Then John Wayne Bobbitt walked into the emergency room at five A.M. with blood-covered hands pressed to his groin, the technicians did not realize that he had been seriously injured. The doctor asked to see Bobbitt’s wrist.

“That’s not where I am cut,” the handsome, 26-year-old man replied calmly. Too calmly; it was eerie. For Bobbitt had suffered a mutilation that few have previously endured, the crudest cut: every man’s worst nightmare. Underneath the bloody sheet he carried, Bobbitt had, as police officer Cecil Deane would later testify, “just testicles where the penis would have been, a red substance. It looked like a nice, even, straight cut.”

Within days, as the details of Bobbitt’s story became known, there were headlines around the world. The tale quickly took on a life of its own. In what was easy to categorize as the latest, and perhaps the ultimate, escalation in the battle between the sexes, Bobbitt’s wife, Lorena, had attacked her husband while he lay sleeping in bed early on the morning of June 23. In one swipe, she slashed off his penis and—knife and organ in hand—dashed out the door of their apartment. At approximately four A.M., as she drove off, Lorena tossed the severed appendage out the window of her 1991 Mercury Capri. Police would find it, later that morning, in the grass near the Paty-Kake Daycare Center, where Lorena had told them to look. Howard Michael Perry, a fire-department volunteer who joined in the search, says he has been asked not to talk to the news media about the thoughts that ran through his mind as he picked up John’s severed member, placed it in a Ziploc bag, and wrapped it in ice. But even as he politely declines to comment, he can’t help admitting, “It was different.”

No one can resist the tale of Lorena and John Bobbitt. Not the Lorena supporters who have transformed the v-for-victory sign into a symbol of solidarity by making scissorslike motions with their fingers. Not the clerk in the Manassas, Virginia, courthouse who rolls her eyes when asked for the case file by number and says, “That’s the one.” Not the Marine Corps public-affairs officer who provides a few dry morsels on John’s stint in the military and then adds, “I saw his wife on television and she looked pretty timid.” Certainly not the urologist or the plastic surgeon who spent nine and a half hours reattaching the organ and many more hours since talking to reporters and radio call-in show hosts about it.

The public is hungry for details, yet many women don’t need many to form an opinion. Before they knew anything about the Bobbitts or the circumstances that provoked Lorena, before they knew that Lorena had accused John of raping her before she retaliated, women seemed nearly unanimous in their response to what must rank as the ultimate crime against manhood.

It is, perhaps, less than completely fair to chart the reaction to the Bobbitt saga solely along gender lines. But women, in fact, do seem to love it. Their eyes brighten and their pulses race at its mere mention. However controversial the ubiquitous critic Camille Paglia may otherwise be, she seems to speak for women across the country when she suggests that Lorena Bobbitt committed a rather thrilling act of revolution. “It’s kind of like the Boston Tea Party,” she says gleefully. “It’s a wake-up call. . . . It has to send a chill through every man in the world.”

Lorena Bobbitt has taken a mythic leap into our collective consciousness with an act so primal and basic that anthropologist Helen Fisher of New York’s American Museum of Natural History is surprised that it hasn’t happened more often, especially given the high incidence of violence between the sexes. Attacks of this nature are, in fact, so uncommon that the surgeons who reattached John’s organ could find nothing comparable in the English-language medical literature in the past several years (though for some reason in Thailand such attacks are not unknown). Psychiatrists and anthropologists agree that the cutting of the penis is an act that would be freighted with symbolism in any culture. As New York psychoanalyst Michael Trupp put it, “It’s a universal no-no.” Men react with horror at the mention of the act, cringing as they cross their legs. As one Washington writer put it, “the response is so rooted in the neural substratum and reptilian back brain that men cannot find words to express their shock.”

James Sehn, the surgeon who has now succeeded in getting his patient to urinate normally, says he finds that men feel “emasculated” by the story, while women feel “empowered.” The doctors have before-and-after photographs of the operation, and Sehn says his wife’s friends have begged to see. “Most men have no interest at that level,” he says.

