And That's Why We Drink - E189 A Poultry Ghost and a Manasshole

Episode Date: September 20, 2020

Welcome to episode 189! The one in which we encounter a boat who may have been misgendered and then murdered everybody. Em takes us on a wild ride on the ghost ship SS Ourang Medan. Then Christine continues the wild ride with the story of Lorena Bobbitt and her dick of a husband (not to mention the fate of her husband's dick). We're also pretty sure everyone has an enemy from Manassas (sorry, Manassas!)... and that's why we drink! If you are experiencing domestic abuse, you can find help at the domestic abuse hotline: [phone]-SAFE (7233)There's still time to register to vote! With the monumental loss of Justice Ginsburg this week, it's important, now more than ever, to use our hurt as fuel and take action. For an easy way to register to vote in your state, visit bit.ly/andthatswhywevotePlease consider supporting the companies that support us! Check out all the amazing shoes and bags available right now at Rothys.com/DRINKGo to Felixgrayglasses.com/DRINK for the absolute best quality blue light filtering glasses on the market!Go to dailyharveest.com and enter promo code DRINK to get $25 off your first box!Head to Policygenius.com right now to get started! Who knows what weirdly specific amount they could save you!

Hi everyone, Christine here. I just wanted to step in before today's episode to remind you to please register to vote. There is still time, but not much, and with the monumental loss of Justice Ginsburg this week, it's more important now than ever to use our hurt as fuel and take action. For an easy way to register in your state, visit bit.ly slash and that's why we vote. That's bit.ly slash and that's why we vote. Let me tap the eyes a little bit. What the hell? Wake up a little bit.

Tim, you need me to smack you in the eyes? In my pocket sockets? Again, why do we always talk about eyeballs? This time he starts recording ahead of time. Yeah, he knows what he's doing. He knows what he's doing he knows what he's doing we should have known okay i feel more awake do you you sure you don't mean you feel a little more in pain you in the eyes a little more like whatever you're doing up to there don't judge me what's going on i just need a little coolant. Oh, I feel better now. Yeah, ASMR.

Kaylin's like, please don't pour water all over the microphone. No, no, no. It's not part of the plan. We're good now. I need a little cold air. So, worked out. So, working well for you? Yeah, I'm good now.

Ready to party? I'm back. Let's rage. Okay. Welcome to our biblical podcast. Where we rage. Where we rage hard against the machine. Yeah.

I'm Christine. I'm me. And. Spelled backwards, it's M. That's right. And also. This is why we drink and that's why we drink. That's what it's called, sort of, a little bit. How are you, Christine?

Listen, I'm great. Thank you for asking. How has your day been? Well, I've spent every waking moment with you. And sleeping moment. Every waking and unconscious moment. Yay! Together.

Well, Christine, yesterday after we recorded she was like i am a little scared to sleep in the apartment by myself and i went okay sleep over and then i did the whole like no you don't have to and i was like can you just shut up i'm coming i was like you already made it clear i'm coming it's fine poor eva came over and then went home alone so well you also got locked out of our apartment for like 20 minutes oh my god with all of your stuff with multiple suitcases yeah it was really a mess poor eva had to come like rescue me yeah i was not going to i didn't even see like an hour and a half later i was like oh my god are you still outside and i was like eva i should send a

picture of you on the side on the sidewalk yeah and the security man who by the way came out and was like what are you and i was inside a bush okay listen why i don't want to know never mind because it was comfier than sitting on the floor listen it doesn't matter okay was it our security guard like no it was for another building where they were like what are you doing over there i think he was just living my best it was very dark out and i was not behaving like a normal citizen anyway i was gonna say something oh yeah so this comes out later but we have a newsletter yes and uh we're sending out today that we're recording so i'm really excited about that yeah um and so by the time this comes out it'll have already

been out and maybe even the second month is coming out yeah so second what is wrong with me i hear what you're saying and no one else is but that's okay we have a newsletter coming out and by the time this episode comes out it will have already existed in the in the cybersphere for quite a while multiple maybe there might be many too we're we're trying to do a lot of these in a row so i don't even know when this episode comes our lovely friend jessica is making these wonderful newsletters and we have a patron of the month in there we have a pet of the month milkshake of the month milkshake milkshake wine of the month and like um it's really fun so yes we've got a lot of good stuff coming that's right i think on our website it's

on there and that's where you drink.com if you want to sign up yeah um i'm just very i've always wanted a newsletter i think it's something i didn't know i wanted like i wanted but i didn't know i wanted it's it'll be fun it's gonna be fun so anyway please check that out um also on our website you can sign up for the newsletter, correct? Oh, yeah. That's what I meant. Sorry. Yeah.

Maybe you did say and I just wasn't listening. This is going to be a bumpy ride. Okay. That being said, I am so amped about this story. Like, that's why my brain is not here because I've been like waiting to do this one since like a very early, very early episode. You'll see. I can't tell you yet, but I'm just.

Will I know it? Yes. Okay. Oh okay oh wow that's new okay oh so subtle but not subtle at all but very sexy definitely makes uh it's it's a crowd pleaser if i it's any crowd that i'm not in i'm a showstopper to any crowd that does not include me um i am winking it's memorable and i find it very attractive the wink is just it's always a little too slow and the smile is a little too pronounced like your face is like your mouth is saying i'm doing it like this look at what i'm up to watch watch that's what my face does it goes like uh like i'm doing it anyway welcome to our show and my favorite is after you drink some wine the eyelid never comes back up yeah it actually does kind of just stay down there that's right i'm like okay time to go to bed and now that we've had enough sleepovers you've definitely

seen that when i wake up were you in a towel this morning yes huh i was up for like four hours and then the moment i walked out grabbed something in a towel you were like ah that was like super good time i thought i was having a dream whatever you did just like immediately not back to sleep not exist anymore so i guess i probably just scared you back into your unconscious mind i also didn't sleep with a blanket last night i really and literally wrapped themselves in t-shirts as blankets. It was a rough 24 hours we've had. I realized once I got to your place,

I forgot to bring a blanket. And Christine had a blanket that was already too small for just you. It was like a tiny SpongeBob blanket. And we had a box full of like, and that's why we drink t-shirts. So I just put the pile on my body. And I was like-

I woke up and I was like, it was just like t-shirts it was like strewn about a box of shirts on me with no t-shirts on them just like laying there amidst all the t-shirts i was like this has worked out very well there were so many shirts that felt like um like a gravity blanket it just felt heavy and also like it's a t-shirt so it fits me this much like so my legs i slept with nothing really didn't work but i felt like if i had something heavy on my chest i would forget that the rest of me was i could fall asleep faster yeah anyway if you like a shirt that smells like me we really need to buy a mattress for that place we keep sleeping on the same air mattress and i swear my poor almost 30 year old back is having a hard time

we should get a mattress for that place write that down it's a temporary it's a band-aid so anyway this is um my story this is a uh mystery conspiracy situation that's fun um so this is and i will probably say it wrong but this is the story of the ss oorong madon whoa a boat it's either madan or madon but i think it's madan yes it is a boat fun um so let's talk about it there because this is what please this is my job let's um so uh there is a stretch of water between malaysia and an indonesian island called sumatra called the strait of malacca oh and And it's been the main shipping channel between the Indian Ocean and the Pacific Ocean since the 17th century.

And over 94,000 vessels, fun fact, travel the Strait every year still. It's the busiest Strait in the world and carries about a quarter of the world's traded goods. I can imagine there might be a haunted boat in the mix if there were that many people. There just be hey hey okay um i don't know i don't know continue over the centuries uh many incidents with pirates uh have happened on this straight even up until i think 2006 was the last documented pirate bonanza. I don't know what they're called.

Not that. A pirate takeover. What do we say in the last episode? A quilting party? Oh, a quilting frolic. Let's call that. Obviously. It's a pirate quilting.

The pirates, they wanted to do a little quilting. They wanted to frolic. They did it. As of 2006, they were something like that. Listen, Em uses t-shirts as blankets. So if they want to quilt, let them. Look, it's a quilting frolic. We're going to make me a blanket at the next quilting frolic.

That's right. And so this straight, I guess, over the last several centuries. I don't know if this is over the last several centuries or a smaller time frame. But it says there's been at least 34 shipwrecks. And I'm like, in several centuries, only 34? Sounds kind of good to good to me yeah i don't really know the statistics of that but i don't know ship i would agree with you but i would imagine like it's been around since the 17th century and not even 40 shipwrecks well i guess a shipwreck is like a big shipwreck where everything goes there could be a lot of there's a couple yeah a couple canoe conundrums that kind of came through you

know canoe conundrums and rathrex that's what i said yeah that's what i say all the time um or also tell me even if it's not good or funny kayak kayak kayak attack kayak attack what were you gonna say i don't fucking know you just gave me a word and hoped i'd run with it a boat bonanza a boating bonanza listen i was already on it with i said so i guess what i'm saying is maybe there were 34 like big shipwreck like ships and not like holy shit shipwrecks and like you know how there's like a fender bender maybe a couple fender benders in there too i think they probably had at least 100 fender benders at least 100 they had a couple of thunderbenders in there too. I think they probably had at least a hundred thunderbenders. At least a hundred. For sure. A couple of raft wrecks.

For sure. So anyway, so this is a very important piece of water property, if I say so myself. And I do. And I do. So in 1947, there were two U.S. vessels. One was the city of Baltimore and the the silver star and they were sailing the straight and the silver star this yeah 1947 the silver star picked up a distressed message from a nearby ship that gave no location but it had a but um it got a message in morse code on its ship

even though i think morse code was like a normal thing then but for me it does feel extra spooky like old-timey it's probably still a thing i don't know maybe maybe i always i always sometimes wow we're doing it again huh it's not good i often think that like maybe when we hear knocks from ghosts it's old-timey ones doing morse code i do i've thought that i don't want to learn morse code just so i can understand what's i think when we were in New Orleans, we said that because we heard like weird tapping and we were like, maybe this was a, I think I know SOS. I know SOS and that's it. Yeah, me too. Well, fun fact, I guess.

Dot, dot, dot, dash, dash, dash, dot, dot, dot. Okay. Yeah. So, oh yeah. So they hear the Silver Star picks up a distress message. No location given, but a Morse code message shows up. And this is what the message was all officers including the captain are dead lying in chart room and bridge possibly whole crew dead and then there was nothing for a while and then some weird scattered morse code as

if they were trying to spell something but getting weaker and then in morse code they got i die oh no okay first of all can you imagine how long that took l like i mean geez well i'm thinking like with this ouija board we were playing yesterday it was just like hey but like morse code would be the same thing i die like it probably you were holding on for dear life just to be able to spell out that you were about to die like idea please i see i did also maybe it wasn't meant to be i die maybe it was like another word and there was auto corrected you know that's a bummer i hate it when my worst code operation system auto corrects you know and so the one word that we know sometimes auto corrects um so the silver star that we know sometimes, autocorrect.

So the Silver Star, they call nearby listening posts, and they are able to triangulate the signal to the Indian Sea, which was not near typical shipping lanes on the street. They were like, they shouldn't even be shipping there. That doesn't make sense. So the Silver Star says that they're going to go check it out. They're going to follow the coordinates and go on this little rescue mission. And hours later, the Silver Star captain finally finds the SS Ourang Medan.

And it was now 50 miles from the coordinates that are provided. So it was just drifting this whole time. So they already knew something bad was going on. The ship didn't look like it had been taken over from like a pirate bonanza but it did there were no signs of people so they knew that like okay even if the ship doesn't look destroyed there's something bad we should see someone yeah um so the silver star tried to contact them and they got no response and the silver star decided okay we're going our crew's gonna go on can you imagine the first person to be like you step on the boat no you step on the boat and then just like fly your boat away fly your boat away okay you know drive it off okay um la la la so the sos is what i meant

it auto corrected to die though um so the ship didn't look like it had been taken over so they're gonna go check it out and when they got on board um well this is so i'm gonna talk about this guy later but a guy named sh mark he wrote a letter about what happened and what the crew saw has been described in the letter and this is an excerpt from that there wasn't a living creature on the ship the captain lay dead on the bridge the bodies of the other officers sprawled in the letter and this is this is an excerpt from that there wasn't a living creature on the ship the captain lay dead on the bridge the bodies of the other officers sprawled in the wheelhouse chart room and wardroom i don't know what the wardroom is um the faithful sparks was slumped in his chair in the radio shack his hand still on the sending key it's like he was the one who had been typing i die and his hand

was still on the morse code machine going for the d i i die and then or the t maybe he's on a diet a diet i diet very well atkins you know uh keto um let me see oh yeah his hand still on the sending key the bodies of the crew lay everywhere in their rooms and the passageways on the decks. And on all the dead faces was a look of convulsive horror. The frozen faces were upturned to the sun. The mouths were gaping open and the eyes staring. And a lot of the people were also pointing at something.

