You're Wrong About - Lorena Bobbitt

Episode Date: November 7, 2018

Sarah tells Mike how a case of marital rape and spontaneous mutilation became a national punchline. Digressions include Ron Jeremy, Alan Dershowitz, Motörhead and the tortures of self-reflection. Sarah reviews John Wayne Bobbitt's later works. Continue reading →Support us:Subscribe on PatreonDonate on PaypalBuy cute merchWhere to find us: Sarah's other show, Why Are Dads Mike's other show, Maintenance PhaseSupport the show

It's gonna search the word penis in this document of nuts I have it appears 37 times which seems even like a low number of times Welcome to you're wrong about the show where we revisit your childhood memories from the 90s, so you don't have to Like that because who has the time I am Michael Hobbs I'm a reporter for the Huffington Post I'm Sarah Marshall, and I'm tired of naming all the places I write for because this is like the main thing I do now And we're talking about I think the title of this is gonna be you're wrong about Lorraine a bobbitt because that is the primary person in this Who I think America is wrong about but we're gonna talk a lot about John Wayne bobbitt, and I've just become like Fascinated by him. I mean America was fascinated by him Like I remember when his porn came out and they reviewed it in like the New Yorker and stuff

He did two pornographic films, and I have now seen one of them Okay, and I would sum up the themes of this whole episode with a quote that John Wayne bobbitt himself Says then this is his first porno, which is John Wayne bobbitt uncut. Oh, yeah directed by Ron Jeremy. Have you seen it? No? Unfortunately First of all, it's pretending to be Biographical it's a biopic. Okay, and so Lorraine is played by this very Scary-looking lady who's just sort of has this like villainous like Disney villainess like Ursula and Little Mermaid a little bit Ursula Yeah, but basically there's a scene midway through where he's

Having an orgy with two or three women and then Ron Jeremy walks in with his own date And he's like, it's me run Jeremy. I'm here to join you, you know And at this point John Wayne bobbitt doing as always an unconvincing job playing himself Nice says I was meeting some very important people now, but everything seemed to turn into an orgy condolences Condolences to John Wayne bobbitt. I feel like John Wayne bobbitt's life in the 90s was like he was the heroine of an 18th century novel About a young lad sort of without much intelligence sort of making his way around the world getting sort of randomly kidnapped by pirates and Turns out to look exactly like a Duke and he impersonates him. His his life became this sort of weird

Pigoresque adventure for a while there. Oh, yeah, what do you remember about all this? Like what are your impressions of this saga? My understanding of the case was that Lorraine a bobbitt her husband came home and he was drunk and he passed out in the bed And he was like a deadbeat husband just like a shitty husband And so she went to the kitchen got a kitchen knife cut off his penis got in her car Drove away. I don't even know what city this was in but it was near cornfields or fields of something And she threw the penis amidst the fields And he was so drunk that he didn't wake up. I'm sure this is 100% accurate

I guess love the phrase she threw the penis amidst the fields That's like it was amidst the corn That's what I remember about it at the time and then the cops obviously got involved and then they found the penis And they sewed it back on and that was where we got all of this after math stuff That's why it's allowed to be funny because his penis came through it with him That's my overwhelming impression of this case is that it was a national joke I mean, I remember Jay Leno and Conan O'Brien and Saturday Night Live had ten Billion jokes about this case for ten billion years

I mean, that's what I remember both of them were just national laughing stocks And this case was something that the country did not take seriously at all. It was just hearty har har Woman cuts off man's penis. Everyone, you know, she's the evil hag. He's the emasculated cook We had these archetypes these tropes ready for them. Yeah, it's like it's a fascinating thing for men to find funny So should we should we start from the beginning let's start from the beginning yeah, and let's okay So one thing that I feel like is the big you're wrong about in this that people tend not to know and that certainly John Wayne Bobbitt himself has probably forgotten by now is That there was not just one trial. Oh, there were two trials

What yes because before Lorraine a Bobbitt went to trial for the quote malicious wounding of her husband John Wayne Bobbitt went to trial for sexually assaulting her. Oh, wow Which she claimed is what he did before she cut off his penis and that was her motivation He says her motivation was that he was bad at sex or that she was upset that he was leaving her or That if she couldn't have him nobody would like it changes based on what year in the life of John Wayne Bobbitt You read an interview from nice. I mean first of all, it's always a version of the events where He's not at fault for anything. Okay, what do you know about Lorraine a Bobbitt? Like if you try and imagine her as a person nothing so Lorraine a Bobbitt was born in Ecuador in

1969 she grew up in Venezuela She came to the US in 1987 on a student visa She went to community college. She started working as a manicurious. She met John Wayne Bobbitt who was a Marine Doesn't he just have that like head shape? Yeah, dude. He's like high and tight. He's just a high and tight dude But so Lorraine a Bobbitt comes to the US in 1987 meets John Wayne Bobbitt. How do they mean? she meets him at a dance near the Marine Corps base at Quantico and She said in a really fabulous vanity fair article that came out this summer written by Lily Anilic quote I thought John was very handsome blue eyes a man in uniform, you know

