MANASSAS, Va. — Lorena is very matter-of-fact about the whole thing. There, she said as she drove us around in her Kia on a recent afternoon, was the hospital where surgeons reattached John Wayne Bobbitt’s penis after she cut it off with a kitchen knife as he slept on the night of June 23, 1993.
Fifteen minutes away, near Maplewood Drive, was the gravel-strewn field where she disposed of the detached penis out the driver’s side window. So, why did she throw it away? I asked. “I tried to drive the car, obviously, but I had this thing in my hand so I couldn’t drive so I got rid of it.” Obviously.
Further down the road, is the nail salon where she worked and fled to that night. “I’m not a vindictive person because I told them where it was,” Lorena Gallo, as she is now known, said. By “them” she means the police who, sometime after 4:30 a.m., clutched their loins and went digging through the overgrown roadside grass for the missing member. They found it, put it on ice in a Big Bite hot dog box from a nearby 7-Eleven and rushed it to the hospital where in a nine-and-a-half-hour feat of urological and plastic surgery it was reattached and restored to (almost) full function.
These are the details everyone knows and the ones Lorena recites with the stoicism of the waiter at the Tortino Mare Italian restaurant who hours earlier had relayed the specials for us. It’s the actual story, she said — the one about a young immigrant who endured years of domestic violence, was raped by her husband that night, had nowhere to go and finally snapped — that she wanted to talk to me about.
“They always just focused on it …” — as in her husband’s detached and reattached and then, a couple years later, surgically kind-of enlarged penis. That was all the media, before now, before the Women’s March and the #MeToo movement, when we were all less evolved as humans, wanted to talk about. “And it’s like they all missed or didn’t care why I did what I did,” she said.
Lorena is correct, of course, that most people forget that before she was tried for what she did, John was charged with marital sexual assault. (He was acquitted.) At the time, marital rape only recently had been made a crime in all 50 states and was nearly impossible to prove in Virginia. Many in the media, including Ladies’ Home Journal and Gay Talese on assignment for The New Yorker, questioned whether it was an oxymoron. (“Wife Rape? Who Really Gets Screwed?” an earlier column in Penthouse read.) Al Franken, as the character Stuart Smalley on Saturday Night Live, implored Lorena to apologize to John’s penis. And, she is correct, that people forget that a jury found her not guilty by reason of temporary insanity. We forget about the string of witnesses at her trial who testified that they had seen bruises on her arms and neck and that she had called 911 repeatedly and that John had bragged to friends about forcing his wife to have sex. In the years since the trial, he was arrested several times and served jail time for violence against two different women. (He denied the allegations.) “This is about a victim and a survivor and this is about what’s happening in our world today,” Lorena told me.
That is the story she tells in “Lorena,” a four-part, Jordan Peele-produced documentary that will debut on Amazon Prime Video on Feb. 15. And that is why she took a break from volunteering with her daughter’s volleyball team and her work at her nonprofit, Lorena’s Red Wagon, that helps survivors of domestic violence, to have lunch and show me around this bedroom community outside Washington, where it all went down.
It has been 26 years since Lorena Bobbitt, a 24-year-old wounded bird of a woman with dark, wiry hair and sad, penetrating eyes became so enshrined in the annals of popular culture that she makes a cameo in both a Philip Roth novel and Eminem lyrics. Today, Lorena is shy, a petite 117 pounds in a black blazer, tasteful black stilettos, diamond hoop earrings and a Louis Vuitton handbag. (She told me her weight because she had weighed 95 pounds in 1993, when John said she had assaulted him.) Even though she has physically transformed, now the picture of an upwardly mobile 49-year-old suburban mom with wispy blond hair, she has the same, sad, dark, orb-like eyes. And even though she goes by her maiden name and, shortly after the trial, the media moved on (thank you, Tonya Harding), people meet Lorena in Manassas and it doesn’t take long for them to make the connection that she is that Lorena in Manassas. “I live here. This is my home. Why should he have the last laugh?” she said when I asked why she didn’t move away.
That afternoon we grabbed a coffee at Jirani Coffeehouse, near the courthouse where in 1994 the world’s media had descended to cover the Bobbitt trial, where vendors sold “Love Hurts” T-shirts and penis-shaped candy, and where inside Lorena, originally from Ecuador, trembled as she told a jury about how her husband, a former Marine, had repeatedly assaulted her. These days, the attention Lorena gets in this town is mostly positive. A woman who recognized her from a Zumba class ran up to us. “Lorena, right? My father-in-law has the biggest crush on you!” she said.
She smiled politely and posed for the photo. Because even though she didn’t want John, who continued to show up at her nail salon after the trial and still writes her love letters, to control her life, she knows that she cannot run from that phallic last name, not when you are Lorena in Manassas. “I know I am still Lorena Bobbitt,” she said. “That name you know, it’s very important here.”
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