Oh my God. Another source. Oh, maybe this is where I say that. Another source says, quote quote every corpse's eyes were bulging all of their mouths were open as if they were screaming and their hands were reaching out as if they were fighting something um or pointing at someone oh my god oh i have goose cam yikes so 20 there were 22 shipmates in total and they were all dead in all in similar ways, including the radio operator.

And, quote, I'm sorry. Even the ship's dog, a small terrier, was lifeless, its teeth barred in anger or agony as if it were snarling at something. So, like, everyone is kind of just, like, frozen in this moment. Poor baby. No, there was no sign of a cause of death there were no wounds or injuries on the bodies the ship had no damage although there was one lifeboat missing but there's no way of really knowing if they went out without an extra lifeboat oh sure like if that was there if it was there or not right yeah yeah okay um and the crew also said that the bodies seemed to be,

um, decaying eerily quickly. Like for like the one guy to have sent, I die to be dead only a couple hours later, all of them were decaying and looking like they, it wasn't only a couple hours. Um, also the ship was 40 degrees on a hot summer day and the boiler was on and working so 40 degrees

fahrenheit fahrenheit to fahrenheit it was like fucking cold on this boat and it was a summer day and the boiler was on there was no reason it should be which btw if they're decaying extra fast it shouldn't be that like that wouldn't make sense that's a great point thanks i'm full of them not really you're basically the next mariska um oh god i wish so uh silver the silver stars captain decided to tow the boat to port they were like we got to at least bring it back so we can investigate and as soon as they tied it up and started going all of a sudden the ourang madan um there was smoke and fire that billowed out from one of the cargo holds oh no and the it immediately basically caught on fire and it was so the fire was so intense and so hot and just

blew the whole thing up so quickly that to save their own boat the captain was like okay cut the tow line like whoever's on there we just can't even say hi like if there was someone on there who we could save we can't do it we just got to cut the toe and let the boat sink yeah um and so when they cut the line something in the cargo holds exploded and apparently the boat even lifted out of the water at one point like it got pushed out of the water so powerfully that it landed back in the water and started sinking and you never saw the ship again. The hell is going on here? So then, you know, there were some articles that came out about the story. One on March 13th and one on October 3rd, both in 1948, which is interesting because those are the next year.

Oh, okay. That is weird. So there was one article in a dutch indonesian newspaper called the locomotive there was another in the san francisco examiner and the article was called secrets of the sea and there was this little i don't know if it was meant to be poetic but uh it basically the secrets of the sea article started with what ship no ship the urang madan has vanished so a little flowery there which i enjoy love it and some of the articles said that so this is where it gets um kind of conspiracy or at least the first like maybe not a red flag but

like an orange flag um that uh about like how this is what's odd about it is that there are so many uh differing opinions on when this incident happened date wise there are like some say it was in 47 some say it was 48 some say it was 49 some say it was 1940 like seven years before oh wow um like nobody really knows the official time um there are brit articles from the Yorkshire Evening Post, the Daily Mirror and the Hampshire Telegraph that all say that it happened in 1940. But then every other article says it's in the late 40s. It's weird. Yeah, that is weird.

So there's like and it's like, why can't you just check like a ship's records or a log or something from like the Silver Star? Yeah, the people who received the message. But this is the Yorkshire evening post article. Explosions were repeated. Soon nothing was left of the Ourang Medan, but a blazing Hulk. The next day,

the fire burned itself out and the steamer went under her secret with her. The Ourang Medan has sent out an OS, an SOS, an OSO. See, autocorrect happens all the time. my own brain autocorrected that one uh an sos and the message uh send dr urgent oh this is why i was like why did i put this in here but okay um so just listen to this real quick so they sent on an sos and the message was send dr urgent the sos from the steamship uramadan begged ships with a shortwave wireless to get touch with a doctor and because of our

shortwave set we relayed the call for help medical stations from germany rome and france replied we informed the uramadan and asked to transmit her request so it's like even the articles are kind of off on the storyline like a lot of them are um a lot of them also just paraphrase what the sos thing was they never mentioned the like i die or oh so because even articles were getting it wrong it's like who do you trust who do you believe right and it's weird that they would leave something out that's right so like eerie wild yeah yeah yeah so uh the quote didn't mention the state of the crew members saying that like they were all already dead it paraphrased the sos uh message and it was saying like we have medical

stations from these places it's like that's in right that wasn't in the original uh morse code message either so um basically this is what causes a theory because nobody really knows what happened and nobody even knows when it happened right um so now in the 50s people are still trying to solve this in 1953 there was an article called death at sea in 1955 there was a guy named morris jessup who wrote a book called the case of the ufo and he thinks that it was an attack from aliens i mean listen at this point so do i so i mean for it to be like for them to be decaying quicker and for all them to be like frozen in this like fearful moment and the temperatures change and they're all pointing upward yeah i mean i mean i'm not saying it's aliens but i'm not saying it's aliens but i'm not saying it's not aliens like that i'm still weird i'm certainly saying it is aliens so

there you go i'll go out on a limb and say that uh and then in 1959 ch C.H. Mark, the guy who wrote that letter, who I said an excerpt about, he was thought to be the Coast Guard on watch that day. So he should have, in theory, heard about it or seen it or something. And he ended up, even though this was 1959, so like a whole decade later, he finally decides to write a letter to the cia because he's he's convinced something fucking wild happened yeah so he writes the cia and he had previously sent them another letter where he described what had happened like what the mystery was and then he is now sending a follow-up uh letter um and he he's kind of telling them his theory of what happened so he says i feel sure that the tragedy holds the answer to many of these airplane accidents and unsolved mysteries of the sea. Also, I've often thought about the many sightings of huge fiery spheres rising from or disappearing into the sea, according to captains and crews in the 18th and 19th centuries.

There are alarming passages in old English chronicles written in medieval Latin or books printed before the year 1500, all of which suggest that these fiery spheres cause destruction and that they come from within our planet. For instance, in 216 BC, quote, things like ships were seen in the sky over Italy and Sardinia as knights stick and his hand burst into flames the same thing happened to roman soldiers in sicily who saw their javelins burn in their hands at rp a round shield was seen in the sky also uh in the sea a round shield was seen in the sky and several places it also burned woods and plains and it kind of ends with yes the enchanting sea what terrifying secret does it hold i feel sure that the ss ourang madan tragedy holds that answer so he kind of ends with yes, the enchanting sea, what terrifying secret does it hold? I feel sure that the SS U Rang Madan tragedy holds that answer. So he kind of thinks like either there's some sort of like fire force, some supernatural thing caught,

like causing instant fires, which would explain why the ship exploded. Yeah. He thinks like people are seeing UFOs in the sky. It's been documented since like before Christ. A whole long time ago. So he's like, something is going on out in the water. And I have a hunch that whatever that was also caused the tragedy of the Uramadon.

And the, where am I? Oh, and so then the, an assistant at the CIA actually wrote back and said. An assistant. They're like, I guess this is my job. The assistant of the director of the CIA. Oh, okay. Well, that's pretty high up there. Kind of the Dwight Schrute of the CIA said, Dear Mr. Mark, on behalf of Mr. Dulles, the director, may I acknowledge and thank you for your letter.

Although we are unable to answer your questions, your letter is very interesting and we appreciate your concern sincerely and then their name great so it was vague but also the cia did take the letters that mark had written and they deemed it top secret and didn't release it to the public until 2003 see there's something there because the cia doesn't just like respond to every freaking letter it gets why would the assistant of the cia write like i mean i'm sure let's put it this way i worked at the prices right and i got all let's just stop there that's just that makes the point pretty clear i think i worked at the prices right and my job was to answer all the fan mail and there was some weird shit there was some weird fan mail i don't know how many people loved drew carrie um the answer's a lot um but a lot of them there were a lot of people who i don't think were entirely stable who were writing because some of

them definitely thought that like drew carrie and them had like a rapport going oh my which they didn't um but a lot there were some people who were like i have like you know the price is right as a conspiracy there oh my gosh there's some people who were like, I have like, you know, the price is right as a conspiracy. Oh my gosh. There's some people who think that there's like some sort of theory that like the game shows are ran by the government to like get your financial information. Like there's some wild stuff going on. And let me tell you, as the person who responded to fan mail, I did not respond to those because they were. You don't want to engage.

Because I didn't want to engage. And also they weren't like use, they weren't useful or onto something that i needed to like cover up so for like this cia director's assistant to be flipping through all of the letters and you can only imagine the cia what they get about aliens imagine the conspiracy shit that they get and she picked this one to make a comment about it kind of is eerie to me also the fact that they made a top secret and they didn't release it until 2003 so like 50 60 years later that top secret thing is a little fishy weird for lack of a better term and for her to even say like we uh we can't discuss this or but we we hear your concern like which by the way like super vague just so rude and

passive-aggressive but whatever but also i would like to take this moment to thank all of you for sending normal fan mail because i don't think we've ever gotten fan mail saying that there's a conspiracy which like actually might be fun so it might be fun if you if you mean it ironically yeah yeah maybe not in like a very real way but um uh none of you have ever thought that this was a conspiracy which means we're doing a good job tricking you that's right so um you gotta cut that up cut that part out so anyway that's kind of the end of the mystery there are a lot of theories so um most of the theories have to do with the fact that they think this ship especially because remember they weren't on the right normal course they were on like a random path um and this was in the 40s at some point so they

think this had to do with um world war ii and so they a lot of people speculate that this ship was probably smuggling in some chemicals for nuclear warfare wait that's really interesting and during world war ii like it was their job to smuggle in some stuff from like japan why they put a dog and involve the dog in that poor thing i don't know maybe he was the one smuggling it in they were the uh the ones who had a cover-up for the dog so uh most of these theories kind of follow that storyline but they're different chemicals so theory one and kind of like theory one through like theory six or so is basically that in some way they were smuggling toxic poisonous chemicals and they ended up inhaling it or they there was a

leak and they died um i wonder what this maybe they were yeah i'm trying to think like what causes instant rigor mortis as you're like not even entirely dead yet as a chemist i certainly can't tell you as a chemist i cannot tell you't tell you. As a chemist, I cannot tell you. Wow, it's popular, I think. I guess chemistry has failed us. Or, aka, I failed chemistry. I think it's pretty clear which one's true. So there's one marine historian named Roy Bainton,

and he thinks that the vessel, aka, was involved in smuggling hazardous cargo. Excuse me, there's one guy named professor sears dorfer who actually found the he was the founder of the german publication oh i didn't get rid of it i told christine there was a german word that i won't be able to read and i was like oh i took it out of my notes nope it's here so he founded this german publication called das toten schiff in der sudsee oh my gosh that's like the dead ship wait a second of the dead ship of the south sea okay good wow i at least said it well enough for you i understood it did i have the most american accent as I did that? No, you sounded like you learned German at...

Zero years old. Age one. Okay, so basically he studied this case for decades. And he thinks that the most likely chemical could have been a combination of potassium cyanide and nitroglycerine. And he thinks that they were in the ship's cargo hold. And these sensitive materials, again, I already kind of paraphrased this, but, um, during World War II, they might've been smuggled in and they were going to use them for some sort of experiments or some sort of chemical warfare.

Um. I mean, that does make a lot of sense to me. Right? Yeah. That makes sense to me. Um, so this would explain why the ship wasn't on the typical course and also how it just like, maybe they inhaled it and then it blew up and it explains why the cia would take it so seriously yeah that it would be top secret

listen i'm on to you you're not a chemist but you are a historian but i am a cia special age oh shit eva cut that out eva you got it come on now i'm not very good at this no oh my god some fan mail like 200 episodes almost and you have the nerve every time. We were so close. Every time. And thank God Eva's deleted it. Every single time you've told them we're in the CIA. She better not forget this one very time.

I mean, come on. Because that would be quite. That would not be cute. Woo hoo. We're going to get a call from the CIA soon being like, oh, my phone's already ringing. One time's too many. Don't you worry. My BlackBerry is on fire.