So reflexive is most women’s sympathy for Lorena, so deep-seated the rage against John, that Sehn’s wife, Christine, has been hounded at her beauty salon, at a “lady’s luncheon,” and even outside her church by women who side with Lorena. Incredibly, Christine Sehn says that some of those who have accosted her aren’t too pleased that her husband sewed the thing back on. “I’ve heard women say, ‘I wish she’d put it down the garbage disposal,’ “ she says.

The tale of Lorena’s retribution satisfies as an act of perfect vengeance against an oppressor. Our reaction to the tale removes us from the people involved and the violence of the act. But the real story saddens; it is more complicated. Many of those who sympathize with Lorena don’t realize and may not care that she herself says she is appalled by the notion that women see her as a heroine. She is horrified by the idea that people are laughing, stunned by the fact that some seem to get a vicarious thrill out of what she did.

“Nobody knows what I went through,” she says. “Nobody knows anything about me.”

Indeed. Nobody really understands what made Lorena Leonor Bobbitt, a quick and capable nail technician whose dream was a suburban town house with convenient mall access, reach for an eight-inch red-handled carving knife and sever her husband’s penis from his torso.

n Caracas, Venezuela, where Lorena grew up, teenagers celebrate turning Sweet 15, marking the passage into young-adulthood a year earlier than their North American counterparts. When Lorena’s turn came, her parents offered a big party or a trip to visit cousins in the United States. She chose the trip.

And when she arrived in a sprawling northem-Virginia suburb of Washington, D.C., she was swept away. “I feel like, oh, wow, this is like another planet, another place,” she says. “I’m going to repeat this ever, ever. Everything was just pink and beautiful. That’s the way I describe this.” Lorena’s vision of the U.S. was informed, of course, by television. “I used to watch the Flintstones in Venezuela, and even the Flintstones used to have microwaves—and they are middle-class,” she says. The real America lived up to her expectations—at least at first. Everything seemed glossier and more glamorous here. “I love my country, don’t get me wrong,” she says earnestly. “I have a patriotism. . . . We do have McDonald’s. We do have Pizza Hut. We do have hotels and beautiful shopping malls. But for some reason this was my dream in the back of my head. I said to myself, ‘Oh my God, this is the place I want to be.’ “

Lorena is sitting in Clyde’s, a brass-rail and hanging-fern bar and restaurant in a spotless shopping mall about 40 minutes from downtown Washington. With her is her employer and friend, Janna Bisutti, who owns the Nail Sculptor salon and who has become a protector and perhaps a surrogate mother to the very young 24-year-old. Blonde and attractive at 35, Janna watches vigilantly as Lorena tells her story, sometimes prompting or interjecting to elaborate.

Also at the table is Alan Hauge, a paunchy 50-year-old screenwriter who is serving as Lorena’s “media adviser.” There is always the question of the rights to the story. Lorena is, after all, a property now.

For years, Hauge has been laboring to get a movie of James Dean’s life off the ground. In 1991, he made the papers after he became the victim of a self-proclaimed movie producer who had reneged on a promise to come up with $30 million for the James Dean story. The producer was gunned down—along with his father and son. Police suspected a security consultant who also was supposed to be involved in the project and was later found dead. Now Hauge is back in the papers again and is intent on seeing that those who speak to Lorena understand the beauty of her “American dream. “ As he sees the story, it is the tale of a woman who came to this country with the values of the 50s only to find herself reckoning with the dissolute 90s. It is a story that should make Americans ashamed, he says, that reality falls so far short of her ideal.

Lorena is a small woman: five feet two inches tall, 95 pounds. In person, she is far prettier than the tremulous girl with circles under her downcast eyes who appeared in court in August for a preliminary hearing. She never looked up that day, except for a few furtive glances. When Virginia prosecutor Paul Ebert handed Lorena’s attorney photos of John’s injured torso and his penis, pale inside its Ziploc bag, she didn’t turn to see. She was too scared and nervous. It was obvious to those who fought for a look at her that this was no trailer-park queen or hard-edged biker moll.

Now, as she works on a steak dinner, Lorena is animated and charming, somehow timid and outgoing. When she has trouble cutting her steak with the table knife, Janna asks whether the meat is too tough. Lorena says that maybe the knife isn’t sharp enough. A waiter is called to the table; another knife is requested. A moment that might have once passed unnoticed now causes self-consciousness. The mention of the knife is an inevitable reminder that the young woman at the table who seems so eager to please, the young woman who laughs at everyone’s jokes, is no longer just another nail technician.