He was almost like a symbol a marine fighting for the country. I believed in this beautiful country. I was swept off my feet I wanted my American dream. Whoa. How do you get quotes like that out of people shit? I don't know man That's that's how the pros do it and then John says Lorraine. It was pretty. She was innocent She was real real sweet. So, you know, you can get better quotes out of some people than others, but yeah And do you have like a mental image of him? He just seemed like the kind of dude that would have become a cop or a army soldier or something like dudes I went to high school with who would have looked directly through me. That is the vibe that I always got from John Wayne Bobbitt Just his world in my world do not collide on any

Anywhere like there's no overlap in our Venn diagrams and just I look at him like a zoo animal And he looks at me like a zoo animal and like that is that's the level on which we interact with each other And like the guy that you went to high school with where if you like sort of knew him vaguely or knew of him if he was in the news Ten years later for his wife cutting his penis off. You'd be like, hmm. I can see that you like. Yeah. Yep, John good old John So they get married in June of 1989 four years before the incident. Okay, Lorraine is 20 John is 22 so they get married and She starts Supporting them pretty quickly. She's working as a manicurist. He leaves the Marines and kind of sporadically employed

She embezzles $7,200 from work at one point which later brings up as evidence of her Untrustworthiness, right? She says that was to support her and John and like the lifestyle that they both wanted to have And that she was pressured into it. So it's just it from the beginning is just a difficult marriage and Becomes more complicated and they're in this is in Manassas, Virginia Which is like in the greater DC area. It's in northern Virginia. So they get married. They're tumultuous Yeah, they get married. It's a tumultuous marriage from the beginning. I mean they get married because She is about to have to leave the country and he doesn't want her to. Oh

So it's a visa marriage. Yeah And one of the things that he later says is that well, you know The reason she attacked me later was because you need to be married for five years to become legal if it's a visa marriage So that's why she assaulted me and it's like John Why would you think that her assaulting you would make you want to stay married to her for another year? Yeah If that's true, that's not a great strategy on her part. Yeah, it's a visa marriage It's a stormy marriage to begin with they fight about money He leaves the Marines fairly soon after so he's not this American dream type person anymore. He's just a regular guy

She's working to support them pretty much from the beginning She's working long hours as a manicurist, you know, they separate for a period He goes off and fathers a child with another woman whoops and then comes back to the marriage But they've already been separated for one lengthy period. They're like back living together again But are talking about divorce and essentially, you know, both of them kind of know which way it's going by the time of the night in Question, which is June 23rd, 1993. They pretty much know that they're gonna get divorced and then this is the end But it's like they've separated and come together a couple times before so I think they all there's also this feeling of you know When you're in a like a shitty relationship that you just can't end. Yes

Very yes, it feels like this was one of those. So they're kind of coasting on the momentum It's like easy to stay together. They have this Fiery thing. They both were really young when they got together. She was 20 years old and he was 22 when they got married So, okay, you know, just the the idea of like of your marriage ending when you're a young married person seems like it's hard You know because you've made this big decision and now you have to admit that you need to move on, right? I don't know. I feel like Harmful emotional attachment can be more tenacious than like a healthy emotional attachment like the bad relationships can be harder to leave Why?

I don't know because of like the basic masochism of human beings I guess you get addicted to like the tumultuousness of it Are you sort of think that that's what love is? Who knows if that's what was happening here But it just seems like one of those relationships that like they would not that the people in it wouldn't let die That's being like continually defibrillated back to life and each time it comes back. It's like a little bit worse off, right? Yeah, that's called being in your 20s that is extremely being in your 20s It's just like look everyone made like a a series of small bad decisions And so the night that this all happens they're living together

Which is important legally later on because in Virginia You cannot charge someone with marital rape if they are living with their alleged victim Unless there is some kind of physical injury Jesus Christ the reason that this is gonna be called sexual assault later is because they're living in the same house But there's no such thing as raping someone if they're your spouse if you don't injure them You can legally rape your spouse without physically injuring them in the state of Virginia If they live in a different at a different address than you like this is the the way that it breaks down at the bureaucratic level All the little ways of not applying the term marital rape to cases of marital rape, right?