I like your fantasy CIA world world everyone's got a blackberry just me actually nobody else does i just decided i needed a blackberry because i want to play brick breaker every now and then certainly if someone found a blackberry in your junk drawer they would not think oh whoa you're leaving it in plain sight like a classic cia move they would think there's your shitty blackberry i think christine's you know what i use on and when they were training me in the cia palm pilot palm pilot i knew it see i love i still to this day kind of stylist love a good palm stylist i uh i actually was on this fun fact about me i probably have said this before but i was actually on the cia we know you're a chemist oh i know directors of the cia no i um man. I was actually real, this is like two truths and a lie.

Most of them are lies. Um, 85 truth, 85 lies and maybe one truth. Maybe one truth. Maybe. Maybe they're all just lies. We'll see. Uh, I was on the high score leaderboard, uh, for Brick Breaker in, um, in the Midwest. And.

That one's true because she's never stopped fucking talking about it. Yeah, it's true and i had to pretend i was 18 to like get on the leaderboard good for you thank you very much good for you that's how i got it so i put on my resume for oh shit special secret skills you know what's uh when i was in college i had the best two truths and a lie because they were all like i'm a ghost hunter and a clown and uh and i like make pickles for i like fucking ride segways for fun and shit yeah it was i loved and like how you say like back then you're like it's still back in the dizzay well also like uh especially like sorority fraternity shit when we had to do like ice

breakers and everyone would like it would get to me and everyone would start awkwardly giggling because they had heard me do the two truths and a lie when they were newcomers and it was always every time i'd pick the most random shit and it was like all it was like there's three truths that's the wildest part that was like all i wanted as a child i was like i just want to blow people's minds with my elevator pitch about myself so yeah this it worked three hour podcast is a great elevator pitch if you're stuck in an elevator we're still talking about ourselves um okay so yeah potassium cyanide nitroglycerine is the most likely yeah chemical combination agree with that uh oh okay sorry so the guy who made that publication

that one uh says that he spoke to a former shipmate from that boat even though everyone was dead so it says that he spoke to allegedly the sole survivor named Otto Milke. Milke? And he said that he took the lifeboat. Oh, the missing raft. So he says he's the sole survivor. And basically he said that they were on their correct route

and it was suggested that there were lethal substances in the cargo. But then that leads the question like, okay, was he the person who escaped the lifeboat? Like, is he lying or not? Like he could easily just like all this information was in the papers. Anyone can say that. Saying like a missing lifeboat. Exactly. I also know Drew Carey is probably what he said.

We're best friends. You know what? I still think about drew carrey um he the day i left he gave me a glow-in-the-dark toilet seat sorry what and i i lost it okay i've never been so angry at you in my entire life i'm also so fucking mad i wanted him to sign it and everything i didn't he didn't get to sign it because i fucking lost it what if this was like the lie you were like something was true no the truth the the lie would be that i have a glow-in-the-dark toilet seat from drew carey after working on the prizes right oh that hurts my soul but he gave it to me on the last day because it was one of the like gifts that they had and like

they like i think i don't know if they do it anymore but they were like cleaning out their gift area inventory and they were like i don't think anyone's do it anymore, but they were like cleaning out their gift area. And they were like, I don't think anyone's ever going to want this. Except for I know the exact person who wants this. Me! Their name is Emma Schultz. But yeah, so. Wow. I'm so mad that you lost it.

They were like, we're not going to use it because I think it was broken in some way. And I was like, I can just glue that shit back together. I don't care. I can't believe that. Yeah. Why did you lose it? This is a conspiracy. I lost it on the lot.

Forget this story. I lost it on the lot on this story i lost it on the lot wow oh i also i mean i was not like good at my job on the prices right i've lost things all the time it's like reading fan mail i want so across then in the same studio like if you go behind like the the um i guess it's the stage like where they're like they pull the doors out and there's a car there if you keep walking past that like the car that's hiding back there you end up on the set of the young and the restless and i oh hell didn't know where i was going so i got lost on the set of young and the rest you're like i'm so young and restless i was like i'm just trying to get

back to the best help why are we talking about that again i literally have no idea oh because you were saying that he talks this guy probably says he's best friends with drew carrey because he's a big drew carrey talks about lifeboats and i was thinking about the time when i first moved to la and i didn't know how crazy la traffic was i got into like three fucking car accidents all in one week it's true i was there i mean i was you know who fucking commented on my shitty broken car every time you saw me pull into the lot was true oh my and he's like you would like this broken toilet seat he was like you like broken things well no he uh he saw me the only way i could get into my car is if i climbed through the passenger seat because my door was so fucked up

and so he used to watch me like go to work i had to like pull myself like through the passenger seat anyway he always had something to say about it so i just remember and he would show up on like a motorcycle and like look all fucking cool and he'd be like nice card and he's like now go respond to all my fan mail he seemed like just also here's a fucking toilet seat for your troubles um anyway uh but yeah so back to the lifeboat yeah we don't know if this guy was telling the truth and also there's a whole other person who claims that he was the sole survivor so then it's like okay someone's lying maybe both phony um and if the crew died from chemicals on the ship the other real question is like then why didn't like the silver star crew also at least feel ill by the time they got there but i guess

if you're evaporated by that point yeah i guess the argument could be if you're on a ship in the open waters it could air itself out at some point um but so another theory is instead of it being potassium cyanide nitroglycerine it could be um sulfuric acid um because this other soul survivor he claims that they were carrying sulfuric acid um from china to costa rica and they were intentionally avoiding the authorities. So that's why they were on a different path. Oh, um, that makes sense. So another chemical I think is called Talbin.

I don't know what Talbin is, but apparently it is a toxic nerve agent. That's mass produced by the, or was mass produced by the, um, Germans in world war two. Oh dear. And they shared it with their Japanese allies.

Um, they think that uh talban has a low persistence level whatever that means and so it would have dispersed by the time the silver star crew got there i see um they also maybe that nerve it's like a nerve response maybe that's why everyone with bodies was messed up no offense but that sounds like some german shit from world war ii oh wholeheartedly not good um oh god and other theories that the ship may have had cargo for um specifically the japanese military unit 731 did you say no offense like i was gonna be like you know germans you know german no offense

you i don't know i know you're german but do but do you know, like, do you know how things Do you know the history of any of that? I'm not offended, to be clear. So the, another theory is that the ship was holding cargo from Japanese military unit 731, because that unit specifically was known for chemical and biological experiments in World War II. And so that could have leaked on board. And that could also explain why everyone died in such a weird way because it was like this new thing that um like that this one military unit was experimenting with so it could explain like why all of a sudden

they were like frozen like that or freaked out or why they looked scared like maybe they were hallucinating from it oh that's a good point and they thought that something really scary was going on huh um because even the dog like he was frozen snarling like like they were all seeing something so if it was some sort of experiment that they wanted to fuck with chemically they could have been trying to do some sort of experiment where it was a hallucinogen that yeah you know um yikes though another theory uh by this guy vincent gaddis who fun fact coined the term bermuda triangle oh uh he thinks it was just simple carbon monoxide from fumes from the faulty boiler um which also leads to hallucinations often so but it's like if you're all it's like

i've never done drugs but i would imagine if you're all taking the same drug you still all have a separate high. Like, not everyone's seeing the exact same thing. I also have never done drugs, so I'm not the person to ask. But maybe it is like if one person is like, everybody look. And maybe it like influences. Not the dog, though. I mean, unless the dog's just.

The dog was the one that was like, holy shit, look at that. And then they were all freaked out because they heard a talking dog. It could actually. I know. That explains it. Are you sure you haven't done drugs before? It sounds like you're. I actually was a dog once.

Oh, that's. Oh, shit. So theory number six is that it honestly could have just been a total hoax because so many papers have differing reports throughout the years, especially on the event's dates. And there's so many theories of the chemicals on board. Why didn't the Silver Star crew mention a single chemical or a single you know stash of them or um shady cargo that clearly authorities would want to avoid why was none of that mentioned in one of their logs like no matter what the chemical was there was if there

was really something hazardous down there they would have mentioned it and that much of it yeah and that much of it to kill everybody um so and unless it was like hidden i was gonna say maybe it was like in like vials or something well the boxes could literally just say like flower and like oh no there's like and they're not gonna say like uranium you sound like you have smuggled drugs before christine listen um i have not theory seven is that this entire story not just is a hoax but it's like completely like even the ship itself never fucking it's just like made up story they're saying oh they're saying that the ss urang madan may have not even existed theory because there's no official incident report like

i mentioned and there's no official ss urang madan registration records for any country including the netherlands where it originally started from or where it was built um even lloyd's shipping registers which i guess is like the universal registration company um the even the silver stars daily logs aren't entirely accurate and this is something that i feel like our names will be listed in one day the The Dictionary of Disasters. Oh, no. Apparently they have, it's called the Dictionary of Disasters at Sea, which I guess is just a total log of every single type of wreck. That's awful.

It's from 1824 to 1962, which in theory is when this happened. There's no mention of that ship ever. Not one time. Like not even in another accident. Really? no mention of that ship ever not one time like not even in another accident really so all of these like really trusted sources and like official legal registration papers none of them exist and you would report that right and granted it was the 40s so there wasn't anything digital like you could just like have it could go missing and there's no other copy like it's all written down yeah um well especially if like it was a real wartime thing right it could go missing and there's no other copy like it's all written down yeah um well especially if

like it was a real wartime thing right it could have been covered up or like right i mean also if the caa knows about it it was helping yeah it could have been called ss christine so well i already have a killer car named after me so let's not okay you're not spread my name too far uh theory eight is that this honestly could just be a ghost ship um and that like it's uh maritime folklore and that a lot of people say like maybe if you see the ship you're seeing the ssu rung badan or because the crew looked scared and there were eerie temperature changes on board they think literally ghosts could have done this like showed up any any potential murdered everybody it seems a little

strange and the ship has never been found and like i said the dates and the the information on it are so different it could have just turned into this folklore situation where they blame ghosts for this mystery that happened um theory nine is your favorite which is aliens oh for sure um for sure for sure for sure it's just due to the lack of a natural cause of their death and the terrified expressions on their faces and the rumors that some of them are pointing to something um and the cia involvement and the cia involvement and the fact that in 1955 that guy morris jessup wrote a book about it um it just all kind of suggests that maybe they were attacked by a ufo i'm sure the history channel has something to say about that probably um and then theory 10 is that it was this one's just fucking stupid but the the it was just a mariner uh bad luck like a curse because the udon the urang madan is a masculine name and it is like

maritime tradition that you name your ship a female name because all ships are women. So they think that was just, oh, because you named it something different. You're you. You asked for it. You misgendered this boat. You misgendered your ship. And so it murdered everybody. Listen, if I were a ship, never mind.

OK, so theory 11 is and this is the final one, is the letter exchanged between the cia and that guy begs the question did the cia actually have something to do with this why would they write back at all considering there's so many like fake theories that get sent to them all the time why would they reach out to this if it were real why would they even respond and why would they deem a random letter top secret like no but what i'm saying is like what if it were real and they were like shit this is top secret why would they respond i feel like that just creates a paper trail where it's like right if anything that would be the one you definitely exactly that's a good point too i don't know man so some people think the ss urang madan uh involved was involved in

a government experiment and like people wonder like what about this case did the cia know that deemed this thing top secret or like did they maybe it wasn't even that this ship did anything particularly weird but it could just be like that the cargo on it was cia protected or maybe there was another ship out there where something similar happened and because this was like adjacent or relative uh relevant in some way maybe they just wanted to cover all their this could just be like a weird outlier but it was similar to something they are involved in so they wanted to cover that up just in case because that would explain like this doesn't sound like it's something the cia would like really be too worried about except for the fact that there was

a chemical during world war ii yeah and maybe there were a bunch of ships like that and so they just shut down all the stories about any of the ships my thought is because the guy who wrote to the cia was uh like head of the coast guard right yeah so i mean that makes sense why the cia would respond to be or he was the coast guard on watch that day okay because i feel like that's like an important position so i guess i could understand why the cia would be like we should acknowledge that this person wrote to us because he's yeah a government official an important yeah i don't know so maybe that's why they wrote back i don't know but it's weird it's it makes it very weird that they wrote back at all and deemed a top secret um but yeah so that's it basically the other than

that there's a fun fact where the yurong madon inspired a video game called man of madon uh and here's the little blurb about it five individuals partaking in an underwater diving who are particular who are partaking in underwater diving um are brought against their will to a large ghost ship the fabled indonesian urang madan where their worst nightmares become reality with their safety threatened their sanity tested and their survival at stake the five must make swift life or death choices that could either lead them to freedom or cause them to suffer fatal consequences oh no so if you liked this story and you like video games and that sounded fun to you you can go buy man of madon sounds enjoyable to you check it out that is the

that's the story that's one of my favorites you've covered in a long time really yeah why i just love like conspiracy theory i just think it's so fascinating and also i think i was hooked from the second you said this letter this morse code message that one that hooked me like the second i saw that morse code message i went oh yeah that sounded like one of my creepy unsolved you know crime case like yeah oh so wild i die i mean that is spooky yeah it's like chilling and then the fact that they then like went on board and found the guy who clearly sent the morse code in his hand was still on the morse code thing yeah on the machine yeah how creepy super creepy it's just such a mystery i don't know i really like that story because it could be so many different things yeah um also i'm realizing now the way that the german word was it probably

meant like the ghost chip you know it's a debt how do you say ghost poltergeist is that how you say ghost yeah guys guys yeah what's polter prank it is something like that yeah tricky trickster ghost i thought you said turkey i was like i'm sure it's not. Turkey ghost. Poultry. Maybe poultry. Poultry ghost. Poultry geist. Okay. Let's say that one for Thanksgiving. A chicken nugget.