When Lorena begins to talk about what happened, she seems rehearsed. But soon she begins to speak more candidly, her narrative frequently punctuated with an all-purpose “Oh my God.” She describes her childhood in Caracas as a happy lower-middle-class existence with loving parents who took their three children on hikes, to the movies, on picnics. Lorena, the oldest, was bom in Bucay, Ecuador, before the family moved to Caracas in quest of greater prosperity. Her father, a dental technician, was “the man of the house,” she remembers. While she saw her parents argue on occasion, she says, she never saw them strike each other. “They would scream,” she says, “but it’s just a normal argument.”

After she returned home from her first visit to the States, Lorena told her parents that she wanted to go to school here. Her parents decided that the family would try to emigrate together. Lorena came to Washington, D.C., in 1986 with her mother and siblings while her father stayed behind and tried unsuccessfully to get a visa. Eventually, it became clear that the family would have to return to Venezuela, but Lorena would not give up. “I said, ‘Mother, I really want to be here,’ and I was just begging,” Lorena says. “My mom said, ‘Oh my God, you have to talk to your father.’ My father said, ‘Talk to your mother.’ “ But her plea to go to school here, she says, “was like a key that opened everything.”

It was a wrenching good-bye. “ ‘You’re 17’/2 and you’re just a child,’ my mom said.” When her mother and siblings finally returned to Venezuela without her, Lorena was overcome with homesickness. She phoned home so often, she remembers, that “my mom said, ‘Oh my God, if you’re going to do this, Lorena, come back.’ “

But she stayed. She took classes in English and lived with Irma Castro, a family friend with daughters around Lorena’s age. She met Janna, who was divorced and looking for a nanny for her three-year-old son. From the beginning, the two formed an exceptional bond. When Lorena wanted to apply for a student visa, Janna decided that she and Lorena would go to Venezuela together so Lorena could submit her application from there, to avoid bureaucratic obstacles. The two surprised her parents, and Janna, who loves to travel, had a memorable tour of Caracas.

After the trip, Janna’s son went to spend the summer with his father, and Lorena went to stay with Mrs. Castro again. And when Mrs. Castro and her daughters went to visit relatives in Stafford, Virginia, a small town near the Quantico Marine base, Lorena went along. That evening, Mrs. Castro’s niece took Lorena to a club for enlisted men. Lorena, who says she had never really dated anyone before, found herself in demand as a dance partner. John Bobbitt was among those who asked.

He joined her at her table and said he wanted to talk to her. “My English wasn’t too good, so I really feel frustrated because I guess he couldn’t understand me,’’ she says. “And I couldn’t understand him either. He mumbles.”

Nonetheless, he asked for her phone number. She gave it to him.

The next day, he called and asked to visit. Mrs. Castro insisted that he come to the house so she could meet him. Mrs. Castro’s daughters disliked him, Lorena says, but Mrs. Castro reserved judgment and allowed Lorena to date him.

John started visiting regularly in 1988. At that point, he would have been 21, tall, not too bright, but handsome in his Marine Corps dress blues. He and his two brothers had grown up in Niagara Falls, raised by an aunt and uncle. He was so much a part of that family that he refers to his three cousins as brothers. According to his lawyer, Greg Murphy, Bobbitt’s father “just left the family at some point,” and his mother “wasn’t competent enough” to raise John and his brothers. Murphy says that John suffered from a learning disability as a child, worked hard to get out of special education into regular classes, and ultimately succeeded. Murphy says he suspects that even now John suffers from attention-deficit disorder. “His attention tends to wander,” he says. “He’ll be easily distracted in the course of conversation.”

On the advice of his lawyer, John declined to be interviewed for this story, as did members of his family. But, through Greg Murphy, he denies Lorena’s charges of physical and sexual abuse. At press time, John’s trial on charges of marital sexual assault was set for November 8; Lorena’s trial for malicious wounding is November 29. Both could face a maximum of 20 years in prison.