So he goes out with his friend who's staying with him at the time They come back at like three in the morning what John Wayne Bobbitt says later on Variously is that he doesn't remember having sex with Lorena or that they had consensual sex? Okay, what Lorena says is that he raped her. Okay, and that this was not an uncommon thing in the marriage One of the things that becomes a problem for her also later is that when she is finally apprehended by the police later that night Which she tells them is that he always has an orgasm and he never gives her an orgasm. Oh What are you hearing that don't get mad at me? I hear just straight relationships You hear like the danger of straight relationships and how maybe they're too risky for anyone to be in it

Sounds like every conversation I've had with straight female and straight male friends of mine I'm sorry But isn't her account pretty plausible I mean if he comes home at three in the morning and he's been drinking The idea that she who presumably has to get up early to work the next morning is gonna be like yes Let's let's bang this out. Yeah I was to go out go off to work to do manicures all day to support him and his you know, whatever the hell he does Yeah, like I'm I'm definitely really into having sex with you at three in the morning when you're drunk

I'm not and I have to get up for work the next morning doesn't necessarily mean it's a salt But it's not a like Enthusiastically consensual right direction. I assume she also says that he like held her down Mmm, and that he had said previously that like forcing someone to submit sexually was a turn on for him Which like right none of that is surprising. That's right straight relationship cultures Like I personally look at that and I'm like, yeah like if this is a relationship that has involved an abuse dynamic and If we go by a version of the story where she didn't say anything or attempt to resist in any way on this particular incident

It's like I don't think that that even particularly matters in the scheme of things because we're looking at consent spread over an entire marriage Right and at a relationship where the idea of whether or not she it matters What she says or does if he feels like having sex like that might have been completely eroded from the relationship years ago, right? This particular night. I think doesn't matter as much as as we want it to matter, right? And then the the Ron Jeremy version of events. Oh No, because Ron Jeremy dramatizes this. Oh my god I just can't believe the phrase the Ron Jeremy version of events exists I mean it sucks

But it's also really nice to be talking, you know to be looking at this weird chapter of American history and Ron Jeremy is there Like I almost wish that it we know when we were talking about I don't know like the the creation of the FBI and it's like and here's the Ron Jeremy version 9-11 There's a whole a whole rainbow of possibility that Ron Jeremy never tapped But the Ron Jeremy version of this is first of all that Lorena is Sleeping with like her huge scary boobs. Okay out on display. Yes, John Wayne Bobbitt comes home and basically

Has sex with her in a way that is just consensual but lame like he's guilty of being a what every straight guy fears being which is like boring sexually and can't stay hard for very long and he just sort of like Very quickly comes and then falls asleep and then she goes and gets the knife and like stands over him And and it's like you deserve this I am going to wound you and then cuts off his penis and then instead of throwing it into a field It actually lands at the feet of Motorhead's Lemmy. No way really. Yes, the guest special guest appearance by Motorhead Yeah, they they also did the closing credits theme. Sure. So that's the Ron Jeremy version

The part where the two actual Bobbitts start telling the same story is that she gets up She gets a glass of water. She says that she Sees the knife in the kitchen and just kind of grabs it. She's not really thinking. She just kind of does it She goes back into the bedroom John Wayne Bobbitt later will say that he feels her grabbing him and initially thinks that she wants to like round to round to Okay, that's like a very John Wayne Bobbitt thing to think Yes, and she cuts it off and then he fully wakes up and yes wakes his friend up Who's staying with him to have him drive him to the hospital?

And his friend who doesn't think it's like super serious starts brushing his teeth. No fucking way Yeah, and John Wayne Bobbitt is like no we have to go to the hospital right now. No way but apparently stays very calm and then at the hospital, you know first they're like clamping it and suturing it and Then they retrieve the penis and it is reattached in a nine-and-a-half hour long surgery Wow, and even after it's sewn back on They don't know if it's gonna be able to stay back on or you know, the doctor apparently tells him that it could literally turn Black and fall off. Okay, but it stays on what what is she doing at this time? She cuts it off and then she like runs out of the apartment super quickly or like how does she she runs out of the apartment?

She has she doesn't have shoes on she's like still holding the penis and she also takes his Game Boy What? Which is very mysterious Why did she take the Game Boy? I don't know like why would you take a Game Boy if you were in her position? She's halfway through playing a link to the past. I don't know like it's a valuable It's valuable. It's sitting there. Sure, you know, so this crime takes place She gets in the car still holding it the penis not really realizing that she still has it in her hand is what she says later Yeah, and she's driving around and she like suddenly realizes that she's holding it

And so she throws it out the window and it's the corn As far as I know corn wasn't involved I think it might have been like a vacant lot because it was across the street from a 7-eleven Oh, see I was imagining like the fields of wheat from Gladiator. That would be nice the mythic resting place of the penis Penis Valhalla, yes, that's what I was imagining But no sadly it was really across like across the street from a 7-eleven and so the cops Because Lorena after this drives to her boss's house her boss Janna from whom she has embezzled Oh, wow

Yeah, she doesn't have like an extended friend network Which is one of the maybe problems in her life And so she drives to her boss Janna's house and is like I guess cut off my husband's penis and her boss to her credit is like let's call the police and Explain the situation and so because of that because she like immediately is like, oh Um Hmm, I definitely did that and then says where she you know where she threw it out the window The cops can go retrieve it and since there's a 7-eleven across the street