Okay. I think it is. I literally have looked this up like 10 times. I think it is something. Pranky ghost. Fun ghost. Play ghost. Shit.

I need to. Wow. You're. My German's fucked. i guess german wasn't your first language either i guess i don't really speak any language because like listen to me for a minute and you'll understand um okay so and this is a story i'm very excited to tell you okay okay um this is one that i did not know at all until like i don't know if it was episode five or it was like really early where or maybe it was on where deirdre was on i'm not sure but you brought it up and i was like oh

what's that and then you told me like a quick blurb and i went what oh deirdre so i know it you do know it yeah well you said deirdre i don't know if deirdre has any connection to this i really don't learn about it damn it yeah yeah was going to make you guess based on this little interview section, but you already guessed it. She babysat Deirdre. I was telling Eva, I was like, somebody babysat somebody and I don't know who babysat whom. Of course it was Deirdre's babysitter. No, it was. So to Lorena Bobbitt. Yes, I'm very excited about this one because I actually know this one. I know all the locations you're going to talk about. That's what I'm saying. I was like, and Eva was excited about this one because I actually know this one I know all the locations you're gonna talk about I'm saying I was like and Eva was excited about this one too

so I was like this is like a double yeah Eva would know even better because double whammy Eva lived closer to where this all happened I think well that's why I remember last night when Eva was like where was I talking about Manassas I was like oh this was in Manassas yeah okay it sounds like not sorry it's happened sorry to all the people who live in manassas yeah okay it sounds like not sorry sorry to all the people who live in manassas but like every single person that i seem to meet has like one enemy from manassas yeah i mean including me i have an enemy from manassas i also have a best friend from manassas just to like to balance out the nice people here i do have a best friend named ellen uh who lives in manassas well i will say any town that has the word man ass in it doesn't seem like it's gonna they're called them in assholes that's so we're

mass holes though so yeah i mean it's not too original once you find enough places with the word ass in it but uh yes deirdre's uh so lorana bobbitt was kind of her babysitter um and that like she did babysit deirdre and deirdre's brothers a few times but the way that they knew each other was because deirdre's normal babysitter and lorraine bobbitt lived together they were roommates oh and so every and then deirdre was like oh she was always really nice to us and you know sometimes when like our normal like she one of the castros what's that was she a castro that's the family she like lived with maybe that would be weird that would be weird i don't know the name but

i know that dear joey said like in times like our nanny like last minute couldn't watch us like we like lorraine would just be there because she already knew us and she was really nice see and i remember going i don't know that story and you guys were like um hello everyone in virginia knows lorraine about it yeah and so and then i said to eva like i also don't really know the story and she was like what and i was like, I also don't really know the story. And she was like, what? And I was like, I think more of Virginians know this than it's a it's a classic. It's we don't get a lot of fun, true crime in Virginia, but this is certainly one of

them. I got to say, if you don't know what, by the way, I apologize. If you don't know what this is, I don't apologize because you're about to get a great twist of a story. It's a fun one. OK, this is the story of Lorena Bobbitt, great twist of a story. It's a fun one. Okay. This is the story of Lorena Bobbitt, a.k.a. Deirdre's babysitter. By the way, now that you know who Deirdre is, of course her fucking baby is Lorena Bobbitt.

Well, I know. That's why I just was like, I know you mentioned it. And I was like, I'm sure Deirdre was involved. But I don't know how. She's involved in a lot of weird things that happen in Virginia. She's involved in actually I'm pretty sure every weird thing that happens in Virginia from what I know of her. So this is actually the little blurb that I was going to say. Like, can you guess what this is based on this?

So I'm just going to read it anyway. Interviewer, what was your reaction when you found out what happened to your brother? Brother, if I'd have seen her, I would have killed her. Interviewer, you think she tried to kill him? Brother, she tried to hurt him in the worst way possible for any man. She did worse than kill him. She took the thing that means the most to a man. And that was from the Jenny Jones show featuring John Wayne Bobba and his two brothers, Todd and Brett.

And so that was like the little intro. Like, do you know what this is? You probably would have figured it out. For those of you who are wondering what that means, just wait. You don't have to wait long because I'm going to start pretty much right right on the spot yep june 23rd 1993 manassas virginia um small town 30 miles outside of washington dc where everybody has enemies i guess uh and around there's always just one person from manassas where you're just kind of like okay i'm sure manassas is wonderful i guess i know one now too from the story

well the people for in manassas i will say i did take uh the first time all three of us oh that's right we all went to dc together i took them to nathan's uh ice cream i thought i'd been there but then i was like why would i have ever been there but so you took me there yeah nathan's has like great so i was like i fucking hate that place here but i love nathan's and i've been to the movie theater next to it many times it's a great it's a wonderful place wonderful well it wasn't on june 23rd 1993 okay 3 15 a.m after a night out drinking and hanging out with his friend robert johnston uh who was staying with him 26 year old john was just i didn't realize how young he was 26 year old john bobbitt goes to join his wife 24 year old lorena in bed he slams

the bedroom door which wakes up lorena and goes to sleep john claims that she began quote playing around with him and then she put her arms around him as he was falling asleep and suddenly he felt a pull and a jerk he wakes up and sees blood everywhere lorena quickly disappears and in his kind of fatigue he realizes that she has disappeared with his penis i wish i could see anybody who doesn't know the story yet i was i was gonna say that's nuts but his nuts are still intact those are still there and there are plenty of that's wieners have you seen the photos yeah there are many there are many yeah and wow is it grotesque yeah it's actually pretty like i

was not as horrified as i thought i'd be i was like oh it's just kind of what you imagine it would look it's like exactly what you're picturing yeah um so there's blood everywhere uh his wife lorena has chopped off his dick um yeah for lack of a better more uh subtle term it's noodles it's pretty noodle one noodle bananas sure listen it could be a lot of phallic things going on here i don't know he's not peeling very well though don't you dare bring my favorite joke into this please so john wayne bobbitt finds robbie uh his friend to wake him up and help him robbie is also tired and not thinking straight by the way like pretty sure they're both wasted but that's besides the point um apparently robbie decides he has to go brush his teeth first uh can you imagine if you were like, help, someone cut my boobs off.

And I'm like, let me go. My breath is so bad, though. I can't take this. Hang on. I mean, you actually might do that because you really are concerned with your teeth brushing. I'll be there in a second. Get in the car. I'll come back.

Oh, just calm yourself. I almost said calm your tits. And I was like, wow, that really would have been a rude thing to say to me if I just lost them. Okay. Anyway, so we're literally like shit don't you dare thank god you're making everybody that was so tough for those of you who are just listening and not watching i had my mouth impossibly full with water could not have wanted to gag more in that second okay we're good we are four bullet points in so this might be buckle up everybody okay so he decides to go brush his teeth

then he's like i'm gonna rush my bleeding literally amputated friend to the hospital so the hospital uh takes in uh john wayne bobbitt and at first apparently the nurse was like what happened to your hand because he was like holding his hand and it was so bloody and then he removed his hand and they went oh dear so they want to perform surgery on him but they obviously cannot put the penis back on without having the actual penis right um so doctors are like we're gonna have to restructure or reconstruct the area um the surgeon who was interviewed in the documentary lorena on amazon prime which i'm going to talk about more um it's a great great documentary um anyway the surgeon who was interviewed was basically like uh yeah we were

gonna have to surgically reconstruct it so he would have to spend the rest of his life peeing sitting down like a woman and i was like okay cool there's nothing wrong with sitting down and peeing like a woman it's actually much more relaxing that's the worst yeah i know okay so the police received calls around uh 5 a.m um originally the sergeant jerry hawks had thought that uh lorena may have swallowed the penis which is that was That was a rumor throughout town. All of them thought that that was like. That was a rumor. Everyone's first gut instinct was like.

She fucking gobbled it down. She must have eaten it, which I'm like, why? What is in your brain that you're like, that's where it went. But they order crime scene technician Cindy Leo to Maplewood Apartments to try and find the penis. When Cindy arrives, she notices blood spots on the stairs up to their apartment. There's also a pool of blood on the bed which is approximately one inch deep that's how much blood there was holy shit he actually lost a third of his blood volume yeah it was like really well i mean that sucks but also like sorry that sucks but also like fun fact of like if you were to chop

a penis off that's how much blood it makes sense that that's where it would go, right? I mean, it's good information. Yeah. Yeah. And bad information also. Yeah. Good trivia information. Yeah, that's true. So the crime scene technicians don't find the penis, but they do as they're looking.

So apparently he goes, of course we checked the garbage disposal. And I was like, what is going on that everyone thinks she ate it or put it down the garbage disposal? Uh-huh. I guess. And also they checked the dishwasher. Like she cleansed it i don't know so they check the interesting they check the dishwasher are not finding this penis um but while they're looking they do find several pamphlets uh about rape and domestic violence uh-huh uh foreshadowing suddenly the team at maplewood apartments receives a call from their lieutenant um and he is with lorena at the police station she is there to report domestic violence she's been suffering under john the police calm her down and say we'll get to that

but first we need to know where your husband's penis is which is first things first yeah which is basically the priorities of this entire case summed up in one sentence which says a lot yeah so Lorena's pretty frazzled she's like really out of it like she's just hazy and she like can't remember what she's done with this penis and um they're like just think like what did you see and she says I remember a 7-eleven and I remember driving near the 7-eleven and she tossed it out her left side, but over the roof. So just like whoop. She said she was driving and she realized she was holding it and she couldn't drive very well because she was holding something.

Saw it, hurled out the window and just kept going. So it landed to the right of the car. Police go there immediately. They're like, the time's a ticking. I remember that. I think there was like a newscast of this or there was like news footage where like there were cops all in a field looking for a penis. Yes. It literally is so ridiculous.