Today, Lorena Bobbitt cannot convey anything about John that would help explain her willingness to spend an evening with him, much less marry him. “He was nice,” she says. “I never really see any problems. He used to ask me questions about school. I was taking English and dentistry. And he was talking about teeth and stuff like that that he found interesting.” Asked whether she married him as a way to remain in the United States, she simply shakes her head no.

She never saw problems during their courtship, she says—yet there were problems. He got a car so he could visit her and then wrecked it, she says. “We would go out and then he would put on an excuse and say, ‘Oh, I forgot my wallet.’ And then Amalin—Mrs. Castro’s daughter—would say, ‘That’s not right.’ Mrs. Castro was really upset about that. Then she decides this is not good. She make a judgment and said, ‘No, I don’t think this is the right person for you.’ “

‘I’ve heard women say, ‘I wish she’d put it down the garbage disposal.’ “

The vigilant Janna saw little of John, but what she saw didn’t worry her. “It was like a high-school romance,” she says. John took Lorena and Janna’s son swimming, and the little boy seemed to like him. Lorena was infatuated with him. “To her, he was Tom Cruise,” Janna says.

“He’s good-looking and he knows it, too,” Lorena says.

When Lorena’s mother came for a visit, John took the two of them for ice cream and surprised Lorena with a ring. Her mother, who doesn’t speak English, had no objections. “He had no long hair, tattoos, earrings,” Lorena says. “And he was in the military.”

A week before the wedding, Lorena says, she and John had sex for the first time. It wasn’t what she expected. Nor was it ever. “You know, I watch movies and I always thought sex, ifs like touching, holding, kissing, caressing, and he was never like that,” she says. “He was never tender. For me, it was rough, I guess.”

The marriage ceremony was performed on June 18, 1989, by a justice of the peace in Stafford, Virginia. “I knew he didn’t have money, so I didn’t expect anything else,” Lorena says. “I did buy a white summer dress. I said, ‘I can reuse this.’ “

After the wedding, John and Lorena celebrated with breakfast at a Big Boy.

Manassas, Virginia, was the site of the First and Second Battles of Bull Run. Now all previous benchmarks in local history seem to pale against the Battle of John and Lorena, who moved, just after their marriage, into an efficiency apartment in this small Virginia town.

“It was like two people starting over. No furniture, no nothing,” Lorena says. Just after the wedding, over the Fourth of July weekend, John announced that they would drive to Niagara Falls and visit his family at the campground where they were living that summer. Unbeknownst to Lorena, the family had planned a celebration at a church—they had invited the whole campground, she says. But John stood them up, arriving a day late. Lorena found herself being introduced to new in-laws who were furious at the slight. “They were just mad. Mad at me, mad at John. I said, ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t know.’ “

The next day, she says, John went off with his cousins, leaving Lorena alone at the campground. “I was just ‘Oh my God, where he is?’ He came back very late at night. I was, like, ‘Where were you?’ He said, ‘I just visited my friends. ‘ ‘ ‘ Lorena decided not to argue with him. But the following day, when they were returning to Virginia, she was astonished to see one of John’s cousins loading his suitcase into their car. “I said, ‘What’s going on here?’ “ John told her his cousin would be moving in with them. Lorena was horrified.

“I said, ‘Do they know what kind of situation we have? We have no furniture. We have a studio apartment. We have not even room for ourselves.’ “ She decided to appeal to John’s family. “It was just quiet, listening to me,” she says. “They make me feel like I was wrong. They just look at me like ‘Hey, you have no comment on this.’ I just started crying. For the first time, I have a feeling like nobody really cares about your opinions. . . . They were just staring at me like I was the wrong one. Wrong in every word.”

John’s cousin moved in and slept on the floor in a comer opposite John and Lorena. To Lorena, the intrusion was a source of constant discomfort. She told John she didn’t want to have sex. “I was upset because I needed privacy,” she says. Not that sex with John had much appeal for her; she never enjoyed it. “He was just in and out,” Lorena says. “I said, ‘Well, maybe this is it. Maybe this is it when you’re married.’ I accepted that.”