They take it to the 7-eleven and fill a big bite container with ice and then put the penis in the container Shut up. Yeah, that really happened. The big bite container. Is that the one for hot dogs? Yeah. Oh my god Well, whatever works that's like very MacGyver. It is very MacGyver. It's not as if they would have anything with them Yeah, it is an example of like how you know, this really happened. It was these people's lives. It was all of this serious horrific Stuff gets pulled in the deep re going to the story but also in this way that you just literally cannot deny It was just funny. It was like this Right like it's horrible and it's all so funny like and it's bones the story is funny

And you don't want it to be funny, but it's funny I'm sure that there are many like Oberlin PhDs written on why this is so funny Why do you always compare me to an Oberlin PhD? That might go to like left-wing poetry slam reference I'm sorry. I should use evergreen or something instead, right? So on the way she throws the penis out the window Yeah, and then goes to her boss's house and then her boss calls the police and is like hello This is where that penis you're looking for is and then you know is arrested turns yourself in cooperates. Everyone's cooperative

And then before she goes to trial so she goes to trial a few months later But before that because she's accused Sean Wayne Bobbitt of Rape and because he can be tried for sexual assault based on state law he goes to trial for sexual assault and a jury of Mostly women acquits him. Oh interesting apparently at the time what one of the jurors told the New York Times is that they wanted to Have a little addendum saying like this is not to be taken. This is not a feminist statement like everyone calm down This is a regular verdict. Okay, there's this feeling at the time that this is like that the way people are responding to this It's like John and Lorena Bobbitt are

proxy warriors in the battle of the sexes basically And there's this response that immediately happens where it feels like there's some feminist voices that are sort of like emboldened by this and There's a large tide of a feminist and of people who are like Lorena Bobbitt was abused and like this is a crime that makes sense in the context of spousal battery and of The kind of marriage that she describes and like let's be more merciful towards her than the legal system tends to be Right, and there are also some voices that are like yay This is fit punishment etc And there of course are people saying that there is going to be a wave of copycat crimes

Oh the big fear in 1993 weird. Yeah, why is that weird? Well, I guess this is the same thing that we said with the battered woman syndrome Yeah, many many episodes ago about how there's this idea that women are biding their time and that women are Super murderous against men and are holding on to all this anger against men and at the slightest Provocation it's just all gonna come flooding out. Yeah, and so there's this fear Among the straights that the women are just gonna kind of rise up at any moment and I guess this gives fuel to that Yeah, I feel like what we consistently learn is like straight people are just living every day In like their own personal cold war. It's just stressful

Yeah, because you look at that and that same language that showed up in the late 70s and early 80s when Cases went to trial where women had killed their abuse of husbands and either been let off without having to do time or being given Comparatively late sentences because of a battered woman syndrome defense. There was the same rhetoric that we see About Lorraine and Bob it that it's going to be quote open season on husbands And it's like nice. What are the straight men of America doing? What are what is the husband population up to? These men think that women are sharpening their carving knives waiting until the first legal window When it seems like women who commit the crimes that they of course all secretly want to commit aren't having the book thrown at them

Right, and then immediately they're just gonna start doing exactly what Lorraine and Bob it did like what kind of a self image Do you have to have to believe that your wife wants to do that to you? And of course the solution to these things is never like hey, wait Maybe our wives are people with agency and we should just be nice to them And that's the best way to keep them from murdering us. No, no, it's always we need harsher punishments We need to crack down. It's always this like tough-on-crime path rather than just like let's ask our wives What they need in our relationships and how to make them healthier, right? Like why don't you treat your wife in such a way that you're not worried that if it were illegally possible for her

She would kill you immediately, right? The only thing keeping my wife from killing me is laws. Nothing else. Just she's afraid of punishments Everything else is in place for her to want to murder me. Yes. Yeah, I just want to live it in America We're like we trust people to not murder their spouses for reasons other than that. It's illegal But what why do they acquit though? Why do they acquit John Wayne Bobbit of the sexual assault? This is actually there's some good quotes here from the prosecutor in this case because another of the weird things that happened is that the

Prosecute the guy who prosecutes John Wayne Bobbit and who has used Lorena Bobbit as a star witness Then turns around immediately and prosecutes Lorena Bobbit using John Wayne Bobbit as his star witness. Wait the same guy Yes, what? His name is Paul B. Ebert the Prince William County Commonwealth's attorney because we're in Commonwealth territory So he's just like the prosecution one-stop shop and when it's John under trial Lorena's the witness and when it's Lorena under trial, it's John the witness. Yeah, it's like bugs on first bugs on second bugs on third weird Okay, so this is quoted in in the New York Times coverage of

