Amazon's new docu-drama Lorena is expected to broaden the conversation on domestic and sexual assault when it is aired later this month
LORENA Bobbitt struggled to turn the steering wheel as blood dripped on to her legs. In one hand she held a 12in knife – in the other her husband’s dismembered penis.
Panicking, she rolled down the window of her Mercury Capri car and threw the appendage on to a pitch-black grassy verge less than a mile from her home in Manassas, Virginia, US.
It was around 4am on June 23, 1993, at the intersection of Maplewood Drive and Old Centreville Road, and the 24-year-old manicurist had fled to her best friend Janna Bisutti’s house after attacking her husband John Wayne Bobbitt, 26, in his sleep.
His severed organ remained at the side of the road next to a 7-Eleven convenience store until police were dispatched to hunt for the missing penis, following a call from Janna. When detectives finally found it at around 6am, they raced it on ice from the nearby shop to the hospital, where urologist Dr James Sehn and plastic surgeon Dr David Berman performed emergency nine-hour surgery to successfully reattach it to John.
To those waking up to the sensational headlines the next morning, it seemed like the ultimate case of Thelma & Louise-style retribution – an incensed woman emasculating her husband in their own home. It was unheard of.
“The idea of a woman intentionally cutting off a man’s penis was unthinkable to most people,” recalls Linda Pershing, professor of women’s studies at California State University, who followed the case closely. “It really hit a nerve that any woman would mess with the male anatomy in the way she did. A penis so represented men’s dominance and their role in society.”
Certainly that’s the way former Marine John saw it. “She wasn’t the beautiful woman I married – she’d turned into a monster,” John, now 51, exclusively tells Fabulous. “Lorena was angry that I was divorcing her. She begged me to come back each time I left her, but the third time, I decided to finally end the relationship. She was devastated.”
Yet Lorena would later testify that her husband had raped her that night – and not for the first time. In fact, she claimed that years of physical, sexual and emotional abuse had caused her to lose all control.
In her testimony, Lorena sobbed: “I cut off his penis because he abused me that much. That’s what happens when a man pushes a woman so far and so low.”
Twenty-five years on, fascination with the Bobbitts endures, with Amazon set to air a highly anticipated docu-drama based on the case later this month. Titled Lorena, the four-part series, executive produced by acclaimed Get Out director Jordan Peele, is expected to broaden the conversation on domestic and sexual assault in the US.
“When we hear the name Bobbitt we think of one of the most sensational incidents to ever be catapulted into a full-blown media spectacle,” said Jordan. “With this project, Lorena has a platform to tell her truth as well as engage in a critical conversation about gender dynamics, abuse and her demand for justice. This is Lorena’s story, and we’re honoured to help her tell it.”
According to Linda Pershing, the series comes on a wave of support for survivors of sexual violence.
“Women are speaking out in numbers now, thanks to the #MeToo movement,” she says. “People are talking more freely, both in media and with each other, than they ever have been. And finally, they’re being believed.”
Twenty-year-old manicurist Lorena Gallo met Lance Corporal John Bobbitt at a Quantico dance hall in 1988. She’d left Venezuela the year before in search of the American Dream, and was swept off her feet by the 22-year-old from Niagara Falls, who proposed within nine months. “He was a very nice guy, we started dating and that’s how I really fell in love with him,” she told ABC’s Nightline in 1994.
The attitude was that if you were married, it wasn’t rape
However, only one month after their whirlwind courthouse wedding on June 18, 1989, the relationship turned volatile – and violent.
Fights about money and John’s alleged infidelity turned physical, and the Bobbitts repeatedly reported each other to police for domestic violence in their first two years of marriage. Lorena was often left with bruises and a broken lip, though John denies ever initiating their fights.
“Of course I didn’t hit her,” he insists. “It would have hurt her. I tried to restrain her a lot. I had marks on me, too, but I didn’t flaunt them.”
Brett Biro, John’s brother, witnessed their violent bust-ups, claiming he saw Lorena stab John in the hand with a fork on one occasion. “There were arguments, screaming, yelling. That’s just the way Lorena was,” he told an ABC 20/20 documentary last month.
“There was a general attitude that if two people were married, everything is consensual. How can you rape your wife?” Blair D. Howard, Lorena’s defence lawyer, says. “But in this case, she says it happened repeatedly throughout the marriage. Not only the physical abuse and the grabbing of the hair but then you also had the violence associated with sex.”
Lorena tried to gather evidence of John’s physical and mental abuse using a secret tape recorder, which he found one night in her purse, bringing on another sexual assault, she alleges.
“He hit me, he slapped me, he pulled my hair… he knew it was his voice on the tape recorder,” Lorena later testified in court. “He wanted an explanation and I didn’t give him one, so he beat me up later. He also raped me. He kicked me in my stomach and he threw me to the wall.”
