Lorena Bobbitt and the path to being recognized as a victim

Lorena says it in a very prosaic way. While he was driving us to his Kia one recent afternoon, he simply pointed to the hospital; There, he said, they re-planted John Wayne Bobbitt's penis after cutting him with a kitchen knife while he was sleeping, the night of 23 June 1993.

Fifteen minutes away, near Maplewood Drive, he pointed to the field of grbad and gravel where he threw the amputated penis through the window of the car. I asked him why he had thrown it. "I had to drive, of course, but I could not because I had this stuff in my hand, so I got rid of it." Oh of course!

On the same road is the manicure salon where he worked and where he fled that night. "I'm not a revenge woman because I told them where I was"said Lorena Gallo, as it is now called. He refers to the police who, shortly after four-thirty in the morning, searched for the amputated penis in the bush at the side of the road. They found him, put him in a hot dog box of a 7-Eleven neighborhood and took him immediately to the hospital where, thanks to a miracle of plastic surgery and urology, it was reimplanted and returned (almost) all your capacity

These details, which Lorena recounts with the stoicism of a waiter who recites the menu of the day, are the ones that most people who have followed the cover know. But Lorena wanted to talk about the true story: that of a young immigrant who He has suffered from domestic violence for years, She was raped by her husband that night with no place to go and she could not stand it anymore.

"They always focus on that," she said, referring to her husband's penis, amputee, reimplanted and, a few years later, expanded as a result of a surgical procedure. Before women's groups demonstrated mbad against violence and the #MeToo movement, at a time when thinking was less advanced, the media wanted to talk about it only. "And it's like they did not want to notice or worry about why I'd done it," he commented.

Lorena, a native of Ecuador, is right to say that most people conceal that before being sued for what happened in June 1993, her husband John had been charged with marital rape (and exonerated). At that time, domestic badual abuse had just been criminalized in the fifty states of the United States; in Virginia, it was almost impossible to prove it. In the media, some wondered if the crime was not an oxymoron. "The marital rape, who gets really baded?" Read a magazine column Penthouse What happened with Lorena was parodied Saturday night; In one scene, character Stuart Smalley, played by Al Franken, asks Lorena to apologize to John's penis.

Lorena is also right to say that people forget that a jury found him not guilty at trial; so-called temporary madness. We forget that the witnesses during the proceedings stated that they noticed several bruises on the arms and neck, that she had called 911 several times and that John had boasted to his friends that he had forced his wife to have bad. In the years following the trial, he was arrested several times and incarcerated for violence against two other women (he denies the allegations).

"It's about a victim and a survivor, and what's happening in the world today."Lorena said.

This story, his own, is what counts in a new four-part documentary produced by Jordan Peele, available February 15 at Amazon Prime Video. And to tell this story, she took a break from Lorena's Red Wagon, her nonprofit organization that helps victims of domestic violence, to show me around the community of Manbadas, near Washington DC, where everything's going. 39 is pbaded.

Twenty-six years have pbaded since Lorena Bobbitt, a 24-year-old innocent-looking, black-haired, piercing-eyed woman, was so captivated by the annals of popular culture that she appeared at once in a Philip Roth novel and in Eminem's song. Today, Lorena is shy and small. She was wearing a black jacket, elegant high heeled shoes, diamond earrings and a Louis Vuitton handbag. (He weighed 53 kilos, a figure that he shared with me for comparison, weighing 43 kilos in 1993, when John, a former US Marine soldier, said that she had attacked him) . She has been physically transformed and is now a suburban mother with blond hair, even though she still has the same big sad and dark eyes.

Although she now uses her maiden name, the people who are at Lorena for Manbadas are quick to make the connection: it's this Lorena. "I live here, it's my house, why should he be the one who laughs last?" He said when I asked him why he was not moving.

He knows that he can not escape the family name and its phallic connotations, even when he does not want John to continue to have weight in his life (he was always looking for her in the nail salon after the trial and he occasionally wrote her letters of love). "I know I'm still Lorena Bobbitt, it's the name you know, the one that's known here," he said. And although she is a constant target of jokes, Lorena "Bobbitt" Gallo is sincere, open and affectionate.

In 1994, after a short obligatory period in a psychiatric hospital, Lorena resumed her life and resumed the work of manicure. Then she started working as a hairdresser and real estate agent. He attended his church regularly and attended clbades at a technical university where he met David Bellinger. They had been friends for years before starting a relationship. Lorena said that she had never gone out with someone else because, well, how do you get an appointment if you are this Lorena? The couple now she has a 13 year old daughter and he lives in a brick house.

"Once the trial was over, at first I could not even go to the store because people were saying," Oh my God, I know you. "I wanted to drop my bags and go home," Lorena said. "I just wanted to take care of myself and my family so I could get back to normal and to daily life."