John Wayne Bobbit's acquittal Commonwealth attorney Paul B. Ebert says you might say these two people deserve each other and Then it of his own role. He says it's not the best position to be in I believe what she said was the truth And I continue to believe what she did in response was not justified So essentially he's sort of making his legal position Tenable by being like, you know, I believe that her husband did rape her or did sexually assault her based on what the law of the Commonwealth of Virginia says But I believe then that what she did in response wasn't justified by being a rape victim Which like is you know a standard prosecutorial standpoint across both trials. It's just weird to sort of flip the defendant and the witness

So obviously what was the evidence for and against was it just her word against his? Yeah I'm so tired of the phrase he said she said but it is the kind of case that they call that because there's no physical injury That there's any documentation of you know, they're they're married. So that's a hard case to try You get the feeling that if not for the malicious wounding trial that the sexual assault trial probably wouldn't have happened, right? You know and also then they're trying based on the idea that the whole the whole reasonable doubt thing, right, right? Like there's a lot of room for reasonable doubt if it's a question of testimony versus testimony and the testimony of the Victim regardless of how you're gonna try and focus on what's at hand

You know that the the victim in this case is going to to go on and be tried for something pretty Incendiary in a couple of months. That's gonna affect the way that you apply your understanding of the case as a juror, right? So there's this weird thing where she then goes to trial and he has been acquitted of sexually assaulting her which kind of Takes some of her motive away You know there has to be proof of sexual assault for there to be proof of of her battered wife Syndrome diminished capacity and specifically her lawyers are arguing temporary insanity, right? So the first trial there's a lot of coverage of it, but it doesn't rise to the level of soap opera

The second trial the Raina Bobbitt going to trial for malicious wounding is on TV the whole thing Oh, like live. It's it's it's fed live. It's one of the first of those It's one of the first trials that shows TV people that there's a market for showing trials And it's one of the first that shows people will watch anything Because they watch a lot of material just about like John and Lorena Bobbitt's marriage and not about the interesting parts of it Like there's a lot of testimony about like them arguing about money, right? so that's on TV for two weeks and She is found not guilty by reason of temporary insanity. Yes, I remember this and I remember that being like a big deal

My understanding is the insanity defense does not work all that often I don't have numbers on it But like if you look at just the cases that we grew up watching and that you know Have made a big impression on American media in the last 20 years. How often has an insanity defense worked like none times Yeah, so what is her argument? She says she kind of blacked out. I would describe it Essentially is just having diminished capacity, you know, one of the defenses that comes up a lot in cases where the mitigation is battered wife syndrome or something like it is

That you essentially have lost the ability to respond appropriately to a threat Oh, you are attacked or you feel the threat of attack which may which may be real or maybe just you Experience something that to you suggest here about to be attacked based on your previous experiences of that and you respond to that Threat all of this makes complete sense when you sort of say it thing by thing, right? Because if you're used to being attacked is specifically by someone who's physically Larger or more powerful than you. Mm-hmm If you sort of get this limbic reaction to the threat of future attack, then you're not gonna be conservative, right? You're not gonna be like I'm gonna try and disable but not kill this person, right, right?

You're gonna overreact because you think that your life is in danger and you have to yeah Because that's what our survival instincts do and that's why we do things like, you know The same adrenaline rushes that are responsible for mothers lifting helicopters off of babies Wherever the hell that happens, you know, if we want to celebrate that they're also responsible for people overreacting to real or perceived threats and You know, there's also the the thing of learned helplessness that happens in abuse dynamics We're like if you are consistently abused and Nothing that you do makes a difference about whether you get abused or not

And if you you know have tried to get out before but have just kind of given up on that that you essentially Don't have a sense of possessing any will of your own So then even if you're presented with like free and clear options to like leave the relationship, right? Or to protect yourself. You just don't see those opportunities anymore Hmm the like global battered wife defense Basically is you know, it breaks down to a lot of different things But it's essentially that like you can't look at someone who responded to someone who was abusing them consistently and

Say that they responded in a way that was disproportionate to what they were experiencing or what they were afraid of because you don't know what seemed Disproportionate in their brain as it existed after being that relationship and in that abuse dynamic for that long So basically based on the abuse she has built him up in her mind as a Existential threat to her in a way that being sexually assaulted at a bar or something by someone you don't know Wouldn't necessarily provoke that response It's because it's part of a pattern that she then has this reaction Yeah, I think they're you know would be this feeling and I think this was why there were Women in America at the time, you know and not just women in America who kind of

Lifted Lorraine a bobbitt up as a figure of resistance in a way that kind of oversimplified her case But also was a form of support of like we've all felt like that right because John Wayne bobbitt also just doesn't understand What harm he's doing who like literally doesn't conceptualize of himself is doing harm who cannot be intervened on like even now Right, he also comes across to me as like morally vacant And I feel as if there is the sense that like John Wayne bobbitt had been blessed that there was this hand of Masculinity like reaching down to touch him and be like, you know, even if the worst thing happens to you You didn't deserve it and you'll be okay And so in John Wayne bobbitt's interviews as you know after this happened and then as he's sort of