Blair continues: “Many independent witnesses corroborated Lorena’s stories of physical abuse. Clients at her nail salon witnessed John coming to the door, where he would yell and scream at her. Neighbours would actually see him grab her by the hair and pull her indoors and overhear their screams.
“When he would go to the gym, he would tell his workout buddies about slamming her head into the headboard when he was having sex with her. He would laugh and really make fun of the situation.”
Four years into their marriage, Lorena and John decided they would separate, and while they were still sharing the same apartment, they had moved into separate bedrooms.
On June 22, 1993, the day before the attack, Lorena tried to seek a protective order against her husband, afraid of what he might do. That night he stayed out late drinking with friend Robert Johnston, and when they arrived home to the apartment, heavily intoxicated in the early hours, John crawled into bed beside Lorena.
He later testified that he had been too tired to have sex with his wife, though forensic evidence contradicted his claims. Lorena says her 13st husband jumped on top of her, grabbed her arms “really tight” and forced himself inside her.
Lorena’s defence lawyer says: “She not only resisted him but she made it very clear that she didn’t want anything to do with him. Once he had finished, in his intoxicated state, he just rolled over and started snoring. She was devastated, so she went into the kitchen to get water and try to pull herself together.”
It was then that Lorena saw the 12-inch knife in the light of the refrigerator – and decided to chop off his penis.
In the aftermath, as media interest reached fever pitch, John was charged with marital sexual assault, while Lorena was charged with malicious wounding.
Meanwhile, reactions to the Bobbitts’ case divided America. For some, the incident was nothing but a punchline, with merchandise – like clothing emblazoned with the words Love Hurts – quickly going on sale, and countless comedy sketches on TV.
People were starting to talk about domestic violence in public
Others, however, saw it as a women’s rights issue, with protesters brandishing placards supporting Lorena outside the courthouse.
“People were starting to talk about domestic violence more in public, but it still wasn’t comfortable,” says Linda. “There was the impression that John was giving his account merely as a way of making her out to be the villain. However, there was still some hesitation over whether we should be supporting her act of violence against another human being.”
John was cleared of marital sexual assault by a jury on November 11, while Lorena’s trial was pushed back to January 1994, when it was televised daily from the courtroom.
On the stand, Lorena sobbed as she described the events that drove her to attack her husband that night. She said: “I remembered the first time he raped me… I remembered the insults and the bad words that he told me. I remembered every time that he had anal sex with me. He hurt me. I remember everything. Everything.”
Court psychiatrist Dr Susan Fiester concluded that Lorena was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. Her criminal responsibility was negated on the grounds of temporary insanity that led her to act on irresistible impulse, and like John, Lorena was also found not guilty.
Neither of the Bobbitts served jail time for their charges. However, Lorena was taken straight from the court house to the psychiatric Central State Hospital in Petersburg, Virginia, where she was kept for five weeks – a condition of her insanity defence under Virginia law.
By this time, both Lorena and John had publicists to handle the hysteria surrounding their trials, and John took off for a 40-city media tour, thanks to his new notoriety.
In 1994, after launching a career as a porn star, starring in John Wayne Bobbitt: Uncut – one of the most successful adult films ever made – he went under the knife for a penis enlargement procedure. That same year, he also served 12 days for battering his girlfriend Kristina Elliott.
Since then, he has remarried two more times – the first lasted only a week, while the second ended after several jail spells, one of which was for domestic violence.
John, however, still maintains he was the victim, and is now working on a book with the transcripts of his original trial, which was never televised. “This whole story is to do with a scorned woman that can’t control her anger,” he says. “The world’s going to know the truth soon. It’s been a one-sided story for 25 years.”
Meanwhile, Lorena, now 49, shied away from opportunities to exploit her notoriety, turning down a $1million offer to pose nude for Playboy in the mid-’90s. Instead, she became a legal secretary, then a real-estate agent before volunteering at women’s shelters.
In 1997, she was arrested for allegedly beating her mother, Elvia Gallo, before being cleared when her mother insisted her bruises were “caused by a pimple”.
Then, in 2007, Lorena – who has been with second husband David Bellinger for 20 years, and is mother to 13-year-old Olivia – decided to focus her efforts into helping domestic abuse victims, setting up charity foundation Lorena’s Red Wagon.
As anticipation mounts for Amazon’s Lorena, available from February 15, the debate rages on – what motivated her to carry out such a violent act? By adding this cautionary tale to the volume of high-profile #MeToo stories, Lorena begs the question of whether the Bobbitts’ tale could have ended very differently.
“Hopefully we can learn from this case about what can happen to women if we ridicule or silence them,” says Linda. “Perhaps if the world had taken her trauma seriously back then, Lorena might not have cut off her husband’s penis.”
