect, someone might come and murder me and stalk me in the bushes or exploit me sexually and sell it to the Enquirer,” she says. One guy was unbearably kind, but Jessie harbored constant fears of dying. In a relationship with a man 20 years her senior, “I was so codependent and so daddy-broken,” she recalls, “and I changed.”
The Buttafuoco infamy never converted to fame. Joey and Mary Jo attended the Oscars in 1995, but Hollywood prospects dwindled from there. (Among Joey’s film credits: “Guy” in 2003’s Mafia Movie Madness.) They were ripe, however, for the reality TV boom of the early aughts, especially as money ran low. Joey signed on to spar with John Bobbitt on Celebrity Boxing in 2002; the latter was replaced by female wrestler Chyna. In 2006 Mary Jo, Joey, and Fisher taped a “reunion” sit-down (Mary Jo has called it an offer she couldn’t refuse). The stunts went further in 2007, with Joey and Fisher filming a date for The Insider, kissing beneath an umbrella in New York, like a deranged rom-com. He later said it wasn’t real, but it broke Jessie’s heart. The following year a sex tape surfaced starring Joey and his second wife.
Meanwhile, Joey’s legal woes raged on. In December 2003 police rushed his house, arresting him in an insurance-fraud sting connected to his California body shop. Home from UC Santa Barbara on holiday break, Jessie says she was held for eight hours, with officers escorting her to the bathroom. Joey pleaded guilty to felony insurance fraud and was sentenced to a year in jail. By 2005 he’d been arrested again, for having a gun at home, a violation of his parole. He pleaded no contest to illegally possessing ammunition and served three months of a one-year sentence.
“You love this person,” Jessie says, “but he was also fucking ruining my life.”
Jessie’s surname constantly betrayed her. “I’m not sure how many people have stood in a room, and when their last name is read out loud, every eye in the room swooshes toward you,” she writes in her work-in-progress memoir. “It’s like waiting to be punched in the face.”
Jessie considered changing her last name (her mom has). She liked the sound of Jessica Barclay—emphasis on the second syllable—but says she lacked the cash to tackle the bureaucracy. Using her middle name, Louise, yielded more callbacks on job applications…until she had to supply her ID. Googling Jessie’s name returns pages of scandalousness—her “digital legacy until the day I die.” Hard as she has tried, she cannot escape herself.
To cope, “the first thing I would do is grab a drink,” Jessie says. From her teens on, alcohol worked like medicine, and eventually Jessie added weed, then cocaine. For more than a decade after college graduation, she ran a children’s theater business, gravitating toward outsiders who, like her, found a home onstage. She kept performing—auditioning for The Voice (her appearance never aired); playing J-Woww in Jersey Shoresical: A Frickin’ Rock Opera, a play created by her friend Daniel Franzese (Damian from Mean Girls).
Behind the scenes, though, Jessie floundered. She binge drank through her 20s and into her 30s, sipping wine from coffee mugs; downing a bottle (or two) a day of wine, vodka. It worked to numb her until it didn’t. By the time Jessie turned 34, everything she’d stuffed down started seeping to the surface. Her body revolted; her nails folding; her cognition delayed when she tried to read. She scarcely ate and struggled to hold a pencil without shaking. Jessie tried quitting drinking and lasted two days, crying as she lifted wine to her lips. She didn’t want to do it anymore, but she couldn’t not.
In her lowest, rock-bottom moments, Jessie contemplated taking her own life, reciting a desperate prayer at night: “Dear God, please take me off of this planet. I don’t want to be here anymore.”
Eight months sober through AA and therapy and still hopeless, Jessie entered an intensive outpatient mental health program. At 35, she had feelings homework, recognizing herself in worksheets on anxiety, depression, and PTSD. In some ways she’d never matured past age nine.
Trying to further understand her experience, Jessie earned a graduate psychology degree—“a master’s in healing”—at Pepperdine University. Working as a therapist, Jessie understood her patients’ trauma on a personal level, but troubled teens, including some with violent ideations, hit too close to home.
“It was like I was dealing with Amy Fishers all day,” she says.