Taken out of a drawer on multiple of five anniversaries. Let me just read the quote He says obviously I would have preferred not to go through all that pain and suffering But being famous for my penis has given me opportunities. I could not have ever imagined Oh my god This is like he's living the dream it's like the whole country is talking about your dick The weird thing about John Wayne bobbitt is that I feel like he kind of does feel that Just from the beginning like from the moment this happened this awful thing happens to him his wife's Motive for doing what she did is very much at issue at the time

Which she doesn't seem to notice at all and he just sort of steps into the spotlight Like he's been waiting for this his whole life. Like he always had a feeling, you know, and it's finally happened He's like hello, you know in every interview that you read with him He just sort of has this blithe Disregard for like the possibility that any of this was because of anything that he did You know this idea that he got famous for his penis and he sees himself as being this famous victim And it's like he's he's been able to tell himself that story because so much of our Cultural version of the story has gone along with that but like this is a story about his wife accusing him of raping her

Right and he's been able to completely ignore that part of it and focus right just on the part that's worked out Well for him and he can see kind of looking at the dynamics of this event any of these trials And I'm just seeing him as like this archetypal guy who just who uses his sexuality in a way that is harmful to women and doesn't even notice that he's doing that Right. He has all of this power to harm and he doesn't even see it. It's not there's malice There's just ignorance and like a total refusal to examine himself to do any Soul searching or any self-reflection at all. It's just he's just kind of bouncing through life like a little pinball Yeah, without really being like, huh, I wonder what Lorena's needs are

I wonder how I can be a better husband just just kind of skating along the surface of everything Yeah, and so and after this happened You know after as after all of this, you know, the trials and Lorena Bobbitt is Committed for psychiatric observation for 45 days. She's let out after I think 38 because they're like, you know She's not dangerous. It's just this dude like she had a toxic dynamic with this dude. It's just this marriage She's yeah, and it's so interesting how How consistently both of them behaved like she just went radio silence basically at least in the yeah She did paid appearances and stuff in South America. She stayed here. She applied for

Permanent residency. She brought her family up. She continued working as a manicurist playboy offered her a million dollars to pose And she was like no, I'm just gonna keep doing my manicurist like this is This is really the the end of Lorena's time in the spotlight and this has been enough for me. Thank you And of course John Wayne Bobbitt as we've discussed just like went for it and the immediate aftermath of all of this happening John Wayne Bobbitt has gone on a worldwide media tour called love hurts He appears on radio stations across the country He appeared on a radio station where he was hooked up to a polygraph His penis or his his self his self his actual self

Okay, he had a merchandising deal for something called the private parts protector. Okay He autographed steak knives the only thing more masculine than a penis Set of steak knives. He also had his penis embiggened and then made its regular size again later on because yeah, he did And so now it's regular again This is all from a New York Times article at the time and this ends with a quote from his lawyer Who says no one who has come to instant celebrity will have systematically exploited as many avenues as John Wayne Bobbitt Wow I mean, maybe there's a lesson there that the only way

To be a successful celebrity is to be morally vacuous about it Yeah, that's probably true. You know and just like not feel ambivalent or I don't know what to do with all this And what does it all mean? It sounds like he just like skated over the surface the whole time and was just like This is fun and the wind is at my back and just didn't put too much thought into it He so has that like the wind is at my back look on his face Yeah, so much of this. Yeah, and John Wayne Bobbitt continues to make media appearances when he can get them and one of the things that she said when she made a

Recent and relatively rare media appearances that he's tried to Call her over the years and she always just deletes his number. No way. He's like still sending like you up texts He's still calling her every so often and he's made coy remarks That you know, he could forgive Lorena if she apologized Oh my god, like he wants to go back for more. He's like, you know, there was good stuff there Oh my god, it is a toxic relationship from your early 20s Yeah I'm still trying to figure out how like what to think about this guy

Is he basically a domestic abuser who sort of got off because he became this joke? Well, an important thing too is that so in his future relationships, they were also domestic abuse incidents So he had like he was charged with domestic battery of his third wife several times But he was acquitted of all of those Okay, and he was also convicted of misdemeanor domestic battery in uh 1994 We've got someone who's been accused of domestic violence three times and convicted once This is at least a pattern in his relationships

Right, the most conservative thing you can say is that he's consistently accused of domestic abuse by the women He's in relationships with does anyone ever give him shit about this on any of these like Montell Jordan appearances Is anybody like tell us about the abuse? I will answer that with a quote. Okay, so this is from an interview that he did with the Daily Mail Oh good I was just so looking forward to like the noise you would make about the Daily Mail So this is the author talking but in the fevered atmosphere of these hashtag me too times the impulse by some to recast Lorena as the victim has proved irresistible

