It was the member-maiming heard around the world, but in 1993 there was little interest in why Lorena Bobbitt did what she did. This documentary tells her side of the story

The emergency service men, one nurse recalls, all sat with their legs crossed protectively. “We,” she added, of all the women involved at the hospital, “were thinking: ‘What did he do to make her do something like that?’” He was John Wayne Bobbitt, she was his wife, Lorena Bobbitt, and the something she did was cut off his penis while he slept, drive away with it and fling it out of the car window somewhere down the road. One of the emergency men found it, another picked it up and they put it on ice (in a hotdog bag, because life has greater temerity than any fiction writer) and drove it and the mutilated man to the hospital.

Severed penis spectacle arouses US passions at Lorena Bobbitt's trial- archive, 1994 Read more

If, in 1993, you were of any age at all, anywhere at all – for it was the severed penis heard around the world – you will remember at least these bare facts. What got lost then – and is only with this Amazon four-part series, Lorena, being disinterred now – is the answer to the nurse’s question. What did John Wayne Bobbitt do to make his wife of four years, do something like that?

It was supplied by Lorena many times. She told the police officers who arrested her that Bobbitt habitually raped her (“It seemed like when I said ‘no’, the more he wanted to do it,” she says now, in her soft voice, sitting in a self-protective posture on a sofa). She testified at his trial after her statement led to his arrest for malicious sexual assault. She testified at her own trial about the emotional, psychological, verbal and physical abuse including multiple vaginal and anal rapes. And many times before that, she sought succour at work or in neighbours’ houses during the increasingly frequent times she had feared for her life before she finally grabbed a knife and cut off the proximate and symbolic cause of it all.

Amazon’s documentary is a welcome attempt to correct the media imbalance at the time – then as, surely if depressingly, now, most of the attention rushed like blood to a penis to the … uh, penis, and domestic violence activists gave up hope of seeing the underlying issues gain traction. It gives those activists a voice, deconstructs the media narrative (which preferred rumours that Lorena ate what she sliced off to her claims of years of escalating abuse), and sets the Bobbitt case against the wider cultural context. It offers stark reminders that this was a time when the first women’s shelter had recently opened, the phrase “battered-woman syndrome” had only just made an appearance, William Kennedy Smith had just been acquitted of rape, Clarence Thomas was confirmed to the supreme court despite Anita Hill’s allegations, and the Tailhook scandal (involving the sexual harassment and assault of 83 women by more than 100 US military men in a Las Vegas hotel) raged.

But while it covers a lot of cultural ground, “Lorena” skims over it too fast and lightly. There are still a lot of dots to be joined and inferences left to be made by a viewer who must already be fairly informed about, and sympathetic to, the issues in order to do so. And although the series avoids the wholly unthinking reportage of contemporary coverage, it still lingers longer on John Wayne Bobbitt’s story than on Lorena’s. That extraordinary injury – and photographs of the dis-member are shown at every opportunity – still exerts its magnetic pull. The incident itself, and the search for its results, is exhaustively detailed and played out in what feels like virtually real time over the first episode. His subsequent rise as a celebrity and porn star and fall as the recipient of a botched penis enhancement operation (“He’s not the brightest bulb that ever burned,” remarks one of his lawyers) and multiple later convictions for theft and the battery of other girlfriends is given far more time than Lorena’s stirring, but less dramatically compelling, story of survival and reinvention as a domestic violence counsellor and campaigner, and founder of the Red Wagon charity aimed at violence prevention.

What is, inadvertently, most striking about “Lorena” is the number of people who attribute their willingness to help her – by giving her shelter, appearing as a witness at trial or some other way – to memories of their own direct or indirect experience of what she endured. For being unsought, it is all the more profound a testimony to the prevalence of domestic assault. May all victims survive and find the peace Lorena has now.