Around that time, Jessie found what she’d been looking for: a rare doctoral program in media psychology at Fielding Graduate University in Santa Barbara. After a lifetime lumping herself in with the family joke, she was seeing herself anew. “I’m fucking really smart,” she says, “and I have something to say.” The application practically wrote itself. “This is who my parents are,” she says, “and this is why I want to change true crime.”
“When I watch the news and I see a body under a tarp…I’m like, ‘That’s somebody’s daughter, that’s somebody’s wife,’ ” Tanya Brown, the youngest sister of Nicole Brown Simpson and a friend of Jessie’s, told me by phone. The morning after her sister’s murder in 1994, while the world watched, rapt, on TV, “Here I am in the living room holding my mom’s hand, and [she’s] saying, ‘That’s my kid.’ ”
I think about the culture-cracking case of Luigi Mangione, charged with murdering UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson: the thirsty tweets and Etsy merch and immediate announcement of forthcoming documentaries; how, policy debates aside, most coverage centered the alleged murderer over the victim or his 16- and 19-year-old children.
Jessie says she’s been prodded by TV producers to read—and reread—scripted lines about the day her mother was shot as if she were a voice-over actor. One unsubtly suggested she cry for drama’s sake. But denying her experience didn’t work. “I tried that for 35 years,” Jessie tells me. “That’s what almost killed me.”
She does want to tell her story on her own terms. Jessie is advocating for a more ethical true crime industry, one that consults victims and their families and shares streaming profits with them (Kennedy scion Jack Schlossberg has suggested that Ryan Murphy Productions, maker of FX’s already-divisive JFK Jr. series, donate to the JFK Presidential Library). With a recently launched consultancy, Mental Health Media Services, Jessie wants to normalize on-set mental health coordinators—akin to intimacy coordinators for sex scenes—to support subjects rehashing their trauma on-camera.
Maybe this is the real reason she didn’t change her name, I think. Maybe she was meant to stay a Buttafuoco and find some power in it.
“One rock at a time, baby,” Jessie calls over her shoulder.
She leads the way in black leggings and Hokas, balancing on stepping stones as we cross a sparkling stream at Malibu Creek State Park. It’s a Bob Ross painting out here, with natural pools and sprays of yellow flowers and mountains in the distance that look like the Paramount logo.
I imagine us clicking our heels: “We’re not in Massapequa anymore.”
Nature was never Jessie’s thing (“The sounds of birds only happened when I was coming down off a coke bender”), but she appreciates the simplicity now. “That’s what I haven’t had most of my life,” Jessie says. “Looking for rocks.” She’s in a rock hunters Facebook group, and it shows when she breaks out a hammer and chisel. Instead of drinking to cope, she smashes milky rocks, looking for crystals within.
Healing takes effort, and Jessie doesn’t try to tie herself in a lacy bow. She drove here recently after one of those encounters: a bank teller eyeing her last name and trying to place it. She went to AA this morning; later, she’ll head to work as a therapist at a treatment center for mental health and substance abuse. Though unconventional, she says living with her mom feels like making up for the years they lost after the shooting. Jessie cut ties with her dad six years ago. She thanked him for the good parts, the boat rides and the water balloon fights of her childhood, while prioritizing her own mental health. When he later questioned her critiques, she fired off a strongly worded email—a manifesto, really. Item one: “cheating on my mother and almost getting her killed.” Every Father’s Day, she posts Madonna ripping his picture to shreds. (Weeks after our visit, Jessie’s dad is pictured in an Instagram post citing James Brolin as the director of a mysterious project—a biopic, possibly, entitled Joey.)
Jessie is still blindsided sometimes, like she was that night at SNL. Back at her house, I listen in on her Zoom with two documentary producers who suggest she codirect a project on her family scandal but issue a satirically Hollywood caveat: Nothing will sell without a sick quorum—full participation from Joey, Mary Jo, and Fisher. When one of the producers casually suggests “What if you interviewed Amy?” Jessie shoots her down with an unequivocal “Fuck, no.”
“You’re traumatizing me by just asking me that question,” she snaps back. “She took a gun to my mother’s head.”
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The post Jessica Buttafuoco Says Her Life Has Been Shaped by Her Father, Joey Buttafuoco, Amy Fisher, and the True-Crime Industry appeared first on Vanity Fair.
