Fifteen years on the name Lorena Bobbitt still makes grown men squirm. But how does a woman who cut off her husband's penis start anew, or find a man? She talks to Helena de Bertodano about that fateful night and her life after the scandal
“If I went to a restaurant, people would wait for me to pick up a knife to cut a hamburger, then take a picture”
VIRGINIA, USA– Lorena Gallo, formerly Bobbitt, says that she only realised she had cut off her husband’s penis when she found it in her hand as she was driving away from their home. “I suddenly realised I was holding his member,” she says in a tone of surprise. “I threw it out of the window just as I was passing a 7-Eleven.”
It is 15 years since that steamy night on 23 June 1993 when 24 year old Bobbitt committed a crime so medieval and extraordinary that she made international headlines. As I wait for her at a restaurant near her home in Virginia, where we have agreed to meet, I wonder if I will even recognise her. The pictures I have seen of her date from the court case and show a grim faced, frizzy haired brunette. Instead I am greeted by a bubbly blonde who is so slim and tiny that she looks like she would have trouble swatting a fly. Behind her is a huge man, her boyfriend, Dave Bellinger, who, she says, will be sitting in on the interview. “As moral support,” she explains in a soft voice, which bears traces of her Latin American roots.
Bellinger, who towers over both of us at 6ft 3in and is almost as broad as he is tall, glares at me and I do not dare argue. In fact, I feel a little out of my depth. It is one thing to interview actors and authors, quite another to interview someone who is famous only because she sliced off her husband’s penis. Besides, she has made it clear that she does not want to dwell on “the incident”. What else are we going to talk about? The weather?
We start haltingly, talking about property. Both Lorena and Bellinger work for a local estate agent and are very glum about the current market. Then we drift on to politics. Bellinger reckons it is a good thing Obama has chosen “bin Laden” as a running mate, I assume he means Joe Biden. Next we study the menu, Lorena decides on a small cappuccino, “I can’t have a large one otherwise I’ll get shaky” and a wild mushroom omelette. Bellinger orders almost everything else on the menu.
Lorena, now 39 and using her maiden name, Gallo (which translates as cockerel), is wearing a royal blue shirt with matching royal blue eyeliner, a black pencil skirt and wedge sandals. She wears a gold heart on a chain and has small, expressive hands, perfectly manicured (she still works part time as a manicurist, the profession she had at the time of “the incident”). She has agreed to an interview to promote her new foundation, Lorena’s Red Wagon, which supports women in shelters, particularly those who have been victims of domestic violence. “My dream is to set up a shelter of my own one day,” she says. At the moment she is busy organising a casino night to raise funds for the women. “When I talk to them I feel like I’m reliving my marriage.”
On that basis, she is prepared to talk about her own experience of domestic abuse. As the daughter of a dental technician, growing up first in Ecuador, then Venezuela, she had a happy childhood, “although we were poor”. She came to America at the age of 18 “for a better life, because I see [sic] how my parents struggled. I wanted to live my American dream.” And has she? “I’ve started. At first everything crumbled around me. I met the wrong person. I wish I’d had a crystal ball and could see the future.”
Lorena, who was working as a nanny while studying in the States, met John Wayne Bobbitt, a tall, muscular marine, one evening at a bar in Virginia. “He was attractive and young and there was an attraction there, so that was basically it. He ended up asking for my phone number. I never give my phone number to anybody but for some reason I give [sic] it to him, then we start dating and that was it.” They married a few months later.
It was then that his personality began to change. “He would get frustrated at work and then he would come and beat me up or degrade me mentally. I was like his punching-bag. At the beginning I was taking it but then I started to think, ‘This is not right’.”
The lowest point came when she became pregnant and, she claims, he made her have an abortion. “He said that the baby would be Spanish and ugly and sick, like in a wheelchair.” She puts down her knife and fork, unable to continue eating her omelette. “I was young and stupid and I believed him. After [the abortion] I felt so guilty it was horrible.”
Yet it did not occur to her to get a divorce. “I was embarrassed. I didn’t want to say, ‘I have a bad marriage. My husband is abusing me,’ You want to say, ‘Everything is beautiful’.”
Despite everything, she still loved her husband. “It is like if you have a dog that loves you so much. Your dog is faithful, loyal to you. You keep on kicking, kicking. Eventually that dog is going to turn around and bite you.”
On the night of 23 June 1993, after four years of marriage, John Wayne Bobbitt was bitten. He returned from an evening out drinking with a friend and, apparently, forced himself on his wife. (He was tried and acquitted of spousal rape in 1994.) “I was asleep, then he came home, and I felt attacked, and that’s when he raped me. People say, ‘No, your husband cannot rape you.’ Well, it’s true. Your husband should respect you.” As her husband lay snoring, Lorena got up to get some water from the kitchen. “It’s not something that I remember in detail but there were all these pictures going through my head: all of the physical and mental abuse. I must have picked up a knife because it was in my hand – but I don’t remember picking it up. I never planned to do anything. The next thing I remember I was in the car, driving.”
