The Wild True Story Behind the New Must-See Show 'Lorena'
When you hear that Jordan Peele has made a documentary series about Lorena Bobbitt, you might make one assumption: This is the true-life story of every man's nightmare, getting his penis cut off by a vengeful woman. But you'd be half wrong. The Get Out writer-producer isn't predictable like that. He and director Joshua Rofé instead set out to make this four-part series for Amazon a fresh take on what went down between Lorena and husband John Wayne Bobbitt and how their story paved the way for the 24-hour news cycle we're now so used to.
"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,” Peele said in a press release about Lorena.
Before we get to this fresh version of events, though, you could probably use a little primer. Even the people who were around on that infamous day in 1993 don't tend to remember the details beyond that whole penis thing.
Who are the Bobbitts?
Lorena Gallo was born in Ecuador in 1969, and grew up in Venezuela, but she always dreamed of moving to the United States to have the "American Dream," as she told Vanity Fair. She came to Virginia in 1987 on a student visa. That's where she met John Wayne Bobbitt, a 21-year-old Marine from Niagara Falls, New York, at a dance hall near his base, in 1989. Six months later, because her visa was about to expire, they got married.
In hindsight, they said the marriage soured pretty early on. John wasn't able to get steady work after leaving the Marines, so Lorena supported them both as a manicurist and a nanny for boss Janna Bisutti.
"She was nice. But she became stubborn and gradually violent if things didn’t go her way,” John told People. He says she was insistent on living beyond their means and was also jealous of other women.
Lorena says John was the abusive one in the relationship. In a 20/20 interview in 1993, she said the first time he punched her was just a month after they'd been married. She also said he forced her to have anal sex, and when she got pregnant, he made her have an abortion. The pair separated in 1991, but reunited again.
She cut off his what with a what?
Lorena and John had again decided to split up, but they were still living in the same apartment when on June 22, 1993, John went out for drinks with his friend, Robert Johnston. He got back that night and said he fell asleep drunk in their bed after a bit of groping. She says he raped her.
At 4:30 on the morning of June 23, Lorena went to get a drink of water and saw a 12-inch knife on the counter. She took it back to the bedroom and used it to cut off John's penis at the base. Then she ran out of the house, penis and knife still in hand, and drove to Bisutti's house. On the way, she threw the penis out the window.
Soooo many jokes
While the idea of a husband mutilating his wife is never funny, comedians considered the Bobbitts an endless source of humor. Tonight Show host Jay Leno estimated to People that he had made 15-20 Bobbitt jokes by that December, and David Letterman was mentioning Lorena nightly.
"Every guy in America is sleeping on his stomach now," Leno quipped.
"All you have to do, and I've seen so many guys do it, is you just say the name [Bobbitt] in any context, and it gets a laugh," comedian Bill Leff told the Chicago Tribune.
You couldn’t turn on the radio or TV without hearing their names. Somehow, this was still funny?
A symbol of anger
"He always have orgasm and he doesn't wait for me to have orgasm," Lorena initially told police. "He's selfish. I don't think it's fair, so I pulled back the sheets then and I did it."
But after those first hours of confusion, she told her story of rape and abuse, saying she feared for her life. In 1993, people didn't talk much about the concept of spousal rape, and Lorena became a symbol for victims of domestic violence. According to the Chicago Tribune, some feminists created a hand symbol called the Bobbitt salute: Hold two fingers in a V, then turn them to the side and they're scissors.
In November of that year, John went on trial for marital sexual assault. A jury of six women and three men found him not guilty. Even so, Paul B. Ebert, who was the prosecutor in both cases, seemed to believe that John was guilty, and many others agreed.
"The fantasy of the meek rising up and striking back stirs something deep inside us," Katie Roiphe wrote in a New York Times op-ed at the time. "The idea of Lorena Bobbitt's going to the kitchen for a glass of water and deciding not to take it anymore is compelling. And if John Bobbitt abused her (despite his acquittal this month) there may even be some poetic justice in what happened to him."
This wasn't happening in a vacuum. Just two years earlier, America watched Anita Hill describe Clarence Thomas' sexual harassment of her, before he went on to be confirmed as a Supreme Court Justice. Many point to the popularity of the rape revenge fantasy that was Thelma & Louise, also from 1991. This was also just after the Year of the Woman (1992), when the most women to date had been elected to the U.S. Congress.
Lorena's trial
After six months of hype, Lorena's trial in January 1994 was an event. People sold hot dogs and other penis-shaped refreshments outside. CNN aired the entire trial, including hours of painful testimony from the accused, as well as many witnesses who said they saw evidence of her abuse. These were the days before reality television, and certainly the first time the word penis had been uttered so many times on air. How could anyone turn away?
It's hard to imagine, but this was all before we became used to following a news story as it twisted and turned every hour of the day. But looking back, when can tell that this is when it all began. Court TV was gaining a massive following with its coverage of the Menendez brothers, on trial for murdering their parents. That same month, Tonya Harding's ex-husband hired a man to attack Nancy Kerrigan. Saturday Night Live found a way to spoof all three in a cold open, starring Mike Myers, Julia Sweeney, and Victoria Jackson. Little did anyone know that O.J. Simpson was just around the corner.
As they did with John, the jury acquitted Lorena, finding that she "was so impaired by disease that she was unable to resist the impulse to commit the crime," as the judge put it. She stayed in a psychiatric facility for 45 days and was released.
What happened to the penis?
This is perhaps the part that captured most people's imaginations back in 1993, and still does to this day. As Johnston rushed his friend to the hospital, Bisutti called the police and told them where Lorena said she'd tossed it. Police found it at around 6 a.m., grabbed ice and a hot dog box from the 7-Eleven next door, and rushed the appendage to the hospital. There, a urologist and a vascular surgeon were able to reattach it.
As news of the incident made the Bobbitts famous, John became eager to tell everyone that his penis was in working order. He spoke about it to Howard Stern, who held a telethon to pay for his medical and legal expenses. By the next year, he was starring in the porn John Wayne Bobbitt: Uncut, which he readily admitted to making to show the world that he was back in one piece. In 1996, he went a step further and had penile enhancement surgery, and the results were not as successful, inspiring him to star in a second movie, Frankenpenis.
The Bobbitts today
We suspect that Lorena is going to cover a lot of the aftermath, both for the Bobbitts and for the rest of us, of the past 25 years. Here are some spoilers:
Lorena became a citizen, brought her family over to the States, and decided to lie low. She refused a $1 million offer to pose for Playboy. Instead, she got work as an administrative assistant and then found a much more stable relationship with a partner named David. She's blonde, goes by her maiden name, and has a daughter. She’s an advocate for victims of domestic violence. In short, things seem pretty good.
John chose a very different path. Following his brief porn career, he worked as a greeter at the Moonlite Bunny Ranch brothel in Nevada. He got married two more times. He was found guilty of domestic battery against one girlfriend, and of harassing another, but he was acquitted of charges he'd beat his third wife. Now, according to his recent Vanity Fair profile, he lives off of disability after being injured in a car crash in 2014, plus some paid appearances.
Also, he reversed that penile enhancement surgery, in case you were really wondering about that.
Lorena begins streaming on Amazon on February 15.
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