Meanwhile, she says, John and his cousin went out drinking every night. Lorena says John was getting fined by the Marine Corps for showing up late to work. (Murphy says John “has never been fined for lateness,” although “he was late a few times and had to pull extra duty.”) One night, about a month after their wedding, Lorena told John she wanted to go out, too. John took her along when he and his cousin ventured into Washington for the evening. They drove home along 1-66, a freeway that runs west from the city into Virginia. John was driving fast, Lorena says, zigzagging from lane to lane and sounding the horn. “I said, ‘Oh my God, we’re going to crash,’ and he would do it on purpose. I hold the steering wheel very tight and John would push me. I said, ‘John, don’t do that.’ That’s when he hit me the first time. He punched me. I was crying the whole time.”

When they got home, John’s cousin didn’t come up to the apartment with them, Lorena says. When they walked in the door, she alleges, John attacked. “He grabbed my hair and slapped me, he kicked me to the wall,” she says. “He kept slapping me.” A security guard knocked on the door. “John said, ‘We just had an argument, a little discussion.’ “ The guard asked if they were married. “Yeah, we’re married,” John said, according to Lorena. “We’re just having a little discussion, like husband and wife.” The guard asked Lorena if she had a place to go. “I said no, but I leave anyways.” She drove to Janna’s shop, where she had worked since a month before her marriage, and slept in the car.

John’s lawyer disputes Lorena’s account, insisting that Lorena attacked John because they had not gotten into a club that she wanted to visit that evening. Lorena dismisses this. And even though she was shocked that John had hit her, she says she wasn’t ready to tell Janna. “I don’t want anybody to know my problems,” she says. “I feel embarrassed, really. He was my husband. I know people that cares, like Janna and Mrs. Castro, will be very disappointed.”

Meanwhile, her living situation grew more intolerable. She had heard that John’s cousin had drug problems, and now, she says, she discovered syringes and tarnished spoons in the apartment. ‘ ‘I took the needles in a plastic bag and I went to the police station,” she says. “Then I freak out and I was chicken. I said I can’t do this. I threw it out in the trash.” But she called the boy’s mother in Niagara Falls and told her that her son was using drugs. “And she was crying and said, ‘Give him an opportunity.’ “ Eventually, she says, John told him to leave.

At Thanksgiving, she was in for another surprise. John’s family—aunt, uncle, and some cousins—arrived for a visit. “I had no idea they were coming,” she says. “I wasn’t prepared. I had no turkey, no dishes. I had to go to 7-Eleven to buy cups and plates.” They told her they were planning to stay in the efficiency for seven days. “I said, ‘I’m sorry but we don’t have furniture.’ ... I said, ‘I have some money. I can rent you a room.’ They didn’t want that. They didn’t. They felt like I was the ugly one.”

Between Thanksgiving and Christmas, Lorena says, John announced that they were moving to a two-bedroom apartment that he had already picked out. (John says they made the decision jointly.) The next big fight that Lorena remembers was over the Christmas tree. “He wanted a real Christmas tree and I wanted a plastic Christmas tree,” Lorena says. “I said, ‘I only have to spend one time and I can use it again.’ “ Once again, she says, John attacked. “He started to torture me,” she says. “He started using some technique that he teaches the Marines. That hurts a lot because my arm was twisted. He was just hitting me. Hitting me in my chest, my arms.” Murphy denies the incident.

Somehow, despite the horrors she describes, Lorena wanted a baby. She got pregnant and tried to surprise John by buying a bib and tying it on him. “He took it off, really mad, and said, ‘What is this?’ I said, ‘That doesn’t mean anything to you?’ “ According to Lorena, John told her that she would be a bad mother and threatened to leave her if she had the baby. “I was just crying and crying,” she remembers. “I was so worried because I didn’t want to have a child without a father. I didn’t grow up like that.” Finally, she says, they went to an abortion clinic. “It was really sad,” she says. “I couldn’t realize that I was going to do this. We both went there and he was really making me scared. He said the needles are going to be big and I was going to die. ... I was hysterical, crying, and the nurse said, ‘What’s going on here?’ She took me to a room to calm me down.” Through his lawyer, John responds: “That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.” Murphy adds that John and Lorena mutually decided that they were not ready to have a baby and that he was “by her side the whole time.”

