I Am Mary Jo Buttafuoco (Studio TF1 America, CMW Valley Productions, Champlain Media, Lifetime, 2026)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The second movie I watched on Lifetime January 17, I Am Mary Jo Buttafuoco, was actually better than I Was a Child Bride: The Courtney Stodden Story, mainly because its director, Heather Hawthorn Doyle (a white Canadian woman described on imdb.com as someone who “has made a name for herself as being a strong story-based director who brings her passion for creating beautiful visuals and grounded performances to every project”), and writer, Gregg McBride (who after I Am Mary Jo Buttafuoco made his major-studio feature-film debut with a horror movie called Six Till Midnight), were far more alive to the moral complexities of their story than their opposite numbers on the Courtney Stodden film. Like Courtney Stodden, Mary Jo Buttafuoco appears on screen in interview segments narrating the story, and she’s far less attractively photographed (by Diego Lozano) than Stodden was, but the very hard-edged plainness with which her scenes were shot underscores both the lingering physical damage she’s had to live with from “The Incident” (as it’s darkly referred to in McBride’s script) and the psychological destruction it wreaked on her. Mary Joe Buttafuoco (Chloe Lanier), nèe Connery, was a high-school student when she met and fell for Joey Buttafuoco (Dillon Casey). She was attracted by his boyish charm, but unfortunately he never grew up – in the script it’s called “Peter Pan Syndrome” – and didn’t see any particular reason why just being married shouldn’t stop him from staying out all hours of the night, drinking, partying, and womanizing. Eventually he ends up having an affair with Amy Fisher (Maddy Hillis), a 16-year-old who got nicknamed the “Long Island Lolita” (all this happens in the Long Island village of Massapequa, a souvenir of the weird part of American history where we were simultaneously massacring the Native Americans and appropriating their place names) and comes off here like a classic film noir femme fatale.

Amy is constantly crashing her car and bringing it into Joey’s auto body shop for repair, and on one visit she makes a brazen sexual come-on which he instantly falls for. Joey can’t do anything about Amy because her well-to-do dad is a major customer at the shop, but Amy wants to marry him and Joey keeps telling her that he’s already married and isn’t interested in divorcing his wife for her. So Amy decides that she’ll just have to kill Mary Jo so she and Joey can be together at long last. At first she recruits a drop-dead gorgeous young man named Steven Sleeman (Indy Lesage), a waiter at a diner she frequents, offering him the promise of sex if he’ll use his rifle and knock off the inconvenient Mary Jo. Amy shows up at the Buttafuoco home with Steven, rifle in hand, waiting outside, but he either can’t or won’t get a clear shot at Mary Jo without potentially hitting Amy as well. Ultimately he tells Amy he’s not cut out for murder, and Amy coldly brushes him off, saying that by refusing to kill on her demand he’s forfeited any possibility of getting to have sex with her. The next henchman she recruits is Peter Guagenti (who’s depicted in the film but not listed on imdb.com) because he has a gun he’s willing to sell her and she’s already decided to murder Mary Jo herself. She comes to Mary Jo’s home on May 19, 1992, posing as a fictitious older sister named “Anne Marie,” and shoots Mary Jo in the face. Fortunately for Mary Jo, the bullet lodges in her jaw, permanently paralyzing one side of her face and costing her the ability to smile as well as rendering her partially deaf, but luckily still alive – though she suffers so much pain and has to undergo so many surgeries one could readily understand why she might have wished she’d just died.

Weirdly, Mary Jo refuses to believe that her husband had a sexual affair with Amy Fisher – indeed, it took her so long to realize he’d gone extra-relational on her that she titled her autobiography Getting It Through My Thick Skull: Why I Stayed, What I Learned, and What Millions of People Involved with Sociopaths Need to Know – until he takes a vacation to Los Angeles and is arrested for solicitation while he’s out there. Like Courtney Stodden, she becomes both an alcoholic and a pill addict to dull the pain, both physical and psychological, of her existence. One of the most powerful and moving subplots of this movie is the presence of her and Joey’s two children, Paul and Jessica. (Alas, the imdb.com page on the film doesn’t list the actors who play Paul, either as a child or an adult, and lists only Amara Sanoy as playing the adult Jessica.) The surprising growth of her children into reasonably sane adulthoods – it’s eventually revealed that Paul is maintaining a “guarded” relationship with his father while Jessica has cut ties with him completely – gives us a healthy subplot to contrast with the madness at the root of the story. Certainly Joey Buttafuoco reminded me a great deal of Donald Trump, especially in his unwillingness to admit to anything wrong and his blaming all his problems on other people; and when Mary Jo expressed her frustration at all the public sympathy for Amy Fisher as a fellow victim, it reminded me of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz’s recent statement on the killing of Renée Good by an out-of-control Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent in Minneapolis that the Trump administration is literally investigating everyone in the case (including Walz himself, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, and Good’s partner Becca) except Jonathan Ross, the ICE agent who killed her.

Ultimately, at the behest of her rehab counselor, Mary Jo forgives Amy Fisher for attempting to kill her and even testifies on her behalf at her parole hearing. (The real relations between Mary Jo Buttafuoco and Amy Fisher were considerably more fraught than that, including a series of tense segments on Entertainment Tonight and The Insider in which the two appeared together and Amy later said, “I have no sympathy for Mary Jo.”) Overall I Am Mary Jo Buttafuoco is quite powerful and well-staged drama, and one of its best aspects is how it shows that ordinary people can be trapped in the same media machine that manipulates and exploits them as celebrities are. Within a few months of the attack at least three separate TV-movies were made about the case, and there’s one scene in the film in which Mary Jo watches as one of the film crews shoots a re-enactment of the assault on her – and she collapses as she watches it. Many celebrity journalists defend their aggressive attack-dog tactics by saying that anyone who pursues a career in the public eye and seeks fame is choosing to put up with this – but this and many other tabloid-fodder stories show how readily people who never wanted fame and certainly never wanted to be physically attacked to get it end up receiving the same rough treatment as the major stars.