The Lorena Bobbitt Documentary Isn’t Just About Cutting Someone’s Dick Off

At around 3.30am on the night of June 23, 1993, Lorena Bobbitt cut her husband’s penis off with a kitchen knife. As he began to bleed out she left the house, dick in hand, and drove to a nearby 7-Eleven where she threw the appendage out the window and called 9-1-1 to confess.

So began a case that was up there with O.J. Simpson as one of the most sensationalised of the 1990s.

But if you’re under the age of 30 your introduction to the story might come with the new Amazon Prime documentary Lorena, which takes a second look at a case that’s stranger, sadder and sometimes funnier than fiction.

Executive produced by Jordan Peele of Get Out fame and featuring interviews with both Lorena and husband John, as well as a cast of their friends, neighbours, jurors, lawyers, police officers and even Whoopi Goldberg (unexpected, but okay), Lorena is one of the most gripping true-crime documentaries of recent years.

It’s also offers a depressing insight into just how backwards the ‘90s were when it came to matters around domestic violence and sexual assault. Because — surprise! — Lorena Bobbitt did not cut her husband’s dick off for the hell of it.

The Chop

First thing’s first: the dick.

It feels necessary to preface this all by saying that John Bobbitt’s penis was surgically reattached and, he says, “is back to normal” now, which is probably why Lorena isn’t afraid to handle the matter with a bit of dark humour.

First responders, the urologist involved in stitching the thing back on, and Lorena herself all can’t help but laugh as they recount the fateful night of June 23. Lorena initially couldn’t remember where she’d chucked it (“Just look around [the house],” she told first responders with a shrug) before remembering it had gone out the car window.

Everything from there reads like a piece of OTT slapstick humour: an exhaustive search eventually locates the penis in the bin (just moments before garbage men arrived to take away with the trash), a cop accidentally steps on it, it’s transported to the hospital in a hot dog bag and reattached in a landmark 9-hour surgery.

And, yes, Lorena has photos of the bloody, severed wang.

The documentary also has a chuckle about how stumped the media initially were when it came to reporting on the case — “penis” was not a primetime news-friendly word in the ‘90s and outlets had to settle for calling it “the organ” instead. This is, apparently, the case that destigmatised the p-word to everyday Americans.

I'm watching the #LorenaBobbitt documentary and fuuuuuuuck every dude here

— Kiss Your Irish Vampire (@ChrisWards) February 23, 2019

Who’s The Real Bad Guy Here?

But Lorena is not a series of punchlines about the dangers of leaving eight-inch carving knives around the house.

Instead, director Joshua Rofe turns the lens on the horrific abuse Lorena Bobbitt endured at the hands of her husband, something the ‘90s media were all too quick to ignore in favour of turning the case into tabloid pulp.

Just like with Monica Lewinsky and Tonya Harding, 25 years later Lorena Bobbitt doesn’t look like a conniving villainess, but a victim of power and abuse who was young and in over her head (she was just 24 at the time of the attack).

John Bobbitt allegedly routinely beat and raped his wife, something that is backed up by accounts from neighbours, regular calls placed to police from the pair’s address and friends of John, who described how he had told them he liked “forced sex” and “making women squirm”. Bobbitt has since been convicted (twice!) of battery against women.

As well as the regular sexual and physical violence, John Bobbitt threatened his wife (who was an Ecuadorian national and did not have US citizenship) that he would have her deported if she did not comply with his wishes, denigrated her verbally, forced her to get an abortion she did not want and frittered the money she made from her job at a beauty salon while he himself remained unemployed.

Lorena Bobbitt testified that on the night of June 23, John Bobbitt had once again raped her before falling asleep. She plead insanity in her trial.

This all unfolded during an era unwise to the machinations of intimate partner violence.

At the time in the state of Virginia, you could only press a charge of spousal rape against your partner if were separated at the time of the attack and if it caused “permanent damage”. To give you an idea of how men and the media of the day viewed the case, you need only consider the fact that Howard Stern said, on national television: “I don’t even buy that he was raping her, she’s not that great looking”.

But many women watching the case unfold in the media found Lorena an unlikely hero. One journalist covering the story tells documentary makers that “women were kind of thrilled about it”, others told Lorena “someone finally did what I always wanted to do”.

Or as the Bobbitts’ female neighbour put it: “I laughed my arse off when I found out what happened”.

Me watching the #Lorena Bobbit docuseries pic.twitter.com/gEzG22HYq7

— Brittany Sterrett (@britsterrett) February 22, 2019

The Media Circus

Interest in the case was so feverish and media coverage nonstop, propelling Lorena and John both to dubious superstardom.

But the media mostly ignored John’s history of abuse and instead made Lorena the butt of the joke, debating the merits of chopping your husband’s dick off on trashy daytime talk shows or under stories headline “A Slice Of Wife”.

Entrepreneurial locals in the Bobbits’ hometown of Manassas, Virginia, sold penis-shaped chocolates and t-shirts with slogans like ‘Manassas, Virginia: A Cut Above The Rest!’ to the press and onlookers who came to cover the trial.

Lorena and John were both somewhat-willing participants in this weirdness. Lorena hired a publicist and gave an interview to Vanity Fair ahead of her trial that included swimsuit photos; John hosted a telethon to raise money to cover his medical bills with a penis metre that went up every time someone donated, and embarked on a 40-city media tour of the US after the trial was done.

He later went on to star in a pair of porn films (one called Frankenpenis); Lorena refused a million-dollar offer from Playboy to pose nude.

All of this — the removal of a penis, the layers of gender politics and prejudice to pull back, the insanity of the media coverage — is captivating subject matter.

But it’s getting to see Lorena reclaim her story and speak openly about her abuse that makes the documentary so worth watching. “It’s like they didn’t care why I did what I did,” she reflected of her experience in the ‘90s in a recent New York Times interview. Now, finally, we do.

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Katie Cunningham is a former Junkee editor and current freelance writer based in Sydney who has written for the ABC, Rolling Stone, The Big Issue and more. She is on Twitter.