With a 12in carving-knife, she had cut off more than half her husband’s penis. As Lorena fled, with the penis, Bobbitt staggered from his bed and woke up his drinking pal who was sleeping on the sofa. The friend drove him to hospital, the same hospital where Lorena was taken after going to another friend’s house and appealing for help. “I told her, ‘I need help, I don’t know what I did to John.’ It was a desperate situation. She took me to the police. They were very nice. They took me to the hospital.” Lorena told them she had chucked Bobbitt’s penis out of the window to the left of the 7-Eleven convenience store. A search party was sent out, the penis was located, packed in ice and – after nine and a half hours of surgery – reattached to Bobbitt.
Lorena was charged with “malicious wounding” and commented to police: “He always has an orgasm and he doesn’t wait for me to have an orgasm. He’s selfish.” But she says she was never treated like a criminal, “They never even put handcuffs on me.” During the subsequent court case, which gripped the nation, the jury found Lorena not guilty owing to temporary insanity.
Afterwards, despite being hailed as some sort of feminist icon, she tried to keep a low profile. “I didn’t choose this recognition. I’m not a feminist. It was difficult. If I went to a supermarket, people recognised me. If I went to a restaurant, people would wait for me to pick up a knife to cut a hamburger, then take a picture. I’d say: ‘That’s not very tasty.’” She hesitates. “I mean tasteful.”
Her husband, however, enjoyed the sudden notoriety. He formed a band, The Severed Parts, then, when that failed, accepted an offer to star in a porn film, John Wayne Bobbitt: Uncut, followed by Frankenpenis. Later he became a priest in the Universal Life Church in Las Vegas. “Anyone can do that,” comments Bellinger caustically. “You just register online.” He set up a removals company but continued to have run-ins with the law and was repeatedly arrested on suspicion of abusing new girlfriends and wives.
I ask them what they would say to Bobbitt if they saw him now. “I have no ill feelings about the guy,” says Bellinger. “I feel sorry for him in certain aspects. He made a lot of wrong choices, got a lot of money drained from him.”
Lorena in the meantime underwent a long period of therapy and now has a strangely detached view of what happened. “You know it happened to me; it could have happened to you, to anybody in the world,” she says, shrugging at the strange machinations of fate. “It just had to happen to me.”
“My past is like a scar,” she adds, sprinkling sugar over her cappuccino. “I cannot move to the mountains and put a bag over my face. I realise now I am here for a reason – to help other women.”
Although she does not court publicity, she is not averse to it. Someone, she says, was planning to write a book about her but it never materialised. Occasionally there is talk of a film. “Someone suggested Marisa Tomei to play me. I’d go with that.” Bellinger chimes in: “I know who’d want to play me. It’s obvious – Vince Vaughn. And Ray Liotta would be John. It would be a long negotiation process though: it would really depend on the director.”
Lorena met Bellinger a few years after her divorce from Bobbitt. “She kept asking me out for years; I kept saying no,” says Bellinger. Lorena laughs: “Don’t flatter yourself.” I ask Bellinger if he was aware of her past. “Oh, yes,” he says. “I followed the court case.”
He says that he is used to the jokes: “The usual one is, ‘Do you sleep on your front?’” Lorena interjects: “It’s a therapy to joke about it but it took me years to reach that stage – I couldn’t talk about it for years and years.”
Now they have a two-year-old daughter, Olivia, and plan to marry some day. Lorena sounds like any other proud mother as she shows me the photographs of her daughter that she carries in her wallet. Do they ever argue as a couple? “Oh, yes,” says Bellinger. “Any couple who says they don’t fight is lying.”
“But it never escalates,” Lorena adds hastily. “It’s just verbal.”
She is horrified at the copycat crimes the case has spawned. “Like the Super Glue one,” says Bellinger, referring to the woman who cut off her husband’s penis and Super Glued it to his stomach.
“Oh, my God, yes,” says Lorena, looking appalled. “You know, I didn’t want to set an example.”
I ask if, in any way, she is glad that her life took such a dramatic turn. “In a way, yes. If I hadn’t done what I did, I would be a typical suburban wife, stuck in a career in nails, probably with three children, getting older, nothing changing. It made me do a lot of growing up, a lot of learning. But I’m not glad it happened. It was a tragedy. If I could rewind, I would definitely erase my marriage.”
She has not seen Bobbitt since the court case, although for years he refused to divorce her and used to send her flowers and cards. He obviously still cared about her, I say. “I don’t know,” says Lorena. “I think he just wanted publicity. He wanted to spark his career.”
Does she ever regret telling the police where to find his penis? “Oh, no,” she says, amazed at the question. “Honestly, I’m glad he recovered from the surgery.”
How people react to Lorena depends on whether they are men or women. “Women tend to be more sympathetic,” proffers Bellinger. “Men expect to see some big bulky monster of a woman. What’s hilarious is when men don’t know her and try to pick her up: they crack jokes about her name Lorena because it makes them think of Lorena Bobbitt.”
“Yes,” says Lorena, giggling. “Then I say, ‘I have a surprise for you’ – and I tell them who I am.”
Courtesy Telegraph UK
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