Mary Jo Buttafuoco promotes her book

Making money from tragedy

It’s hard to say how many people have profited off of the whole Joey Buttafuoco, Mary Jo Buttafuoco, Amy Fisher debacle. After all, there have been three made-for-TV movies documenting the once football star and his love triangle with his wife and a teenager. I’d like to see the type of short term personal loan a budding filmmaker takes out to produce “The Amy Fisher Story.”

Of course, the love triangle turned into a lot more when Amy Fisher shot Mary Jo Buttafuoco in the face in 1992. For a long time, Mary Jo Buttafuoco stood by her man. She says she believed him when he said he had nothing to do with Amy Fisher’s actions. However, Mary Jo finally left Joey Buttafuoco in 2003.

Buttafuoco goes on Good Morning America

This morning on Good Morning America, Mary Jo Buttafuoco talked about her recently published book “Getting it Through My Thick Skull.” Mary Jo says she wrote the book because after so many years of marriage, after finally getting out of it and after a discussion with her son, Mary Jo Buttafuoco realized that her ex-husband was a sociopath.

She says she came to this realization after her son Paul called Joey a sociopath. She says she wrote it off at first, but then she decided to look up the definition of "sociopathic tendencies" on the Internet. She says the list of characteristics fit Joey to a T.

Details on the book

The full title of Mary Jo Buttafuoco’s book is “Getting it through My Thick Skull: Why I Stayed, What I Learned, and What Millions of People Involved with Sociopaths Need to Know.” Excerpts of her book on the Internet make it clear that her main goal in writing this book was to protect other people who might be in danger of making the same mistake she did.

She also admits that she wasted many years on her relationship with Joey. She says she stayed so long because of the kids, especially to help them whether the media storm that happened after Amy Fisher shot her in the face. Here is an excerpt from her book that was posted on ABC News:

Joey Buttafuoco is a sociopath. There, I said it. Sad but true. The man who stole my heart in high school—whose large, hardworking Italian family embraced me, who constantly professed undying love and devotion, with whom I shared a million happy, fun times—is a sociopath. I loved my husband with all my heart, raised two great children with him, and fully expected that we would grow old together in our beautiful waterfront home on Long Island, surrounded by family and close friends. I stood steadfast next to this man, ferociously defending him for years after the infamous shooting by Amy Fisher turned our last name into a worldwide punch line. This same man is also the walking, talking dictionary definition of a clinical sociopath. This was a recent, life-changing realization for me—and goes a long way toward answering the one question that seems to fascinate the public more than any other: Why did she stay for so long? It’s clear to me now: I was in thrall for! almost thirty years to a sociopath.

Ironically enough, it was our son, Paul, who brought this inescapable truth to my attention. Two years ago, on Father’s Day 2007, my son and I were discussing Joey’s latest embarrassing stunt—a highly publicized, entirely fake “reunion” between him and Amy Fisher, in which they held hands, kissed for the cameras, and claimed they were “getting back together.” Joey and I were no longer married, but his actions continued to affect us all. I could only shake my head and wonder, as I had countless times over the years, When is he going to grow up? Why is he making such a fool of himself? When will he ever get it?

“Never,” Paul said flatly. “He’s never going to get it. He’s a sociopath.”

My first reaction was denial. “Sociopath” is a scary-sounding word. I thought a sociopath was a crazy person, a nut job, someone who couldn’t function in society, or a charming but cold-blooded killer. The word has been used so often to casually describe extreme cases—like O. J. Simpson, Scott Peterson, and Ted Bundy—that the true nature and scope of its meaning eluded me. But Paul’s calm certainty and the discussion that followed nagged at me long after we moved on to other topics. The word reverberated in the back of my mind for the rest of the day. Late that night, when all our company had gone home, I went to my computer and Googled the words “sociopath traits.”