The Amy Fisher Case: What Actually Happened, and What Came After

On 19 May 1992, a 17-year-old named Amy Fisher rang the doorbell of a house in Massapequa, Long Island, and shot the woman who answered it in the head. The woman, Mary Jo Buttafuoco, survived, permanently disfigured and partially deaf. The man at the centre of it, Mary Jo's husband Joey, a 35-year-old auto body shop owner, had been sexually abusing Fisher since she was sixteen. Almost none of that framing made it into the coverage that followed. Tabloids branded Fisher the Long Island Lolita,...