Hal-9000
01-31-2019, 05:12 PM
By Amy Chozick NYTIMES.com
Jan. 30, 2019
https://i.imgur.com/SlHtydU.jpg
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.
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. “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.
John went on to star in pornographic films (“John Wayne Bobbitt: Uncut” and “John Wayne Bobbitt’s Frankenpenis”). He became a fixture on “The Howard Stern Show.” “I don’t even buy that he was raping her,” Stern said on one segment with John. “She’s not that great looking.” Lorena did some press, but mostly resisted offers to turn their castration saga into a film or TV series. She turned down $1 million to pose for Playboy. “A million dollars is a million dollars,” she said. “It would’ve been amazing. But I wasn’t raised that way.”
So, even though most portrayals of Lorena made her seem like, in her words, “this crazy, jealous lady,” the Bobbitt trial did play a part in the laws changing.
“Lorena” ends with the number for the National Domestic Violence Hotline, but the narrative itself doesn’t take a side. It relies on news footage and interviews with Lorena, sitting in her living room. John is extensively interviewed, too, from a lounger in his home in North Las Vegas. He has maintained that he planned to divorce Lorena and that after he denied her sex that night, in a vengeful rage, she cut off his penis while he slept.
In a phone interview, John, who was in New York preparing to tape “The Dr. Oz Show,” said he hadn’t seen “Lorena” but he said the filmmakers had set him up to make him look bad. “She was never abused, she was always the abuser and she cut off my penis because I was going to leave her,” he said. I asked John about the additional charges that the film covers, including a harrowing interview with one of his ex-girlfriends who said he tied her to the bed in his Niagara Falls, N.Y., apartment and for several days repeatedly raped her. He was convicted and spent time in jail.
“It’s all made up and I’m tired of it,” John said. “I was with a lot of women, a lot of women and none of them ever complained, except Lorena —” He paused. “And Joanna.” After we discussed the allegations, he proposed we keep talking over dinner at the Empire Hotel where he was staying. I declined.
Back in the car, as Lorena pointed out the hospital where John had his surgery and where, just down the hall, she underwent a rape kit, I asked her if she regretted what she did. “How can you regret something you didn’t mean to do?” she said. She explained, again, what she told the jury in 1994. John came home drunk. He raped her. She went to the kitchen to get a glass of water, spotted the kitchen knife and was overcome from years of abuse. She doesn’t remember anything after that. “To me, regret is ‘Oh, I bought a black car instead of a red car’ when you don’t choose right,” Lorena said. “I wasn’t in my conscious mind.”
Jan. 30, 2019
https://i.imgur.com/SlHtydU.jpg
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.
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. “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.
John went on to star in pornographic films (“John Wayne Bobbitt: Uncut” and “John Wayne Bobbitt’s Frankenpenis”). He became a fixture on “The Howard Stern Show.” “I don’t even buy that he was raping her,” Stern said on one segment with John. “She’s not that great looking.” Lorena did some press, but mostly resisted offers to turn their castration saga into a film or TV series. She turned down $1 million to pose for Playboy. “A million dollars is a million dollars,” she said. “It would’ve been amazing. But I wasn’t raised that way.”
So, even though most portrayals of Lorena made her seem like, in her words, “this crazy, jealous lady,” the Bobbitt trial did play a part in the laws changing.
“Lorena” ends with the number for the National Domestic Violence Hotline, but the narrative itself doesn’t take a side. It relies on news footage and interviews with Lorena, sitting in her living room. John is extensively interviewed, too, from a lounger in his home in North Las Vegas. He has maintained that he planned to divorce Lorena and that after he denied her sex that night, in a vengeful rage, she cut off his penis while he slept.
In a phone interview, John, who was in New York preparing to tape “The Dr. Oz Show,” said he hadn’t seen “Lorena” but he said the filmmakers had set him up to make him look bad. “She was never abused, she was always the abuser and she cut off my penis because I was going to leave her,” he said. I asked John about the additional charges that the film covers, including a harrowing interview with one of his ex-girlfriends who said he tied her to the bed in his Niagara Falls, N.Y., apartment and for several days repeatedly raped her. He was convicted and spent time in jail.
“It’s all made up and I’m tired of it,” John said. “I was with a lot of women, a lot of women and none of them ever complained, except Lorena —” He paused. “And Joanna.” After we discussed the allegations, he proposed we keep talking over dinner at the Empire Hotel where he was staying. I declined.
Back in the car, as Lorena pointed out the hospital where John had his surgery and where, just down the hall, she underwent a rape kit, I asked her if she regretted what she did. “How can you regret something you didn’t mean to do?” she said. She explained, again, what she told the jury in 1994. John came home drunk. He raped her. She went to the kitchen to get a glass of water, spotted the kitchen knife and was overcome from years of abuse. She doesn’t remember anything after that. “To me, regret is ‘Oh, I bought a black car instead of a red car’ when you don’t choose right,” Lorena said. “I wasn’t in my conscious mind.”