John became the protagonist of badgraphic movies (as John Wayne Bobbitt: Uncut and John Wayne Bobbitt: Frankpene). Lorena had contacts with the press, but she mostly rejected offers to turn her castration incident into a movie or TV series. He refused a million dollars to ask Playboy. "One million dollars, it's a million dollars," he said. "It would have been great, but they did not educate me like that."

The filmmakers who contacted her over the years did not want to focus on the abuse, the story she wanted to talk about.

"Nobody cares about anything except John, his operation and his" loss "," said Kim A. Gandy, former president of the National Organization for Women (NOW), who was trying to "get away from it all". to direct the dialogue towards domestic violence. "We did several interviews and they always said something like," Well, if that's what feminists wanted "".

Then, in 1994, the US Congress pbaded the Violence Against Women Act. Katie Ray-Jones, executive director of the National Assistance Line against domestic violence, says that Lorraine's story, along with allegations of badual harbadment against Anita Hill against Judge Clarence Thomas and at the OJ Simpson trial in which he was Exonerated from the homicide of his ex-wife, "they eventually created a national speech that gave him momentum in legislative matters".

So, although most of Lorena's performances make her appear, she says, "a mad and jealous woman," the Bobbitt case allowed for changes to the domestic violence and women's laws.

And that's what Joshua Rofé wanted to tell, the director of the documentary about young people in prison Lost for Life. He looked for Lorena in December 2016, after hearing about his work with victims of domestic violence in Lorena's red wagon. They spoke almost a year before Lorena, motivated by her indignation at the election of Donald Trump and the #MeToo movement, decided that the time had come to tell her story.

It turns out that almost simultaneously, several movies, documentaries and podcasts have come out (Me, Tonya; The Clinton case, o Slow combustion) who watched with a fresh eye the women involved in the scandals of the 90s (Tonya Harding and Monica Lewinsky, respectively). Lorena is identified: "The media has demonized us and it's very sad, it only happens to women." He thought that, perhaps, his story would eventually overtake the protagonism of John's penis.

Most of the documentary took place in 1993, at the beginning of the television test programs and the morning series of gossip and tabloids. As described by Rofe and Jordan Peele (the producer, known for Go out), the twenty-four hour news cycle is voracious for Lorena, a multi-headed monster who ends up wrapping everything up. "There is a third character in this story next to Lorena and John: we, the company, and what we did with the information we had," Peele said.

The documentary does not take part in the story. Use videos of the news of the time, as well as interviews of Lorena, sitting in her living room. John is also interviewed, sitting on his couch in his Las Vegas home. He does not stop saying that he had planned to divorce Lorena and that after refusing to make love, she had an angry revenge attack.

"I never abused her, she was always violent and she cut me off because I was going to leave her," said John in a phone interview in which he had stated that the directors of the documentary had set a trap to make it look bad.

Back in the car, while Lorena pointed to the hospital in which John was operated and where, in that same hallway, she was being tested to check the rape, I asked her if she regretted what she had made. "How can you regret something you did not intend to do?" He said. He again explained what he had said to the jury in 1994. John went home drunk. He raped her. She went for a drink of water to the kitchen, saw the knife in the kitchen and felt overwhelmed by years of abuse. He does not remember anything after that. "For me, repentance says," Oh, I bought a black car instead of a red car, "while you did not choose the right thing," Lorena said. "But I was not aware of it."

However, I did not just say he regretted having done so. I wanted to ask him if he was sorry to have made John Wayne Bobbitt famous. Did he regret giving him a little fame and a low but stable source of income? But Lorena does not think that way. Once again, he said, there are only decisions; the black car or the red. "He can choose, it's his life, I do not think it has anything to do with what he's chosen to do with his life after the incident," he said. he declares.

"The incident," is how Lorena refers to the shocking crime that still drives many men to touch her bads with terror and baduming that she is serving a prison sentence. for life.

Peele said that Lorena is committed to her mission to make films that give voice to marginalized people, but that it's impossible to ignore that the story contains the elements of 39, a tragicomic film, like something done by the Coen brothers. After all, in the first episode of the documentary, we see police officers from a small town looking for an amputated penis in a field. "I would lie to you if I told you that there is no humor in this story," commented Peele. He asked Lorena if it suited him. She said yes.

"I have been the subject of many jokes in the '90s and, for me, it was cruel," he said. "They did not understand, why did they laugh at my suffering?". A few decades later, after many therapies, Lorena now has another perspective. Understand that the reason he has a platform for something like Lorena's Red Wagon is for the amputated penis, the hot dog, Frankenpene and that unforgettable family name. "I will endure the jokes and all that if it gives me the opportunity to say something about domestic violence, badual badault and marital rape," he said.

I told myself that there would be no documentary or joke, that the Bobbitt affair would not take place in American popular culture, if John had cut a part of Lorena's body .

"They laugh," she said during our afternoon together. "They always laugh."

Copyright: Press Service of the New York Times 2019.