There should be a me too movement for men because the law is biased toward women says bobbitt. No We could all stand up and say me too I went through that my girlfriend did this my fiance poisoned me my wife cut off my penis Because I filed for divorce. I mean me too me too. Let the men do it. Do you agree? Oh my god And it's like john like men can't actually you're kind of the only one Yeah, you're actually the only one who had his penis cut off and for all this talk of copycat crimes Like this has happened a couple more times. Oh, yeah, and apparently there was a phenomenon in

70s in thailand where this happened dozens of times But you know, I I think I don't know if this has happened at all in the u.s Despite opening the legal floodgates. There hasn't been anything we can call a copycat phenomenon Like it's a big country eventually this will happen again, but it's it never sparked a wave And here's another one of john wane bobbitt conceptualizing himself reasonably what happened to me is like ogre and nicole She finalized the relationship and two weeks later She was dead the same jealous behavior occurred with larena the hurt person becomes enraged

Me and nicole both got our heads cut off. Oh my god, and it's also like nancy kerrigan We both had our legs cut off. Oh my god. It is evil behavior and for the record, by the way, nancy kerrigan didn't get her leg cut off Yeah, no one got their leg cut off of the people that we're discussing today Like what does it mean to describe yourself that way to be fair Oftentimes when people are held accountable for their actions They tend to catastrophize right that we've had a wave recently of men who have faced the tiniest possible consequences for their actions being like It's a witch hunt And so it's easy to put john wane bobbitt into that frame on the other hand. He did actually have his penis cut off

I mean, that's true. He literally did and no one can say that he didn't So that's a thing so it's not I mean, it's not like a situation where like He lost a grant or like he was fired from his extremely lucrative job There's an element of whining about this from men But john wane bobbitt to some extent is the only man in america that can actually make that case because he did I mean, he was actually mutilated. I feel like I come down Kind of where the prosecutor came down where it's like a sexual assault probably took place and like domestic abuse Probably happened

And it's a wildly disproportionate way to react to that. You know, she was trapped in the marriage She couldn't leave because of visa reasons She was scared but like mutilating somebody in a very severe way is like a really fucked up and inappropriate thing to do I don't think she should have been like locked up and thrown away the key or whatever But it's a Really big deal to cut someone's penis off. Yeah, if anyone Can be a martyr for like men's rights, but it's probably john wane bobbitt and everyone else should shut the fuck up There needs to be one so they can have him

And he likes being famous And he's in this weird position where yes, he can be the face of men who are maimed by Women in disproportionate ways and he's the face of a movement of almost one And yet he's also still capable of being annoying because he still has a penis that works fine. Yeah And of course, I was watching john wane bobbitt uncut and I was like, I want to see the penis I want to see the penis. I want to see the penis Right and then finally they show it and they cut to it like pretty abruptly from something else So you're like not ready and then suddenly it's there and you're like, oh

I would not even necessarily have guessed like it really it is pretty amazing like it works He materially benefited from this situation. It's part of why he's weirdly appealing as a human being You're like wouldn't it be nice to just have no self-awareness at all and deep down We know it would be horrible because we wouldn't be accountable for our actions And there would be all this like all this good stuff and self-insight that we wouldn't have but at the same time you're like What if I were John Wayne bobbitt and I could have this like the biggest sign that you were capable of getting That like maybe you need to make different decisions about what you do with your life and you're like wow I'm the victim and I'm gonna make a movie with Ron Jeremy. I'm gonna make two movies

I mean, isn't that the sort of the thing that says something about where we were in the 90s that he Despite the evidence that we had about domestic abuse He became kind of like a jokey fun celebrity that went on Jay Leno And that no one ever held him accountable for that or even was like, you know Something funny happened to this guy, but like maybe let's not welcome him into polite society Like I always thought it seemed kind of weird how it just became this like joke Nothing about the whole situation is like all that funny unless you know, just because like it has the word penis in it It's funny, but like if she had cut off his hand or something we would have we would be having a completely different conversation about it

Yeah, it's true. It probably has to do with the fact that in America. We're Uncomfortable with penises as a whole anyway. We really don't know what to do with them Someone has written their Oberlin PhD about Like our weird obsession with penises and as soon as penises get involved in something We all become little giggling toddlers. I'm gonna read you something So, you know how I have complicated feelings about Alan Dershowitz Yes, but who you know in the 90s was still passively a civil libertarian and now he's just a big balloon full of am radio