Actually, I have a photo we'll put in the YouTube video of the guy who found it standing there and pointing at the spot where he found it. You don't want to go like, I found it. Exactly. And Cindy actually like had to go back with the officer and be like, can you stand where it was so i could take a photo like yeah like she's a crime scene technician and so he's like standing there pointing at it it's just so awkward um so sergeant willard hurley is the first to find uh john's pain in the grassy field outside the 7-eleven but he refused to get close to it i think they said like he was religious which i was like what okay okay you're also a police officer right sounds like i guess yeah like it'd be gay if i touched it yeah but i also don't think he probably would have picked up a that's true a boob or something

else true but i immediately want to judge uh virginian in the 90s oh i'm fully judged oh yeah don't worry you'll have plenty of chances to judge literally okay every man in this entire story um so this story is rough okay okay so now they have this penis and they somebody goes and gets it because he refuses to um so they bring it into a 7-eleven do you know what they put it in oh this is another trivia fun fact now and do or something what they put it on ice in a big bite hot dog box a hot dog box i thought it was like a mountain dew slurpee cup or something no it's like a hot dog container also no i don't think he literally they literally put it in like mountain dew to preserve it but i meant the bottle but yeah then i remembered how that might sound yeah no uh hot dog box so that's kind of a fun

little wink also yeah nod to the hot dogs so now with uh this iced penis in tow police call the hospital and the uh surgeon dr david berman and dr james sen the urologist prep john for surgery as they wait for the penis to arrive and then they show him they present it like a ring box yeah can you imagine being the person who worked in that 7-eleven by the way who's like i need a box and they they were like are you gonna buy anything with that and they're like i need it for someone's they're like actually no actually maybe you should just close this whole location because you're about to get swarmed by news cameras um so let's see so the police bring the penis to the hospital um apparently the nurse who was

interviewed in this documentary said that like while he was going to, a lot of the officers were sitting with like their legs crossed in the waiting room. Cause they were like in like phantom pain. Yes, exactly. Um, she's like for us, it wasn't a big deal, but they were all like squirming in their seats. Um, so while John was under in his nine hour, by the way, long surgery, uh, on one side of the hospital, Lorena was on the other side

getting a rape kit taken done um she's interviewed being simultaneously interviewed by a detective so she told the police uh where they could find the knife she didn't like try to hide anything she said it was in a garbage can outside of the nail salon where she worked and uh she had driven there after the incident and unfortunately it was garbage day that day so cindy the crime scene technician had to rush to the nail salon to find the knife before the garbage trucks took it away um so the first words uh he hears dr berman say when he wakes up when john wakes up are the operation was a success but your penis could still turn black and fall off.

Yikes. What a nightmare. A waking nightmare. Luckily for John, the penis looked, quote, really terrific after the surgery. And Dr. Berman confirmed that he would regain virtually all of his normal functions. He even said it turned pink right away. I was like, OK, now I don't want to know. Excellent.

Rather not. Rock on. Yikes. OK, the following day, the story, not shockingly, became international news with everyone getting involved, like being everyone, probably even the 7-Eleven person being hounded for interviews. I can only imagine. In the newspapers, journalists were struggling to describe what happened because no one knew whether they could like publish the word penis if that was like too far which yeah probably a weird conversation in a lot of journalism like boardrooms yeah like how far can we go with this which i think you can probably say the word penis but i guess back then that was yeah back then questionable before people realize it's a human body part and nothing else

um so this same feeling coincided with how the police reacted uh on the morning of the event where they like refused to touch it and you know it was just very everyone was freaked out yeah um when trying to radio each other police officers were struggling how to describe the crime because they didn't know if they could say penis on the airwaves because the news media monitored the police airway like monitored interesting i don't know the police radio system so that if they said like hey his penis was chopped off like can you imagine being like i'm just like doing a regular police scanner and you hear like someone's penis was i didn't know about that yeah that's kind of weird uh fun fact so they often use the word appendage and organ

yep but it became an american cultural moment for uh when the p word was used excessively in the media all of a sudden um so john who was still recovering from his injury did bucket loads of interviews like immediately um and then laura's friend and boss janna bazuti uh hired lorena an attorney james low as well as a media representative alan hogg so the police uh they police the media begging for interviews with larina advised her like lay low don't jump into everything like john wayne bobbitt is right i can't call him john i want to call him john wayne because it's just so ridiculous but anyway um so oh i also wanted to add i'm sorry i meant to mention this. I listened to an incredible two-part episode on this, on the Sinisterhood podcast,

and I, like, love their show. I listen to it a lot, and I never have, like, mentioned it, because this is the first time I did,

like, really used it for, like, real research, and they did just a really great job, and they, the only reason I thought of that right now is that they talked about his name being John Wayne Bobbitt, and apparently his brother's name is Todd, and were like why did they name one john wayne

and then the other one just todd i was like that's a great question anyway so uh check out sinister they do a great job on this story and a lot of other ones um so uh john was doing all these interviews uh lorena's lawyer was like, don't get involved. Lay low. The only interview Lorena gave was with Kim Masters from Vanity Fair, where the interview was accompanied by photos of Lorena in a swimsuit shot. And while Lorena was swimming around a pool for this photo shoot for Vanity Fair, the main question in the public's mind was, what would make a woman do this? Like, what possessed her to take this like the penis right yeah like what what happened something pretty gnarly i would imagine like if i

found out that a woman chopped off a guy's dick i'd be like i don't know anything yet but my first inclination is maybe he deserved it maybe something yeah my first inclination is what did he do like right people don't just do that like for fun something really bad must have happened to her from him oh and it did just get ready do you know much about that background um i know that he was cheating on her was he cheating on her and abusive that he was cheating on her i don't know anything else oh boy get boy oh i can't wait really bad it's really bad okay um so lorena and gallo is her maiden name and john wayne bobbitt met at a dance hall near the marine corps base in cuanaco in september of 1988 this now we're going the backstory here lorena born in ecuador in 1969 and raised in venezuela first visited

washington dc in 1986 and she was 16 and fell in love with the US and decided she wanted to live there someday she graduated from high school in 87 and moved on a student visa at age 18 in pursuit of her American dream as she called it she lived with family friends the Castros that really might have been the family that's that's who she lived with up until she lived with john wade bobbitt so probably maybe um she lived with them uh in virginia and was always known for being pretty shy and quiet um she was barely able to speak english so she was taking classes in esl that's what deirdre said she was i asked like i've asked like well what's she like and you just said she was really friendly

but imagine like someone who like there was definitely a language barrier. So they were just very quiet, but very kind. Yeah, especially right that early into her living here. Yeah, she didn't really know English. And so John himself was from Niagara Falls in New York, where he and his two brothers, who were three, were placed in the care of his aunt and uncle who were already raising four boys of their own because john's mother apparently had a quote mental breakdown and had been suffering abuse herself um in high school he was extremely athletic he thought of himself as uh as a jean claude van damme a name which he'd used to sign into the local pool he gave himself a nickname which great woof yikes um so he went on to join the marines and uh that night at the marine corps in 88 when they met lorena and john danced and exchanged phone numbers and they say they fell in love with each other basically at first sight lorena admired

how much of an absolute gentleman he was and he remembered how beautiful she was and they pretty much began dating right away but um it was a very conservative quote-unquote way of dating because she had been raised in a very conservative manner and so to her like he didn't just go they had chaperones the castros literally like chaperone the dates because um that's just how she was raised sure so. So they start dating. And he's the first person she's ever dated. Their dates were often chaperoned by the Castros. And 10 months in, they are at the swimming pool. There's a lot of pools in this story for some reason.

They're at the pool. And he found, he dives to the bottom. And he finds like somebody had dropped like a gold ring with a bow on it at the bottom of the pool and he comes up with it and proposes to her with that romantic right i'm like ew somebody dropped that in the bottom of the pool okay it's just it's just all bad so she said yes uh she said yes. They married on June 18th, 1989 and settled down in Manassas, Virginia. Two years before this, John had been discharged from the Marines but struggled to find and hold down a job. Neighbors even struggled when they were asked to remember him ever working.

So it seems like he really didn't have a history of, you know, a job history. So Lorena was pretty much all of a sudden expected to make all the money and pay for everything and she was a manicurist and made minimum wage right and you know was trying to wasn't wasn't cutting it like no yeah and like shouldn't have been expected to pay for both of their lives lifestyles and rent etc um as lorena told abc news it was only a month into their marriage when john first hit her so here we spiral quickly down okay to the bottom of the pool um in lorena's preliminary hearing in 1993 detective peter weintz read out the statement

lorena provided him at the hospital the first night of the incident. And I quote, and then I was angry already. And I turned my back and I, then the first thing I saw was the knife. Then I said, I asked him if he was satisfied with what he did and he just half asleep or something. He always have orgasm and he doesn't wait for me to have orgasm. He's selfish. I don't think it's fair. So I pulled back the shirt or the sheets then I did it so she later regretted saying that because she said that wasn't what she was trying to say like it was one of the misled the it made it sound like that was specifically why versus like that was one of many many many reasons why he was a piece and she doesn't she was basically like I don't even remember like that's not that wasn't the point right right um but so that of course everyone like

jumped on that um and james low her defense attorney said that is not really what was being said there you have the problem of a second language you have a problem with a woman who was hysterical at the time and also probably scared as shit being interviewed about this stuff fully so like just saying whatever came to mind and like didn't even want to talk about it but like had to um in the documentary she reflected how she couldn't quite comprehend what was even going on at the time when she gave that statement and so that was something that that's not how she wished it had gone like was that damning at all later in court fully because i mean well not in court but just in the public in general.

Because I would think if she led with, like, he beats the absolute shit out of me and, like, I was scared or something. Right. It might have framed it differently. No, so it was framed. Like, victimized her more or something. Well, well, I guess you'll see. Okay. I'm not sure, because you can make a, you can decide, I think, for yourself, like, whether you think.

I'll just give you the facts and you can decide, I think, for yourself whether you think. I'll just give you the facts and you can decide. So soon after the hearing, the first of two trials began. There was his and hers trial, essentially. So John's assault trial with the charge of marital sexual abuse went first. And because this was a sexual abuse trial, permission was denied to put it on TV. abuse trial permission was denied to put it on tv uh however reporters uh flew in to document the case and um they didn't have anything to worry about as far as like finding enough footage because the locals of manassas were making sure people were not going home empty-handed they started making t-shirt souvenirs that read manassas virginia a cut above the rest and we're

selling those as like tourist, you know, attractions. Over the course of November 8th to the 10th of 1993, both John and Lorena took the stand where they gave their own account of the events that night through the framing of sexual abuse. So the judge ruled that the jury were only allowed to consider acts of sexual abuse against Lorena on the night in question and only incidents within five days of Lorena's actions would be admissible. So basically they were like, this is not about their past. This is about that night and whether you find him guilty of this behavior that night and within the five day period. So things that might have occurred in their past. So like the history of their abuse was not to be considered or included. And Lorena's act of severing her husband's genitals was also not supposed to be part of their thinking, which I'm sure it was. But, you know, sure.

Thinking about this charge of marital sexual abuse. So marital rape had only become a crime recently. It was in 1993 that it even became a crime because right before that i mean well once you're married like you apparently immediately property consent for the rest of eternity right you don't get to say no right exactly um so carlos sanchez who's a journalist for the washington post uh reminded listeners that quote at this time in 1993 in order to convict on a spousal rape charge which carried a life sentence there were two conditions you had to be separated from your spouse at the time of the crime so even marital rape only counted if you were separated

from the person so it just it was still like they as long as you have already said i don't want to be married with you anymore i don't want to be married with you anymore i don't want to be with you that's when it counts uh-huh but if you're together and living under the same roof like no no no yeah um secondarily there are two things you had to to prove so secondarily you had to cause significant physical bodily damage oh yeah yeah it's also like going back to the first one like it's like so you can say no to being married anymore but you can't say no to like having sex with that person so stupid i i don't it's just it's so fucking stupid okay correct so all right and then also you have to like be like fucking bloodied up for someone to believe that oh fully you're no even counted and that was a

problem for lorena too because she was like not you know bleeding or anything right she just said no and she she looked too healthy yeah she looked she looked too sprightly that's actually to mean it like a quote i'm pretty sure pretty much that is coming off uh pretty soon yep i think it's literally in this bullet um so leslie will from the women's policy study center concurs saying that quote we're still in a situation where people believe that a man's wife was his property. That was just the thinking process. And I'm sure for a lot of people still is. On the stand, although Lorena would recount the stories of rape she was forced into, along with how he had said to her that forced sex excited him, which is he said that a lot.

