Cutting memory of the Bobbitts
John Wayne Bobbitt wants you to know he is a good man in a crisis. “It’s my military training,” says the 51-year-old former US Marine. “It never leaves you.”
It certainly came to his aid on that terrible night, nearly 25 years ago, when he woke to find his wife Lorena sawing off his manhood with a 20cm carving knife.
Bobbitt is still, inevitably, remembered for the events of that night, which made headlines around the world, and which he now recalls in eye-watering detail.
At first, the horror and the pain sent him into deep shock, he says. But then his first-aid drills kicked in. “Instantaneous response actions! Lifesaving! Apply pressure!” he barks.
Shortly after he got to hospital, police found the missing two-thirds of his penis which his fleeing wife had thrown out of the car window near their home in Manassas, Virginia.
She had called the police, after realising what she’d done, which led to an exhaustive search.
In a miraculous nine-hour operation, urological surgeon Jim Sehn and his team successfully re-attached the organ. “He was the most calm guy I’ve ever met in my life,” said the doctor, recalling the moment he met Bobbitt in the emergency room. “He high-fived me and said: ‘Do the best you can for me, doc’.”
Bobbitt was warned, quite bluntly, that his member could quite possibly “turn black and fall off” in the days following the operation, a prospect that would have psychologically, if not physically, felled lesser men, but not him.
Oh, come on. You must have been traumatised, I say. “Nope,” says Bobbitt. He believes that he was lucky — lucky! — because he was young, fit and fresh out of the military. “I am a United States Marine and we are different. We are highly trained to fight and we are prepared for the worst thing a person can go through.
“So I was ready. If it was anybody else . . . some other guy not so well trained, it would have been a different story.
“It would have been a lot more tragic. They probably would have killed themselves, you know,” he says.“But I am a survivor.”
Is he really? Can he, for example, survive the reawakened interest that the 25th anniversary has provoked?
He is taking part in an investigation about the case by ABC’s 20/20 news show, while Amazon is producing a four-part documentary called Lorena.
In it, Bobbitt’s former wife Lorena Gallo will “tell her truth” in a critical discourse on gender dynamics, abuse and her fight for justice.
Lorena always claimed that she attacked John because he came home drunk and raped her, while he insisted it was an act of vengeance because he was leaving her. She says their dysfunctional six-year marriage — which ended in divorce in 1995 — was riddled with bullying and abuse.
He says that she — an Ecuadorian immigrant and trained manicurist — was using him to chase her American dream and couldn’t bear to let him go.
Both Bobbitts were acquitted of all charges in sensational trials. In 1993 he was found not guilty of rape and assault. In 1994 she was acquitted of malicious wounding by reasons of temporary insanity, and was set free after 38 days in a state mental institution.