Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, August 29, 1993 TAG: 9308290168
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MITCHELL LANDSBERG ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: MANASSAS LENGTH: Long
The men don't get the women, the women don't get the men. In the strange and disturbing case of John and Lorena Bobbitt, the war between the sexes has come to resemble the Civil War battles fought here in 1861 and 1862. The South called them Manassas. The North called them Bull Run.
They didn't even speak the same language.
Time magazine called the Bobbitts "America's most estranged couple." Everyone around here knows what they did, or are alleged to have done, although sometimes it takes a minute to connect the name with the act.
"Bobbitt?"
"You know, the woman who . . ."
"Oh yeah. HER."
The women smile. The men grimace, shake their heads.
What Lorena Bobbitt did, beyond any disputing, is cut off the top two-thirds of her husband's penis with a 12-inch kitchen knife while he slept the night of June 23. She said he had just raped her, and that it was the final straw in a perpetually abusive, four-year marriage. He denies raping her.
Both have been charged, Lorena Bobbitt with malicious wounding, John Bobbitt with marital sexual assault. Both face up to 20 years in prison.
Both also have filed for divorce.
Their story has been told and retold from Manassas to New York to Berlin to Tokyo. For a while, it was the hottest topic of conversation not only in Manassas, but in Washington, 30 miles to the east.
John Bobbitt's attorney, Gregory Murphy, said there was no point in asking for a change of venue to find jurors who hadn't heard of the case. "I'd probably have to go to the jungles of the Amazon at this point, and even then I'm not certain they haven't heard about it."
One reason, of course, is simply the novelty of it all. It is, among other things, a triumphant medical story.
Police found the severed penis on the grassy corner where Lorena Bobbitt threw it after driving away from the apartment she and her husband shared. The organ was packed on ice and taken to Prince William Hospital, where it was reattached in a delicate, 9 1/2-hour operation that has made minor celebrities of Dr. James Sehn and Dr. David Berman, the urologist and plastic surgeon who performed it.
It also is a compelling and wrenching personal story. At one point, it is easy to see, John and Lorena Bobbitt must have been an attractive couple. He was an ex-Marine, handsome in a stocky, all-American way, with blue eyes and light brown hair; she was a Latin-American beauty, born in Ecuador and raised in Venezuela, striking in a darker way, the eyes brown, the hair black.
But life here in the outermost fringe of Washington suburbs, where new curvy rows of neocolonial and neo-Victorian houses are eating away at the red-dirt farm fields, wasn't very sweet for the Bobbitts.
John Bobbitt couldn't hold down a job. "I don't know how to describe him," said one of his bosses, Michael Martorella, assistant manager of a Red Lobster restaurant in Manassas. "He's the kind of person who had an excellent background - excellent educational background, the Marines . . . but he was just slow. He just couldn't grasp it."
Martorella said Bobbitt was moved from his cashier's job at the Red Lobster to another, less demanding job, "and he just kind of stopped showing up." He later worked at another restaurant in town, and was doing day labor at the time of the attack.
Lorena Bobbitt, who worked as a nail sculptor in nearby Fairfax, quite clearly wasn't happy with her marriage. As long ago as 1991, both Bobbitts took out warrants against each other for assault and battery after an incident in which John Bobbitt claimed that his wife kicked him in the groin, causing him to stumble and cut his foot on a nail. Lorena Bobbitt said her husband had hit and choked her, causing her to fall and hit her head. The warrants apparently were never pursued.
John Bobbitt is 5-feet-10 and weighs 190 pounds. Lorena Bobbitt is 5-feet-2 and weighs 95 pounds.
Neighbors have been quoted as saying they fought all the time.
But none of this quite explains the strange allure of the Bobbitt story.
"It may go back to Freudian psychology or penis envy or whatever," said Paul Ebert, the Prince William commonwealth attorney who is prosecuting the case. Ebert said it has become "a household topic," the one thing everyone wants to talk about when they see him.
It is one of those crimes that resonates on a symbolic level. It has been compared to the Bernhard Goetz case, to the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas hearings, to Tailhook, to the Central Park jogger - sordid cases that somehow came to represent larger issues in American life.
"I mean, this is it, isn't it?" asked Judith Olton Mueller, executive director of the Women's Center, a non-profit counseling center in Vienna, Va. "To be emasculated for a crime of sex? You know, that's everybody's most basic fear. Talk about an eye for an eye or a tooth for a tooth! I don't think I want to use the words to describe this one."
Mueller was quick to say that she didn't condone what Lorena Bobbitt had done. But like many women, she said she could understand it. She could sympathize. Then she went further. The severing of John Bobbitt's penis, she said, was "a critical event in the history of women."
"Violence is done to women continuously and pervasively," she explained. "And this is a retaliatory act of great dramatic value, where a woman has returned, retaliated in a way that is equally as violent and dramatic as the violence done unto her."
It happens occasionally. Evelyn Smith shot her husband after he allegedly beat and raped her. Now she runs a small foundation for battered women in Washington. She is among the many women who have called Lorena Bobbitt's attorney, James Lowe, to offer their support.
"Reading the story and seeing her face - I saw her face and I saw myself," Smith said. "I'm black, she's white, but I still saw myself in her face and in her eyes. What she's going through, I've gone through. The only difference is, her abuser is still alive and mine's dead. I shot and killed mine. . . . I think her husband is fortunate - I mean, he's lucky that he's still alive. She's a better woman than I am."
This support for Lorena Bobbitt - the words "Thelma and Louise" pop up quite a bit - is disquieting to many men, to say the least.
"Basically, men react by wincing," said Alvin S. Baraff, director of the MenCenter, a private counseling center in Washington. "The men are really slightly threatened by it. They're really feeling dismayed and confused by the reaction of women to the incident."
"My work," Baraff added, "is usually to help men and women get along better. It's very difficult for a man to get along when women are so angry."
Women say they have good reason to be angry. An estimated 3 million to 4 million American women are battered each year by their husbands or partners, and one study found that one in every seven women has been raped by her spouse.
"There are a lot of women out there who have gone through this and probably wish they'd had a chance to get their own revenge," said Kim Gandy, executive vice president of the National Organization for Women. "So I certainly think that explains the number of women who have said, `Yeah, well, he got what he deserved.' "
All of this assumes John Bobbitt's guilt. But as his lawyer, Greg Murphy, has pointed out, the only act known to have been committed the night of June 23 was the severing of John Bobbitt's penis.
She is expected to offer a "battered spouse syndrome" defense, which claims that she was, in effect, temporarily insane because of what had been done to her.
Her trial date has not yet been set. Her husband is scheduled to go on trial for sexual assault Sept. 27.
by CNB