You Know the Lorena Bobbitt Story. But Not All of It.
By Amy Chokes-it!
ooops, correction..
By Amy Chozick
In
the 1990s, she was the topic of tabloid headlines and comedy skits.
Now, as a documentary series takes on the story, she opens up about how
that one night changed her life.
MANASSAS,
Va. — Lorena is very matter-of-fact about the whole thing. There, she
said as she drove us around in her Kia on a recent afternoon, was the
hospital where surgeons reattached John Wayne Bobbitt’s penis after she
cut it off with a kitchen knife as he slept on the night of June 23,
1993.
Fifteen minutes away, near
Maplewood Drive, was the gravel-strewn field where she disposed of the
detached penis out the driver’s side window. So, why did she throw it
away? I asked. “I tried to drive the car, obviously, but I had this
thing in my hand so I couldn’t drive so I got rid of it.” Obviously.
Further
down the road is the nail salon where she worked and fled to that
night. “I’m not a vindictive person because I told them where it was,”
Lorena Gallo, as she is now known, said. By “them” she means the police
who, sometime after 4:30 a.m., clutched their loins and went digging
through the overgrown roadside grass for the missing member. They found
it, put it on ice in a Big Bite hot dog box from a nearby 7-Eleven and
rushed it to the hospital where in a nine-and-a-half-hour feat of
urological and plastic surgery it was reattached and restored to
(almost) full function.