In 1991, John was discharged from the Marines and found himself without steady employment. Lorena became the main breadwinner. Their fights escalated. She called 911 (so did he). Lorena was caught embezzling $7,200 from Bisutti (she stole the money out of desperation, she claimed, because she was supporting both her and John). The couple’s house went into foreclosure. They broke up. A year later they reconciled. It didn’t take.

Lorena imposes on her life a new story line, one lifted from the Hollywood movies that so enchanted her as a teenager.

John and Lorena had already agreed to separate again when, in the early-morning hours of June 23, 1993, John returned to their apartment with his friend and houseguest, Robert Johnston, after a night of drinking. Johnston retired to the living room; John to the bedroom, where Lorena was asleep. According to Lorena, John raped her before falling asleep himself. She went to the kitchen for a glass of water. She saw a knife. She used it to cut off his penis. “I didn’t want to teach him a lesson,” says Lorena. “No, it was survival. Life and death. I was fearing for my life.” According to John, the sex was consensual. “I was leaving her for good,” says John. “It was what my mom said—If she couldn’t have me, no one could. And there was the green card, too. That didn’t come to my mind at the time, but it’s obvious. You have to be married to an American citizen for five years to get one, and we’d only been married for four.”

Lorena got into her car and drove to Janna Bisutti’s house, flinging the penis out the window en route. Bisutti called the police, gave them its rough coordinates. Officers recovered it and brought it to Prince William Hospital, where Johnston had taken John a short time before. It was re-attached by Dr. James Sehn, a urologist, and Dr. David Berman, a plastic surgeon, in a near-miraculous nine-and-a-half-hour operation.

On November 11, 1993, a jury of nine women and three men found John not guilty of marital sexual assault. Two months later, on January 21, 1994, a jury of seven women and five men found Lorena not guilty of malicious wounding due to temporary insanity. Both offenses carry a maximum sentence of 20 years.

Audiences Say

Legally, the case was a draw. By acquitting both John and Lorena, the judicial system was basically throwing up its hands, admitting it didn’t know who to blame. The public, however, was neither so confused nor so equivocal. Complexity and ambiguity be damned. They wanted a villain—John, an under-employed former Marine barfly with barbells for brains. And a heroine—Lorena, a young woman tipping the scales at 92 pounds who could hardly speak except to weep. This wasn’t life, it was TV. In fact, it was reality TV, or would have been were such a term yet coined.

The case was emblematic of the times: In the early 90s, the gender wars were especially bloody, casualties running high on both sides. Thelma & Louise, the inciting incident of which was a thwarted rape, was the big movie of 1991. That same year, Anita Hill testified about Coke cans and pubic hairs at the confirmation hearing of U.S. Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas. Camille Paglia declared Lorena’s deed a “revolutionary act.” Feminists supporting Lorena flashed the V-for-victory sign, then turned it on its side so it became a pair of scissors: snip snip.

CNN aired Lorena’s trial in its entirety. When coverage was interrupted to show President Clinton’s press conference on Ukraine’s nuclear disarmament, the switchboard lit up with calls from irate viewers who didn’t want to miss a single second of the proceedings, the minutiae of the couple’s squabbles—over whether to buy a real Christmas tree or a plastic one, for instance—riveting in their banality. Comedians hadn’t had it so good since a Long Island teenager named Amy Fisher knocked on the door of Mrs. Joey Buttafuoco—and not to sell Girl Scout cookies. Outside the courthouse, vendors hawked Slice sodas and hot dogs, penis-shaped chocolates, T-shirts bearing the legend LOVE HURTS. Lorena expressed the hope that Marisa Tomei would play her in the movie. Once John’s trial wrapped up, he embarked on a 40-city tour in which he participated in “Stump the Bobbitt”—that is, tried to guess punch lines to jokes about his mutilation—went on radio programs, autographed steak knives, and appeared as a judge on Howard Stern’s New Year’s Eve pageant (fellow judges included Tiny Tim, Mark Hamill, and Daniel Carver, the Grand Dragon of the Georgia K.K.K.).

Critics Say

It’s the case that launched a thousand op-eds and very-special-episodes, most of them hand-wringing in tone, dedicated to such weighty themes as Gender Inequality or Female Rage or A Society That Turns a Blind Eye. And a persuasive argument can be made for the Bobbitt story as domestic tragedy. Lorena and her lawyers certainly saw it in those terms: An immigrant girl comes to the greatest nation on earth with stars (and stripes) in her eyes. She marries a local, a pretty-boy brute, who abuses her, routinely, systematically. She takes it and takes it until she can’t take it anymore.