Mary Jo Buttafuoco Forgives Amy Fisher More Than 20 Years After Scandal

It’s been more than 25 years since Mary Jo Buttafuoco was shot in the back of her head by her husband Joey Buttafuoco’s lover, 16-year-old high school student Amy Fisher. But now, Mary Jo is opening up about the “Long Island Lolita” scandal that rocked the nation back in the 1990s, and just one day before she tells all in Oxygen’s Snapped, she revealed that now that it’s been more than two decades since the incident, Mary Jo has finally been able to forgive Amy for what she did all those years ago.

“After seven years, I went to the Betty Ford center because I was addicted to these drugs and I wanted to get off of them,” Mary Jo said in an interview with Fox News about her addiction to pain killers after the incident. “I had survived this gunshot wound, but I was now a drug addict if you will.”

Mary Jo said that while she was in treatment for her addiction, counselors that she worked with asked her what she wanted to do with the rest of her life now that she survived such a cold-blooded attack, and they asked if she wanted to walk around with this grudge against Amy for the rest of her life.

“It was a slow turnaround,” Mary Jo explained. “I sobered up and I was like, ‘You’re right. I don’t want to do [it], I can’t feel like this anymore.’ So when I say I forgave her, it was ‘I forgive what you did to me,’ but I don’t say, ‘It’s okay what you did to me.’ It’s, ‘I gotta let you out of my head, I got to let you go because you’re killing me all over again.’ It sounds so cliché, [but] to move forward, you have to forgive.”