SHE’S MARY JO BETTA-FACE-O
Doc restores famed vic’s smile & pride
It’s been more than two decades since Mary Jo Buttafuoco took a bullet to the face from Amy Fisher and lost her ability to smile.
Now, thanks to a stunning new surgery, she’s grinning from ear to ear.
“It’s the first time in 25 years that when I smile, I can see the side of my teeth,” Buttafuoco told “Inside Edition” following her revolutionary facial nerve surgery. “I love it!” The now-62-year-old made headlines in 1992 when she was shot in the face by Fisher — the infamous “Long Island Lolita” who was secretly sleeping with Mary Jo’s thenhusband, Joey Buttafuoco.
What wasn’t reported, though, were Mary Jo’s struggles with self-esteem and her beauty as a result of her injuries.
“I was out in public with a very paralyzed, deformed face,” she explained. “It affects your self-esteem. It does, when you can’t put on a bright smile.”
Mary Jo divorced her husband in 2003 and described how she came to terms with their wild and tumultuous relationship in a 2010 book titled “Getting It Through My Thick Skull: Why I Stayed, What I Learned, and What Millions of People Involved with Sociopaths Need to Know.”
While she was comfortable on the inside, though, the Long Islander had an even tougher time coming to grips with her appearance.
“She doesn’t think of herself as pretty [or] beautiful, and it’s completely the opposite,” Mary Jo’s daughter, Jessie, told “Inside Edition.”
“She is the most beautiful person I know, inside and out.”
After years of being afraid to look in the mirror, Mary Jo met with Dr. Babak Azizzadeh — who has developed a new surgical pro- cedure to fix the nerves in one’s face — and finally chose to do something about it.
Using a nerve stimulator, Dr. Azizzadeh was able to identify and tag which microscopic nerves were working and which were misfiring.
“There are certain muscles that are obstructing her from smiling, so we are going to rewire her nerves,” he said before one of the procedures. “Believe it or not, some of the nerves are actually causing her smile to get worse.”