SLICE OF LIFE
Lorena Bobbitt: New Amazon docuseries about the case that shocked the world
AMAZON’S new four-part docuseries, “Lorena,” takes a deep dive into one of the most sensational news events of the ’90s through the prism of the #MeToo movement. On the night of June 23, 1993 — after enduring years of alleged abuse — Lorena Bobbitt sliced off her husband John Wayne Bobbitt’s penis. She was later put on trial for malicious wounding (and he for raping her) while the case became fodder for worldwide headlines and stand-up comics including Andrew Dice Clay and Whoopi Goldberg. In “Lorena,” premiering Friday, truecrime voyeurs will thrill as the details of that horrific night are recounted in wincing detail and from several points of view. We hear from the police, who had to retrieve the “appendage” in a field off the highway — that’s where Lorena threw it from her car window — to the bemused urologist who considered his options for making sure Bobbitt could still urinate should the organ not be found. There’s also the brilliant microsurgeon, who reattached the organ in a nine-hour operation. And, of course, Bobbitt himself, who somehow sees the humor in it all, despite having lost one-third of his blood volume in the assault.
Like the law-enforcement personnel interviewed in Joe Berlinger’s recent Ted Bundy Netflix docuseries, the town of Manassas, Va., had never seen anything like this. But neither had the world. It was also a story tailor-made for the era of Court TV, but before “Lorena” gets sidetracked by the grime of the crime, director Joshua Rofe provides some context.
In 1989, former surgeon general C. Everett Koop celebrated the opening of the first shelter for battered women. In 1990, there were 100,000 reported cases of rape — and an estimated 1 million cases. In 1991, we had Anita Hill accusing then-Supreme Court nominee Clarence Brown of sexual harassment. Two years later, the case of Lorena Bobbitt seemed to synthesize the strands of all these stories: one night in a suburban bedroom became an international conversation about marital sexual warfare and why wives
were still viewed as the “property” of their husbands. Filmed in a familiar “48 Hours” you-were-there style, the fourpart “Lorena” combines grainy footage of yesteryear talk shows (“Jenny Jones”) with present-day interviews with the jurors from the case and the journalists who covered it, along with Bobbitt’s brothers and Lorena herself. Although her boss at the time hired a “media representative” to handle the onslaught of press attention, hiring a lawyer would have been a better idea. She posed in a one-piece bathing suit for Vanity Fair ; as Kim Masters recalls, “She really wasn’t in a position to present her case to the world.”
John Bobbitt was acquitted of rape. Lorena was found not guilty by reason of insanity. They divorced in 1995 but were reunited on the set of the series “The Insider” in 2009, when John apologized for the way he treated Lorena. It was too little, too late, as Lorena readopted her maiden name, Gallo, and started an organization called Red Wagon, which seeks to prevent domestic violence through family-oriented activities.
By turns entertaining, shocking and sobering, “Lorena” shows that the only recourse for a woman in those circumstances is her own defense.