The doctor who examined her said he couldn't find any outward physical signs of rape and that her mental state quote didn't fit the frame frame of mind of a victim i fucking hate this place me too oh my god take me out take me away aliens please god okay i'm just gonna jump ship literally onto a ufo goodbye leave my husk behind leave these husks behind there was also a whole thing about how the underwear she was wearing was torn i don't even want to know too late too bad uh forensic analyst i have to know you have to know uh forensic analyst conducted an investigation saying the fabric was unable to be just ripped like that and found a tiny scissor cut so she must have done it to plant it yeah and john's defense went on to say and where did she work a nail salon where you'd find scissors and i was like

and guess where you live a house where you'd find scissors okay it's really stunning actually how they just framed this whole thing also like i don't know if she went to the hair salon or the nail i'm sorry the nail she clearly went to her own cut her own underwear then went home and then like also like someone who's raping you can just take your underwear off and there's no cut at all and it's still assault but they're proving they're trying to prove quote-unquote that he didn't assault her at all and then she's making it up you see such bullshit of course it is this is infuriating oh it's the most vile it just gets and you know what's so much worse i'm i'm clearly like such like a uh a sheep to this too and that

like i literally grew up knowing the story my whole life and yeah you you hear uh girl cut his dick off and then like they don't that's like the most shocking part so you don't really want to you don't need to know anything else you're like damn yeah it's a quote need to know but like it's very headline worthy i didn't know any of this like whole victim blame bullshit it gets so much i just heard i just heard the the gist and i was like good enough for me and now it's like oh fuck well it didn't help that you were so little at that point i feel like people who were a little bit older at least could have had more of a grasp of like yeah how fucked who were a little bit older at least could have had more of a grasp of like yeah how fucked up this is or no like at least like looked at the media

and been like hey maybe that's not the full story but like you're kidding you get told like this crazy thing happened and like of course you're why would you think anything else the gossip not the info exactly totally do so exactly exactly i mean i think we're all guilty of that and um so yeah i think that's why this is just like such a wild story to tell and like needs to be told um and the sinister hood uh ladies did a great job too covering this and they um they talked about like you know there's so much genital mutilation that happens in um certain parts of the world and it's like that doesn't make the headlines you know it's

not like this crazy punch line but this is like what a cuckoo hysterical lady you know so it is a very good like sobering point that this happens a lot to girls and women mostly girls i guess or a lot of times girls and like that doesn't seem to be very exciting for fox news second it happens to a man yeah it's like what i mean even that interview in the beginning you were saying it was like she took away the only thing a man matters the only okay well yes that was an ignorant fucking sentence that came out of that guy's mouth yes okay me. This guy and his brothers are just the dumbest. Just like literal garbage. Literal garbage.

Literal garbage. Literal garbage. Got it. Uh-huh. So, uh, on, oh, right. She worked at a nail salon. Guess what's there. So there's, okay.

On November 10th, the jury found John not guilty. Wow. Cal surprise. Cal surprise. With some followers of the case speculating, how could the jury, this is a quote, how could the jury send a man to jail for 20 years for having marital relations with his wife? Fuck off. I know.

Fuck off. What are you talking about? Okay. Next. Christine, what's next? This is the most infuriating story just go go ahead this is the uh this is only one of two trials we already got through one now we have the big show trial great lorraine's trial um

so according to one of the jury members becky rinker john's trial was only a playoff game okay football anybody whereas sports sports ball z anybody with an omelette i don't know okay sportsable playoff game help help help me i die yet i die yet somebody take me away i need i need a big shield in the sky to take me away okay uh what's even the point of this whole world okay so anyway you're losing it homie what is going on this is the fourth episode we've recorded in like 48 hours no wonder um yikes which means we had to research all this in like the last couple weeks okay so becky ringer said this is a playoff game laurie's trial was a super bowl i guess it sort

of was they were like selling merch and shit so yeah um so they both returned to manassas prince william county circuit court in two months for lorraine's trial with charges of malicious wounding uh lorraine and John had very different ways of how they'd spent how they'd spend their time approaching Lorena's trial. So Lorena had hired Blair Howard to join her defense attorney to join her defense team as defense attorney and spent her time mostly indoors staying at her friend and boss's Janice house, who is kind of a recurring character in the story. Blair explains in the documentary that they decided to put forth a defense, which was a form of insanity in Virginia called irresistible impulse.

Irresistible impulse, an incredibly rare plea, is anchored in a proposition that Lorena had undergone a great deal of trauma, and that night was the trigger. Oh, okay. She was impacted to such a degree. This is her, like, her own defense team. Yes, okay. She was impacted to such a degree that she couldn't control her impulse to act out if in this trial she is found guilty she was she was to face a 20-year sentence as well as deportation to venezuela yeah also like so this what was it

called the rr the the defense attorney then the thing oh irresistible impulse yeah okay so i i that wasn't gonna say it irresistible okay fuck me uh is it just a version of temporary insanity yes okay yeah it's a uh they said where is it um i guess i don't but yes a for but put for the defense which was a form of insanity in virginia called irresistible yeah so it's like very insane like she wasn't i just didn't hear that in her quote unquote right mind for lack of a better term temporarily fucking insane i mean at this point we're all gonna lose it after a few interviews john went to live on a ranch uh so this is what lorraine is doing during this time preparing her defense etc laying low meanwhile yes do you do you

tell the fun uh thing about what happens to john wayne oh i tell okay because that i tell that and more okay because that part is like the other part of like what everyone in virginia that's the one that i remember that's the only other part i remembered besides somebody was a babysitter yeah was this other part because everyone everyone that lives in virginia knows like marina bobbitt caught uh cut off her husband's penis and then the next then i wanted to make sure you brought it up yes so that happens i think after the um trial gotcha but it is coming i promise yes sorry for the terrible pun okay after a few sorry after help sos oh my god okay after a few interviews john went to live on a ranch uh nearby colorado springs to lay low not really after spending months riding and caring for horses where he had a girlfriend called stephanie john then attended a

john wayne bobbitt look-alike contest at a Hooters in downtown Colorado Springs and then love going and doing their own fucking look-alike contest to see how much they look like them fucking selves have you heard who was it that did that and lost there was somebody who did Dolly Parton's done that a few times I think maybe that's what it was she's lost a few of which cracks because like her her competitors are like all these like delightful drag queens who like know how to zhuzh up the god in the camp oh sure and like that's gonna win every day she got she's gonna walk into that contest and be like i'm i'm already a loser i bet you dolly's like yeah i take my crown take the ribbon yep okay um so he enters this john wayne bobbitt look-alike contest and then he makes a guest appearance as a judge

on howard stern's new year's eve pageant where howard now imagine what that interview was like bad bad howard stern is a way worse person than i thought or really oh yeah oh let's hear it i want to make sure i put this quote in before i just like try to attempt to misquote it um i don't think it's in here but uh at one point during this interview he said i don't i don't totally it's something i don't want to misquote it but so it's not verbatim but it's something like i don't totally believe he raped her she's not even that attractive really oh yeah um and then it just gets worse like it just gets really bad uh some of the things like that the president of the united states oh well so assuredly we're not surprised by that just to remind everyone god the end listen when does

this come out not november right no probably october too late vote too soon and too late altogether please vote i'll be on a ufo somewhere but you vote please okay and then maybe i'll come back okay uh probably not if you get on a fucking ufo and leave me here i'm gonna be so mad i'll send for you maybe no you won't i certainly won't you and akon are gonna grab me and akon yeah yeah and then i'm stuck here okay let's go okay so i'll write you a postcard so So he's on this Howard Stern show. It's just like this big spectacle. Not surprising. And that night, Howard Stern raised a total of $190,000.

And it was charted on a penis meter. A bloody penis meter that he had created. It's like a fund-a-thon. I don't know. Phone-a-thon. Like a fundraising thing. Dick-a-thon. Dick-a-thon.

Yeesh. And he raised almost two grand i'm sorry 200 grand to um give john wayne bobbitt for like his ween to do what with it like another surgery or some shit they did he did try to enlarge it and i think i heard in one source that enlarging it was part of this funding process that Howard Stern wanted to contribute to helping him enlarge the painting. Alongside other club appearances and radio interviews he then conducted, he would autograph steak knives. He also didn't disappoint those who thought that one Bobbitt case T-shirt wasn't enough because he decided to make his own and he sold merch. He basically just like ate this whole thing up yeah loved the limelight of it he i mean he definitely is known to have like he's like look if i can get clout out of it and like at the very least could like make money out of like yeah this this trauma like i'll ride that ride he owned it uh he embraced it

so with it then being decided that so lorena's case was broadcast on TV, whereas his wasn't because it was technically sexual assault case. Hers was broadcast because, again, this is also around like the OJ trial, like TV court cases were like a huge thing, you know, and you can see why, I guess. Yes. I'm sure we would have. I would have watched it. Yeah, of course. We're not tweeting about it, too, I guess. Yes. I'm sure we would have, I would have watched it. Yeah, of course.

We're not tweeting about it. Two or whatever. Yeah, live tweeting it. So her case was decided to be broadcast five days before the trial. The prosecutor presented a plea bargain to Lorena's attorney team. If Lorena admitted that the incident was premeditated, she could do four months in jail instead of the whole trial. But Lorena refused to accept that and refused to

admit guilt because if she were to submit to a felony she would never be able to become a u.s citizen and all she wanted was to become a u.s citizen even through all this okay so um that was like her dream so january 10th 1994 um the atmosphere atmosphere around the courthouse was like i mean as if it were a Super Bowl. 200 reporters were waiting outside. Hundreds of people with protest signs for both sides. Clearly, I don't know what happens at a Super Bowl. I'm sure none of that actually happens at a Super Bowl.

You know, everyone packs into a courtroom and everyone's protesting. There's Beyonce maybe singing somewhere. Okay. Anyway, again, lucky for people who thought that like these initial two shirts weren't enough. More souvenir shirts were made, including ones that Bob, John Bob had signed. So he'd autographed them. There were also food trucks outside offering quote sausage served on eight inch roll and

better than sex cake. Very clever, but okay. Just like that stuff could not fly today, right? Or would it still? roll uh and better than sex cake i don't think that's very clever but okay just like that stuff could not fly today right or would it still i like i understand like what it what a cheap way to do like not just for like the food trucks but like everything from like the shirts and like from the city itself having like the cut you know cut above the rest cut above the rest like i feel like i don't know i guess for the sake of the attention of it all but i just talked about our president i don't think

you're right much improvement i mean there's definitely been some improvement of course because of things like this i can't imagine the mental turmoil in many ways obviously that lorena had to go through too because like you know this was such a it became such a publicized thing that was probably so personal and now there's people out there on food trucks making jokes and like oh yeah totally like and he this like her zero sensitivity is on tv like raising money like yeah me and she's like and also like howard stern helps him earn like six figures even though she's like well fuck off like i'm working a nail salon he expected both of us to like work off of to live off of my living it's a terrible terrible terrible

situation and you know i was just thinking like i don't know that it would be like in person that crazy maybe it would be like with people selling stuff but like the internet would go haywire and people would sell merch online like i feel like people still gravitate understandably like humans still gravitate to stuff like this and like like a spectacle oh we love a spectacle wow we do love a spectacle that's part's true yeah so uh 60 of the population was watching like 60 of the u.s population was watching this case and whenever cnn would cut away to news of like arms talks the network would start getting all these complaints like put back, put the trial back on. Holy shit.

They're like, there's like war. Nope. Put the trial back on. Oh my God. This trial was different because it wasn't just any more about what happened that night, but it was also a chance for Lorena to finally tell her side of the story. Like before this, she's been laying low like her defense team advised. this she's been laying low like her defense team advised so initially alongside bombarding the jury with imagery of the severed penis um which uh but by the way the fun fact to throw in all this um the foreman of the jury clay cocalis commented in an interview that quote she might have thought

about going to medical school because the cut she made was such an amazing surgical cut like people the surgeons themselves were impressed they were like this was just a like no jagged edges just right through um so the prosecution showed all these photos of his severed penis be like look what she did you know and then um the prosecution went down the line of how lorena had battered john in the past and that she had always been capable of what she did you know and then the prosecution went down the line of how lorena had battered john in the past and that she had always been capable of what she did on the night of the event john's brothers and sister-in-law took the stand to speak about a time where they were waiting for bumper cars and quote all of a sudden lorena just for some reason got upset and scratched john's

face and was punching and john just stood there uh by the way, Lorena was 95 pounds. So and he was an ex-Marine. So sorry, but I think let's just remember that. Yeah. Don't forget that information as this is happening. Right. One of Lorena's co-workers also testified saying that Lorena had previously said at work that if her husband cheated on her, she would chop his dick off. So that's not a good look either. This trial was the battle of the sexes that's what people call it and uh as barbara walters observed on 2020 i do think that men and

women see this very differently men see it as a man being mutilated in the most awful way a man could imagine many women see it as a woman being abused to such a degree that she struck out at the area that was doing her the most harm yeah and um oh i also listened uh on the mile higher podcast they covered this too i forgot um a while ago i listened to that and uh they were saying like it was a weapon like she saw it as a weapon and that's i think that makes a whole lot of sense i agree the um this sentiment was echoed by women who were protesting outside the courthouse chanting women fight back and according to vanity fair feminists supporting Lorena flashed the V for victory sign, then turned it on its side to go snip, snip.