Alan Dershowitz wrote a book In the mid 90s called the abuse excuse. Oh nice I would like you to argue against Alan Dershowitz and you know, this is in response to the Lorena bob at trial It's in response to Tanya Harding the argument is that you know, everyone wants to be killing everyone and now they found all these loopholes And it's you know Folded into this general hysteria about the 90s and how everyone likes tv too much and you know And so here's the thesis of Alan Dershowitz's book that I want you to argue against. This is an air times review Mr. Dershowitz yokes the parts together with observations that quote abuse and other excuses may be a symptom of a national

abdication Of personal responsibility. Oh nice And that all the excuses he writes about quote encourage a sense of helplessness Which leads to an unbroken cycle of abuse counter abuse excuse And violence and that to regain control over our destiny. We must first reassert responsibility For our choices and our actions. This is like now. That's what I call personal responsibility volume 78 just

Cranking out the same arguments for everything always By wanting to make things harder For women. I'm actually the one that cares about women. I mean, it's it's the same like upside downery I mean, what's interesting about this argument is that he's right in the general right that people respond to incentives and that legal structures Matter But then right now and especially when he was writing we basically have widespread impunity for domestic abusers And so swinging that pendulum back He's saying is like gonna make women more aggressive or whatever, but it's like well

What is it doing to the behavior of men that they know they're going to get away with it? Like I do think that the chances of punishment matter Punishments to some extent matter, but he never applies that to the status quo He only applies that to changes to the status quo. What do you think Alan Dershowitz says to that? Man People are snubbing me and moth has vineyard. He makes the sound of the monsters from pitch black Yeah, and what's funny too is that I feel like if you're Defending a system that basically, you know, say there's something systemic like domestic abuse

There are crimes that then can function if you look at them this way as kind of canaries and coal mines We're like if you have a certain amount of women who retaliate against abusive Partners and you can be like, okay This is this is an indication that domestic abuse is an endemic problem If you see it that way then you can be like, all right Like how do we how do we lower crime rates by you know managing the thing that's causing the retaliatory crime The crime that women feel is necessary in order to end or get out of difficult abusive relationships Or you can also do this thing where if there's this larger problem

And then these more visible crimes that are indicative of that problem if you're punishing people for those Then being tough on crime is a way of not looking at the entire picture at all because if you're Taking these crimes in response to a bigger problem Putting the people who commit the responsive crimes in prison And not addressing what they're naming is the cause of it then you essentially can say that you solve the entire problem By by putting away the people who commit crimes that are responsive to this bigger problem in their lives But isn't domestic abuse also a crime? I mean, that's what's weird is like everybody wants to be tough on crime

But they never want to be tough on particular forms of crime. I mean spousal abuse like spousal rape Yeah is also a crime. So shouldn't he be arguing? Let's really crack down on the spousal abusers and make those dudes do 50 years in jail. I mean, it's the selective Worrying it's like it's only a slippery slope when we start being nice to women When we're like, let's just let men get away with stuff Like that slope is not slippery because we've always been letting men get away with stuff and it's and everything's going fine Right, we're not able to entertain hysteria about like, what if we start letting men get away with stuff and it's like, well, we've been doing that Yeah, it's the whole time. Yeah, we can't freak out about it because it's already the situation

I feel like the the hallmark of the 90s media scandal is that you know at the time there's all these New York magazine articles and highbrow Editorials about this and various other scandals of the period of like how did America become such a cheap tabloid frenzied Circassie kind of a place like aren't we above all this? And the people who are doing all the pearl collection don't seem to realize that they are being presented if they choose to take the Opportunity with narratives that are about all of the issues that they want to talk about these are stories You know so many of these tabloid 90s stories what are thought of as tabloid stories are about domestic abuse

they're about The lack of recognition of marital rape legally they're about complex legal issues they're about all of these serious things that are at the forefront of feminist thought and sociological thought and legal thought and Us trying to define ourselves and deal with our biggest problems as our society as a society And instead we are able to see them as just like this funny thing that happened. I think it's also the inability It's really difficult for people and especially people in the 90s to leave public figures complex Like to me lorina bobbitt is a complex figure. She's clearly the victim of some form of abuse

She also clearly did something wildly inappropriate To reclaim her as a feminist hero is kind of bullshit because she's more complicated than that and to reclaim her as a vicious Queen is also stupid because it's also more complex than that and it's like these cases that Fall somewhere in between what we want them to be. We're very bad at dealing with those And so we craft this narrative around somebody But then in the specifics almost nobody ever fits. So we're left with these

Misconceptions about complicated people that have been pushed into these, you know square little boxes Yeah, and everyone's too complicated to be a hero Yeah, John and lorina bobbitt were just two people who kept making bad choices until they ended up Being the focal point of the entire country's attention. Yeah, there are just people who sort of wandered over Right to the spotlight basically. I'm glad that I've made terrible decisions my whole life But have never wandered into any spotlights. I think that's the trick. I know. Yeah Don't get famous just make dumb decisions under the radar for your whole life. Yeah And love yourself love yourself and your bad love yourself make bad decisions quietly

And live near a 7-11 with ice available If need be there it is You