Mary Jo Buttafuoco — who it’s pretty safe to say was safe to say the only completely innocent party in the whole tabloid circus — was forced to deal with the effects of her injuries sustained in the shooting. The shooting left Buttafuoco with a bullet lodged near her spinal column. She told Oprah in a 2005 interview that she suffered from facial paralysis and hearing damage as a result of the attack. In 2017, People reported that Buttofuoco underwent additional surgeries to help repair some of the damage.
Curiously, considering everything that went down, the Buttafuocos did not divorce until 2003. In 2012, Buttafuoco married Stu Tendler, a print shop owner, at a wedding ceremony in Las Vegas, per the New York Daily News. However, that marriage ended in divorce in 2018, with a court document filed by Tendler mentioning that the couple’s “likes, dislikes, tastes, and personalities are so divergent we can no longer live together as husband and wife,” per Radar Online. Tendler died just a few months after the divorce was finalized, and when his obituary was released there was no mention of Buttafuoco.
While Mary Jo Buttafuoco has remained out of the spotlight — at least relative to her ex-husband who has appeared on shows like “Celebrity Boxing” and “The Howard Stern Show” — she still makes occasional TV appearances and in 2009 she released a book with the clever yet still very much on-the-nose title, “Getting It Through My Thick Skull: Why I Stayed, What I Learned, and What Millions of People Involved with Sociopaths Need to Know.”
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