Which is like, oh, that's creative. Yeah, it is. Yeah. On the third day of the trial, when Lorena took the stand, she recounted the abuse she suffered in the relationship, starting from the first incident a mere month after they had married one incident she remembers is when uh they were in the car and he was driving like really he drank a lot too and he was driving really radically going like 90 miles per hour and she asked him to slow down and he

turned and punched her and when they got home began kicking dragged her inside began kicking her yelling at her and when she cried he mocked her for crying and continued to physically abuse her at this time an officer officer francis showed up at the door and john like completely changed face and became like the exact thing you see in a lot of abuse cases of just had this like lovely oh officer everything's fine she's just having like a hissy fit um i'm sorry but like i know what she did wasn't right but like also like i would drop this fucking dick off oh it gets to a point where you're like oh well i'm surprised it took her that long seriously not that i'm ever advocating to do that to anyone's genitals advocating obviously i understand currently well you start to really there you do really you start

to understand like oh oh, shit. Like, yeah, this was a weapon used against her. Like, honestly. And so and she was like, I never want that to happen again. Okay. Anyway. So this officer shows up and John Wayne is Bob is like, oh, everything's fine. And Officer Francis asked if Lorena had a place to go.

And Lorena said she didn't. But she left and spent the night in her car outside of work. When asked whether she told anyone, she said she hadn't because she couldn't understand why it had happened. She was also really young. This is her first relationship and was embarrassed to tell people. She goes on to tell the jury how John would repeatedly rape her vaginally, anally all the time, just constantly raping her. vaginally anally all the time just constantly raping her remembering the emotional abuse she endured he'd get angry if they went to a bar and a man would look at her any excuse he could find basically on another account from one of the Castro daughters when John and Lorena spent

Christmas with the Castro family John gave Lorena a present she was like nervous to open it and this was like in front of the family and you, you know, it's very conservative background. She opened it to find like skimpy underwear. And she was embarrassed and upset and walked away. And he followed her, pushed her against the wall, saying, what's wrong with you? Walked away and whispered, bitch. And this was like in front of all these people who were like, what the hell? So the abuse led to her stealing clothes from a nordstrom store um and 7200 from her

employer and like she again was being forced to pay for things she couldn't afford the the mortgage like she couldn't afford and she couldn't find the money he was going to beat her their lifestyles yeah and and right she was always being punished um lorena said i stole because i have a lot of payments to do and i can't handle by myself. I stole from Nordstrom because he didn't like my dresses and he would always tell me I was so ugly and I wanted to be pretty for him. face even had a bump on her head one time police who had responded to complaints of domestic violence at their apartment about half a dozen times in the past few years also also testified and neighbors who lorena would confide in there was one named ella jones who had suffered domestic abuse herself and who had kind of been like i see what's going on here had given lorena those pamphlets that they had later found about like right rape and domestic abuse yeah

so two neighbors named Jonathan Kopua and Jonathan Whitaker who often played basketball with John testified that they had once heard him say that he liked forced sex and liked to make girls squirm bleed and yell for help holy shit

just in a basketball game please cut this guy's ass off yeah it's like no fucking wonder so watching the trial you can see how the whole recollection of these events is like traumatic obviously for her and ultimately when asked whether she thought he would kill her she replied with yes uh lorena was suffering from massive anxiety ptsd which was also seen physically she was she was weighing weighed 95 pounds at this point. She was clearly very struggling from her PTSD. Dr. Susan Feister, a forensic psychiatrist, went on the stand to say, Lorena suffered from major PTSD and panic disorder. I don't believe she had control over her actions at that period of time as she was experiencing severe distress and her husband psychologically closed off every avenue of escape for her she became psychotic at the time so attacked the instrument of her torture i believe her behavior was consistent with irresistible impulse so with all that in mind lorena continued to handle this trial like laid low handled it with grace being

polite she always addressed everyone as sir and ma'am when asked questions was just very like docile and kind submissive submissive like like some well i feel like that's a negative connotation like she was meek no no like she was just very like graceful like she never gotcha like she was very you know she told her whole story and was brave and strong in that way, but also was just like very measured, I guess maybe is a good word for it, and polite. So then John Bobbitt was called to the stand where the defense knew they had to challenge his credibility because he says to this day he doesn't believe in violence. Okay. So when shown a questionnaire he had filled out in the past that covered instances of him having previously struck his wife, he said he didn't remember that form at all. Of course. So they show him the bottom and say, is this your signature?

And he goes, yeah. Okay. The defense also reminded him of February 1991 when he had pleaded guilty in court for charges of battery of his wife. To this, John responded with, I didn't plead guilty to it. I just said, you know, I denied what she stated. I didn't do nothing. I didn't hit't plead guilty to it i just said you know i denied what she stated i didn't do nothing i didn't hit my wife or anything they just said this so like he literally he literally uh pleaded guilty and then now was like no no i didn't do that and they're like but like you like literally too little too late it's already done like i don't

know how you're gonna refute that yeah we Yeah. We have the paperwork. It's really weird. When asked about the instance where Officer Francis came to the door on the night he punched Lorena when they were driving and whether John remembered Officer Francis, he says he didn't. John also denied drinking that night. But when Officer Francis testified on trial, the officer recalls like a strong odor of alcohol on John and believed he was drunk. John also denies telling anyone he enjoyed forced sex, which goes against what his neighbors had testified about the basketball game. Weird thing to also invent. Additionally, John provided different information to Robert Johnston, who was staying that night at the Bobbitts with how much they'd been drinking. Because, like I said, they were presumed to have been very drunk the night that happened. When remembering the night of the incident, John said that he didn't remember having sex with Lorena because he was so dead tired.

So wasn't up for anything that night. And only she was touching him. OK. OK. This goes against what Lorena says, which is that he raped her that night of the event. And throughout the whole cross-examination, John Bobbitt contradicted himself with newspapers including the washington post reporting at times in his testimony he appeared to confuse even himself shaking his head in befuddlement okay yeah sorry i've got nothing else no i just feel bad i'm like just like i'm like just dumping this all out but

there's so much okay this day in court like shifted a lot of the media's views on lorena um the daily news front cover now read why lorena bobbitt did it she lived in fear and the new york post headline read lorena was the real victim oh um so some media really did try to change their yeah and like change the storyline yeah also it's kind of shocking to me that it took having to hear the story to think like maybe there was a reason why she did it yeah but i feel like it's like you said like you hear like some lady chopped her husband's dick off and you're like what i only all i ever heard was that he was abusive and and he cheated but like that was it and i never knew what like to what extremity of abuse so easy for people to point out like oh she was just crazy sure yeah so it's fun um okay so a lot of female reporters had tried to cover the story sympathizing with lorena and domestic violence

but a lot of male editors came back and said no one wants to hear about that part so fun worse in court the following day lorena recounted how in 1990 john forced her to have an abortion after telling her she would be a terrible mother and that if she did have a child, he would refuse to help. So, yeah, forced her to have an abortion because she didn't want one. And he said, well, you have to because otherwise you are abandoned on the street, basically. He also hurled more verbal abuse at her, including how she was Spanish and didn't deserve him and she was ugly, had a bad figure and couldn't speak English. Every time they would fight, he would threaten to take away all her immigration paperwork. So he used that against her all the time, threatening like I can get you deported, basically.

So like like I said, like closed off, he closed off every avenue she had of potentially escaping. He would also say how she doesn't deserve to be in this country uh when this was raised in the trial it was picked up by a local hispanic radio station who began to lament how um a fellow hispanic woman was treated so some news sources were you know being more sympathetic to this case obviously than others um the hispanic community swarmed to support lorena outside the judicial center uh no matter the weather they were there like every single day to cheer for her as she entered and left the courthouse um lorena provided another key bit of evidence that evening

on the morning of the 21st two days before the incident she had apparently applied for a protective order which she wasn't granted um and this evidence was then made even more hard hitting by a new crucial witness who took the stand for Lorena Bobbitt's case. And they provided support for this argument that Lorena was suffering from PTSD because she had seen Lorena just a few days before the incident. So this is actually a client of hers at the nail salon. Her name is Regina Keegan. And she said on June 17th, she went to get her nails manicured and her eyebrows waxed. And Lorena,

you know, was the technician. And she said the manicure was very bad and that her eyebrows were very uneven afterward. And when starting on Regina's nails, Lorena pulled up her sleeves and Regina knows she was covered in bruises. And Lorena like quickly pulled her sleeves back down. throughout the manicure lorena's breathing changed like she was like out of breath um and she started tearing up there were tears in her eyes and she said to

regina that if i leave him he'll kill me he was going to drop me over the railing and if people ask me what happened he'll tell them i jumped oh this is literally the headspace she's in like with days before this happened um a psychiatrist analyzed lorraine's behavior and deemed it to be behavior of someone who had suffered ptsd and was not in control of her faculties um unfortunately it was only after john's trial that regina heard about the bobbit case so she wasn't like reading or watching the news very much and so she saw this she saw lorraine on tv and went holy shit like yeah i know one that's who was just talking to me and even though john ween bob had already been uh not guilty you know the jury had deemed him not guilty she was able

to get this news to uh the defense team before like during lorena's trial so at least it made it into her trial um so they used it in the trial as said by kim gandy from the national network to end domestic violence quote this case came at a time where the criminal justice system didn't take domestic violence and sexual assault seriously many women saw this case as an opportunity to bring domestic violence into the public eye with a lot of women who saw themselves in lorena's plate so she had a lot of right people who empathized and understood what she was going through on january 22nd 94 the jury found lorena bobbitt not guilty of malicious wounding by reason of insanity so it worked even though it was like a really rare year was it irresistible impulse double r double r uh-huh there are two hours in there um it worked so that was a win for them um so both lorena and john were acquitted essentially in

both their trials so because the requirements attached to the verdict of irresistible impulse it did mean that she wasn't totally free right away. She had to go to Central State Hospital to have a psychiatric evaluation and was committed for 45 days. But thankfully, she didn't have to be deported and go to prison. So similar to the period between the two trials, the aftermath. This this is where we get to the point of you really start to see these people's character in the aftermath of this whole situation. So their divorce was finalized in 1995. John went on to continue making entertainment appearances, which included judging a drag queen Lorena lookalike contest.

And away from me. And also judging Miss Nude 1995. Why? The 90s were tough, man uh as well as tried to form a band do you know his band was called did you know he tried to form a band i didn't know that it's called the bobbits or the penises the severed parts okay well good i bet that band fucking ruled they were so hardcore uh he then also tried his hand uh in the pornographic industry this is the one i remembered you guys telling me um the the main phrase is oh the

lorena bobby case you don't know about it basically she cut her husband's penis off and he became a porn star yes and also was dear to babies she was dear to his paper so um do you know the name of the of his porn name film oh no what john wayne bobbitt uncut oh fuck off it told the story of him and lorena um john comments a porno seemed like the best way to show that my penis worked okay oh oh thank you i'm so glad we were all hoping you'd prove it to us i know well in sinisterhood they said that the surgeon actually watched the porno and went oh my god i did that like he put it back on and was like holy shit which is just the wildest like full circle thing um so he shot to fame with this film as uh it had its own hollywood premiere that's how like big this was um it was apparently the fourth biggest grossing porn film and the grossest in my opinion,

but the fourth biggest grossing porn film at the time. It is rated 4.1 out of 10 on IMDb in case you're wondering. And I'm sure you were. Did he win a Woody? I'm sure he did not. By the way, for those who don't know, a Woody isn't like an Oscar, but in the porn industry. Yeah. And those people are professionals.

This guy's not a professional. Well, it seems like he's like skyrocketing to fame by having really done not as much as the people who work hard for what they earn so that's true but fame i guess is not maybe the right word maybe just like clout no definitely he didn't have clout but like notoriety or fascination yeah which i feel like doesn't last unless you really have like that's true let's just say he wasn't great for all i know i just feel like they could have like he could have gotten a woody principle on principle that he was like the well the story of the year they did like they did they were hoping he would become like this he just was not good at what what they wanted him to do i guess

sex yeah are we surprised no no not at all but like it's nice to hear it yeah so considering the amount of money john had earned through all these mediums the hospital never got paid for the surgery and can you imagine how expensive that nine hour surgery on a penis was they had to put like the arteries together and stuff um so john had to file for bankruptcy and like howard stern raised him 200 grand whatever um so not even two years later john then gets called back to court for another domestic violence case with his then girlfriend christina elliott he completely denied the allegations but was found guilty and spent 60 days in jail only a hot six zero the first porn success then led John to seek penis enlargement.

