In the early morning hours of June 23, 1993, in a small apartment in Manassas, Virginia, Lorena Bobbitt picked up a kitchen knife and walked to where her husband, John Wayne Bobbitt, lay asleep. What she did next would consume American media for the better part of a year, force a national reckoning with domestic violence, and leave both participants permanently altered by their sudden, unwanted place in criminal history.
Lorena, 24, was an Ecuadorian immigrant. She and John Wayne Bobbitt were married, and by 1993, she would later testify, years of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse had ground her down to something beyond ordinary desperation. John denied these claims. The disputed history of their marriage would eventually become the central argument of a nationally televised trial — but first came the act itself.
Lorena severed her husband's penis with the kitchen knife while he slept. She then left the apartment, drove through the Virginia darkness with the severed organ, and at some point discarded it in a roadside field. She eventually called 911. Police located the organ in the field. Surgeons worked to reattach it, a delicate procedure whose outcome was far from certain, and John Wayne Bobbitt survived the assault.