Lorena speaks with total naturalness about the matter. There, she says, is the hospital where surgeons sewed up her husband, John Wayne Bobbitt’s penis, after she cut it off with a kitchen knife in her sleep on the night of June 23, 1993.
A quarter of an hour away is the field where he threw the amputated limb out the window of his car. Why did he throw it away? «He had to drive, and with that thing in his hand he couldn’t, of course. So I had to throw it away.” Of course.
A little further on, on the same street, is the nail salon where she worked and where she sought refuge that night. “I am not vindictive. That’s why I told them where the penis was,” says Lorena. She is referring to the policemen who, after half past four in the morning, combed the gutter in search of evidence of the crime. When they found it, they put it on ice inside a hot dog container. They then sped to the hospital where, in a feat of surgery that took nine and a half hours, it was reattached to its (almost) fully functional owner. Those are the details that many people know and that Lorena relates with indifference. But the story that she wants to tell is another: that of a young emigrant from Ecuador, mistreated for years, who had been raped by her husband the night of cars, who saw no way out and who, finally, could not take it anymore and went to the action.
“They just focused on that,” says Lorena, referring to the penis. How he was cut, sewn up, and then, a couple of years later, surgically lengthened. The rest was left out. Those were times long before the #MeToo movement. “The reasons why I did it did not matter to everyone.”
In fact, hardly anyone knows that before Lorena’s trial began, her husband was accused of sexual assault (a charge to which he would be found not guilty). Rape within marriage had just been incorporated as a crime in US law. Many journalists then wondered if something like this was possible, if raping one’s own wife was not a contradiction.
Her husband bragged about forcing her to have sex
There are also many who have forgotten that the jury acquitted Lorena for temporary insanity. That numerous witnesses confirmed the presence of bruises on her arms and her neck. That she called the emergency room many times and that her husband bragged to her friends about forcing her to have sex. In the years following the trial, John had to serve two prison sentences for violence against two other women (he has always denied the accusations). “What we are dealing with here is a victim and a survivor,” says Lorena.
“The reasons why I did it did not matter to everyone,” said Lorena
Her version of what happened is now told by this woman in the documentary lorraine, available on Prime Video. She has been helping victims of domestic violence for years with her foundation, Lorena’s Red Wagon. That is the reason why she is encouraged to talk about that night in 1993 in which Lorena Bobbitt entered the history of popular culture with an act that came to appear reflected in a novel by Philip Roth and in the lyrics of a theme of the rapper Eminem.
“I was the butt of a lot of jokes. They laughed at my suffering, “says Lorena today, who continues to live in the same city
Lorena still has sad eyes, although today she is a 51-year-old woman who has succeeded at her job. She goes back to her maiden name, Gallo, though when people see her around Manassas it doesn’t take long to recognize her as “that” Lorena. When I ask her why she hasn’t moved to another city, she replies, “I live here. This is my home. Why should I let him win?
In the afternoon, we stopped for coffee near the court where, in 1994, she told the jury how her husband, a former soldier, regularly assaulted her.
“I just wanted to have a normal life”
Today, most people are nice to her. A woman recognizes her as we chat, and Lorena smiles politely and poses for a photo. From the beginning, she has refused to allow John to continue marking her life –he still writes her love letters–, but she is also aware that in her small town it is impossible for her to escape from his story and of the surname that she bore. “I know I’m still Lorena Bobbitt,” she says.
In 1994, after a brief stint in a psychiatric clinic by court order, she went back to work as a manicurist. She later became a hairdresser and, finally, a real estate agent. She regularly went to church, she also enrolled in college. There she met David Bellinger, her current partner. They were friends for a long time until they started a relationship. Before going out with him she hadn’t done it with anyone else, she says, she didn’t even think about it. How was she going to work being “that” Lorena? The couple lives with her 15-year-old daughter.
“After the trial, there wasn’t a day that I went to the supermarket without someone saying, ‘Oh my God, I know her!'” She made him want to run away. “She just wanted to take care of myself and my family. Have a normal life.”
John Wayne Bobbitt became a porn star and a regular television guest. “I don’t think he raped her,” a presenter once said, “she’s not that attractive.” Lorena herself also gave a few interviews, but she turned down the offer to pose for the magazine. Playboy for a million dollars. “A million is a million,” she says today. It would have come in handy, but I wasn’t raised that way.”
While many women defended Lorena and wondered what John had done to her to make her react like this, some feminists accused him of harming the cause by making women look like dangerous crazy women. The activists against gender violence tried to change the focus of attention, away from the severed member. “No one cared about anything other than John, his operation and his ‘loss’. We did a lot of interviews,” recalls Kim A. Gandy, former president of the National Organization for Women in the United States. And many told us things like: ‘Come on, if it’s what feminists have always wanted to do’».
Although in most of the stories that were made she appeared as “that crazy and jealous lady”, in the words of Lorena, there is no doubt that her judgment had a great weight in the development of subsequent events.
This part of the story is what documentary filmmaker Joshua Rofé wanted to tell. For this he interviewed Lorena, but John also spoke from his house in Las Vegas. He remains faithful to his version: that he had already planned to divorce her and that, after he refused to have sex that night, his wife cut off his penis while he slept, as revenge.
“I have had sex with many and none have complained”
In a telephone conversation, John tells me that he has not yet seen the documentary, but that the author has tried to make him look bad: “Lorena was not the victim, she was the culprit,” he says. It is not the only accusation that is collected in the film. For example, an ex-girlfriend claims that John tied her to a bed and raped her for days. “That’s just lies, I’m tired of them,” he replies. I have been with many women, with many, and none has ever complained, except Lorena…». He is silent for a few moments and adds. “And Joanne.”
How can you regret something you never wanted to do? Lorraine says. At that time, she did not know what she was doing »
Back in Manassas, Lorena answers my question if she regrets what she did. “How can you regret something you never wanted to do?” And she retells what she already testified in court in 1994. John came home drunk. He raped her. She went to the kitchen for a glass of water, saw her knife and all the years of abuse came to mind. Then she no longer remembers anything. “You can regret buying a red car instead of a black one because you made a wrong decision,” says Lorena. But she didn’t decide anything. “I didn’t know what she was doing.”
But I didn’t mean just whether he regretted what he did, but also whether he regretted making John Bobbitt famous, guaranteed him a small but regular income, perhaps for life. Life is decisions, he says. “He can decide. It is his life. I think I have nothing to do with what he does with his life after the incident ».
The incident. This is how Lorena refers to the act whose mention is enough for many men to be unable to avoid putting their hands to their crotch. She has had to accept that her story cannot be told without a certain dose of black humor. “Those days I was the butt of a lot of jokes. It was cruel, she says. Why did they laugh at my suffering?». But today, almost three decades and many therapy sessions later, Lorena finally gets it. She understands that all that stuff about the severed member, the ‘hot dog tray’, the ‘Frankenpenis’ and that impossible-to-forget surname are the reason she is being paid attention to today. “I will put up with the jokes and everything else if I can help put the issue of gender-based violence and rape within marriage on the agenda,” she says.
For my part, it is becoming clearer to me that there would have been no documentary, no Bobbitt jokes, no worthwhile cultural phenomenon if it had happened the other way around: if John had cut off a piece of Lorena’s body.
“They laugh,” says Lorena many times throughout this afternoon. They always laugh.”
@The New York Times Magazine
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