That was documented in a highly anticipated follow-up film called, now this is the one I was wondering if you remember the name, John Wayne Bobbitt's Frankenpenis. I didn't know that one. I sure do now. Apparently it was a botched surgery. The storyline in the porn? No, the real surgery oh oh they the guy just injected a bunch of fat into it apparently and um apparently it ultimately ended in dr rosenstein who performed the surgery uh closing his practice but the film got a 5.1 out of 10 on IMDb. Well, there you go. Moving on up to that Woody Award.

Yep. In 98, John started to work as a celebrity greeter at what they called a brothel in Nevada called the Moonlight Bunny Ranch. His employers there tried to get him, like, to be a bartender, but he was really drunk all the time. So that wasn't working. He also was supposed to drive the limo we know how that goes uh with his driving he also just like couldn't do a job right like they'd be like here can you please serve well he never worked his wife he fucking lived off of his wife exactly and thought he could now live off his quote-unquote fame or infamy i guess um so he just was bad at every type of job they were trying to give him.

And apparently, well, I guess I'll just read the quote. According to the escorts who worked there, John used to think that everyone who came by the ranch was there for him, and he'd engage in two-hour conversations with clients. And I'm sure these clients were like, no thanks, we're not here for you and your weird franken-penis, sir. John stole around $140 140 000 worth of clothing from a store around this point he claimed to be a celebrity and demanded for shop assistance to

give him free clothes uh he was caught when he tried to return the clothes to different stores of the same chain and was given a five-year probation in 1999 john didn't show up to his 32nd birthday party which was hosted at the bunny ranch um which is when the owners realized that john had gone on the run with one of their escorts who worked there a 19 year old woman called desiree they had started a relationship at the ranch but uh this was like a big no-no for an employee uh john to be you know having a relationship yeah with with one of the women who worked there but they like stole off into the night um desiree drove them to niagara falls where she secured john an apartment because he had no money this sounds familiar unfortunately this relationship ended in domestic

violence and reached a really really bad point where he was dangling Desiree off the balcony by her legs threatening to drop her. Holy fuck. Which is what remember Lorena was like if this happens he'll dangle me and he'll drop me and say I jumped. Yeah. So apparently this is something he does. He then and this was witnessed by other people which

is disturbing because of what happens next. So he then tied her to the bed where she suffered three days of torture where he told her that she was his lorena now guess how she fucking escaped like this is a wild story she cut his penis off too she's like did she do it again no since she's a lorena i wish no and that point just slit the goddamn throat at that point oh my god she had to play dead because he was like beating her and stuff and she was like the only way i can get out of this by the way i'm so happy that that person got out of that situation that's what i'm

saying it's so close good for you if you're listening a close call especially because so she played dead waited for him he got like a blanket to throw over what he thought was her literal dead body. And then as he turned to kind of like move her body somewhere, she literally got up and just fucking ran for it. So like the fact that she escaped is thank Christ. But like so scary. And again, like this stuff isn't covered in these like in the early story. Literally had no fucking clue. in these like in the early story literally had no fucking clue also i wonder like if i were lorena i would have thought the second that all the court stuff was over he'd be coming to the house to

fucking kill me yeah i'd be like out of there i'd be like i'm never being in virginia again or at least never fucking at least the second i don't think he even was like that mad at her because he was like look at what you've just got me this like great fame i would be so i'd be like if he was almost gonna kill me every day before i cut off his penis like he's definitely gonna kill me now oh yeah well i'll tell you maybe that's is that why sorry i don't mean to keep no no is that then why he was saying like you're my lorena and he was like getting back at lorena about like almost killing her and essentially killing her yeah maybe wow okay actually yeah probably he was just now projecting it onto somebody else um he certainly did that i never

heard this part of the story ever oh my gosh it's so crazy okay in 2003 he was arrested again on another abuse charge spent 15 months and why are people dating this man that's what i'm saying well maybe they don't know because nobody's reporting on it that's that's a great point yeah not trying to fucking victim blame here i'm just wondering like if i if i knew that man existed and then he came out to me and said let's go on a date it's like he's very good at victimizing vulnerable manipulating probably because like he finds vulnerable people right and then just like tells him to give him what he wants it's just it's i think it's just mind-blowing to me that someone who pulls shit off like that can continually get away with it

it's just so oh yeah gross it's gross it's baffling quite frankly um anyway i did not mean to victim no no no you didn't used how he's still landing anybody because like these people didn't these people i don't mean like, but like people didn't necessarily know this and there was no internet. Nothing was going viral on Twitter. Like it just, not everyone saw that side of it. Actually, most people didn't. So she escaped. Thank God.

So many things like happened. He remarried twice. What? Okay. I know. I know. I know. He underwent another battery case with his third wife.

Apparently he broke his neck at one point like this guy just can't calm the fuck down so he can't calm his tits as i always say now age 53 he still lives in nevada and uh in interviews he still holds on to how lorena was prone to jealousy and that he's a marine he's trying to protect people how is he not in jail i don't understand how he's not in jail for all of those assault charges. All of the above? Like, at some point, wasn't a judge like, hey, you got off scot-free, and then you kept doing it, and then you kept doing it.

15 months he got for, like, the fourth one. That man should be in jail for the rest of his fucking life. Agreed. He said, and this sounds like the fucking quote we used, he said he never used violence against another person pretty much ever, which sounds like a thing. Always never, sometimes often. For Lorena, upon release from the hospital after the court ruled that she no longer needed to be hospitalized, she returned to her life as a manicurist wanting to keep a low profile and lead a simple life. All she wanted, she said, was to get her American dream.

She regularly attended Catholic church, reconnected with her her family decided she wanted to go back into education she enrolled in community college and she was approached by obviously so many different media outlets um and whereas john like fucking ate that shit up she was offered a million dollar nudity offer from playboy and refused um so wow i know and she said no i don't want that which is like that alone i think is proof that she wasn't doing this for the attention it's a perfect expression of like their values of their values and what they stood for this entire time like she was never there for the for the fame of it yes and like what this case meant because for him it was like i'm taking advantage of this for her it was like it was just an escape route like it wasn't she's like i just wanted to cut his penis

off i didn't do it leave me alone it's like i just wanted to leave me alone that was her phrasing like all she said she said late she says later i just want him to leave me alone because by the way he doesn't but you'll hear about that in a moment um okay god there's more so she does agree to a tv movie which supported her in paying her legal bills but then she donated the rest of the money to a trust um a year after her release from the hospital lorena began going to shelters to share her story of domestic violence and to hear other stories uh it was at community college that she met uh david bellinger and they started off as close friends and then married they're still together have a 13 year old daughter named olivia and live near

lorena's family. So, thank God. Happy ending. Lorena still lives in North Virginia. She continues to go to local shelters and every year delivers Christmas presents to mothers and their kids at the shelters. Lorena received many love letters from John Wayne Bobbitt that she does not ever reply to. So, some of them them here's one example a lot of them read along the lines of I miss you if there was a choice of any woman in the world I choose you I love your heart I thought about you today you made me smile we would make a lot of

money if we were back together if you had a baby there would be a lot of people out there that would love to exclusive interview me and you John would often sign it so it's still like yes it's still like that gross masculine thing of like oh look if i got you pregnant to be proof that my penis worked remember when i like forced you to have an abortion well now you should have a baby because i want to go on the news now you should have a baby so i can prove that i can ejaculate still fucking Fucking manasshole. Manasshole, truly. And she actually moved to Stafford. Oh. She's not in Manasshole anymore. Is that in Virginia?

It's closer to Fredericksburg. Is that North Virginia? Mm-hmm. Okay, good. Because that's what I was like, I don't know. It's Northern. It's Northern Virginia, yeah.

It's like the city kind of like right above Fredericksburg. Oh, okay. So Lorena has made TV appearances on programs including Steve Harvey, but is always sure to advocate and shine a light on domestic violence. Oh, sorry. I meant to say say john would sign off his letters from your cold and sensitive husband and in the documentary when she's looking through them she responds to the

cameras with i cut his penis off just leave me alone which is like exactly what he said i just wanted to cut his piece off so he'd leave me alone which yeah it didn't work the fact that he can still say i miss you it's like you really need to get your fucking head screwed up like really take a fucking look at yourself yeah god it's you're right it's just something's wrong and i can guarantee he doesn't even mean it it's just manipulative oh yeah so like immediately like i want to impregnate you so i can get famous yeah like and then i want to punch you in your fucking face probably. What an awful man. So she has made appearances on TV, including Steve Harvey, but is always sure to advocate and shine a light on domestic violence. When recalling to Vanity Fair about a time she went to Knoxville to speak at a law review, she said,

The president of the school introduced me as a celebrity. I said, thank you, but let me correct you. I am not a celebrity. I am an advocate. said thank you but let me correct you i am not a celebrity i am an advocate uh she continues to volunteer at her daughter's volleyball team and has a non-profit called lorena's red wagon that helps survivors of domestic violence and this docu-segretaries i mentioned lorena on amazon is just incredible because it does look at this from that whole new perspective that a lot of people don't know um and it's produced by jordan peele's production company so that's how you know it's good he's just

one of my favorites yeah um uh his production company called monkey paw and directed by joshua rofe it's four episodes long um just brilliant and like really just and it interviews john wayne bobbitt and he just looks like such a tool the whole time if you look at a picture of him you know he's a piece of shit he just looks exactly like he and his brothers are the fucking worst um so it frames the case in like this greater historical moment of like domestic violence and how it was viewed then versus now versus like what has changed what hasn't changed um so these references include other cases like uh anita hill's harassment case the oj simpson case tanya harding it's all very like timely and relevant for that time period um the docu-series mentions how at the time in 93 there wasn't a hotline for

domestic violence victims there there wasn't funding for shelters but then in 1995 46 million dollars worth of funding was allocated to support the violence against women act which i'm pretty sure like last last year was defunded again which fucking we can't win um right yeah uh with more recent events including like obviously harvey weinstein donald trump me too movement etc etc etc one of the two most popular of them is the president of our country should be a ringing endorsement for uh for this bullshit right here to it needs to be stopped morse code i'm leaving i'm following my ufo okay i think the aliens know morse code to help you out no they probably are pretending they don't so they don't have to pick me up okay lock the doors on

the way literally lock the doors um okay sorry so because of all the recent stuff happening and probably fucking forever and ever infinity and beyond, the series also reminds us that we are not in that much of a different place, unfortunately, to how it was in 93. And if you have suffered domestic abuse or you know somebody who has, there is now, thank God, a domestic abuse hotline that you can call 1-800-799-SAFE. And that is the story of Lorena Bobbitt. Sorry that was so flipping long but been waiting for a long time to cover that since like 2017 when we first started the show oh my gosh yep that's a that's a pretty crazy one well i knew i didn't like john bobbitt john wayne bobbitt but wow i really fucking hate that guy he's a bad man and like so is howard stern what the fuck you know i don't know i i try to do that thing where i empathize and i'm like maybe like now that time's gone on he's learned well and

he's not the same they made a point in the part two on sinister where they said listeners wrote in said like yeah he actually has he's grown improved a lot but then they were like i just they were like we just wish you would like say something like address it now that the documentary's out maybe he could say like hey that was really fucked up of me and i played a huge part in this it wasn't even an offhanded comment either it was like he addressed a whole spectacle no like he had this penis meter and right paying for his enlargement surgery and said all sorts of like horrendous stuff allowed him to be able to live comfortably and keep being a piece of shit and all that correct yeah and i and i don't want to like try to defend someone that i don't know either side of but like i like to think since the

90s someone has called him out on his bullshit and like he's grown but i agree like yeah and apparently he thank god is like more sensitive now i guess from what i've heard at least but yeah it would probably help a lot of people if you made a made a statement but then we'd probably be waiting that's just tip of the iceberg on this fucking story anyway we'd be waiting in line forever if we got a statement from everyone who needs to make a statement anyway on that note thank you for listening to our really long episode i'm so sorry wow hope you are having a great time on that road trip hope you got picked up i'll swing by and pick you up on my UFO.

Yeah. So I'll be there soon. Just look out the window. Oh my gosh. Well, wherever Lorraine is and wherever your family is now, I'm glad that you are in a much safer space. Me too. If you want to learn more about us, you can go to NSWDrink.com or check us out on social

media at ATWWD Podcast. And until next week. And that's why we drink.