Janna says that Lorena finally told her about her troubles and that John admitted hitting her. “He said, ‘She nags and I get frustrated,’ “ Janna reports. Janna’s husband (she remarried several years ago) agreed to talk to John, who promised to do better. After a while, Janna says, she advised Lorena to divorce him, but Lorena wouldn’t do it. “Just like if somebody is on drugs,” Janna says, “you can’t make them stop.”

Instead of divorcing, John and Lorena bought a house on Pine Street in Manassas in the summer of 1990. Again, of course, they disagreed. Lorena wanted a town house. “John didn’t want town houses because he said one wall belongs to another family. And I said, ‘I don’t care, we have no money.’ “ But John, according to Lorena, was fixated on having a big garage. They found a white rambler with a large garage and John fell in love. Lorena says that the house cost more than they could afford, but explains that she was counting on John’s regular biweekly check from the Marines to help. “I called my mother and said this is how it costs in dollars. She said, ‘What? That’s way too expensive, Lorena. . . ‘ But we were already in the house.”

It is Labor Day weekend. Lorena is sitting on the deck beside the pool in her attorney’s backyard. She is wearing a lime-green bathing suit, and Jim Lowe, her lawyer, has seen to it that she is wrapped in a towel against the encroaching late-aftemoon chill. There is something childlike about her; she has a way of asking you, even compelling you, to take care of her.

Lowe is a veteran criminal-defense lawyer who works out of a small, unpretentious white house in Alexandria, Virginia. His wife runs his office. He estimates that out-of-pocket expenses in this case will run up to $25,000, and he’s not sure Lorena will ever be able to cover those costs, much less his fee. She won’t have any money unless she makes a deal with Hollywood, and he’s leaving that to Alan Hauge. He’s not even sure he’ll get to step into the spotlight of a trial, since Lorena could make a plea bargain. “What the hell,” he says. “Every once in a while you have to take a flier on something interesting.”

John’s lawyer, Greg Murphy, works in a new office building complete with a polished reception area. Several weeks ago, Murphy said that John had gone back to Niagara Falls to await trial. But actually John was still living at the Maplewood Park apartment complex, where “the incident,” as the residents there like to put it, occurred. And he has not been shy. He has been telling neighbors and patrons at the nearby Legends bar, where he worked as a bouncer before the incident, that he is going to be rich and famous. He has joked that instead of having a 12-inch member, he’ll have to make do with 11 inches now.

Lorena’s lawyer greets this report with a sound just short of a laugh. “The photograph did not reveal anything of that magnitude,” Jim Lowe observes dryly.

As dusk falls, Lorena starts to tell the story of life in the house on Pine Street. These are the worst memories of the entire miserable four-year marriage. Once, in February 1991, after she called the police on consecutive days, Lorena filed a complaint accusing John of choking her. John countered that she had kicked him in the groin. Both cases were dismissed.

By then, John had been out of the Marines for about a month. According to Lorena’s lawyer, he would have 19 jobs (6, says Murphy) in the next two years. Lorena continued to work for Janna at the nail salon. “She was the meal ticket and the punching bag,” Lowe says.

It was also when they lived on Pine Street, Lorena says, that John started to see other women. He actually asked for gas money so he could go on a date. Nonetheless, he still wanted sex. During this period, Lorena contends, John raped her for the first time. She says it was after one of their tights.

Greg Murphy says his client never raped Lorena or even hit her except in an effort to deflect her blows. Murphy also describes Lorena as irrationally jealous. “Anytime he would talk to another woman, she would get absolutely furious,” he says. “Even if it was a relative.” Asked whether John was unfaithful, Murphy says that while John and Lorena were living together “he did not have any sexual relationships with other women.” When pressed for more detail, he hedges: “Assume the guy is a flirt, assume the guy is even unfaithful,” he says. “That doesn’t make him a rapist, nor does it make her a battered wife.”

Lorena, for her part, acknowledges that she tried to hit John, but only, she claims, after he attacked. “I tried, but I couldn’t do anything,” she says. “He always grabbed my hand and then he twist my arm and I couldn’t do anything.” Meanwhile, Lorena says, she nipped one of his budding affairs when she visited the other woman at the hotel where she worked. “I said, ‘Look, you want to date him, fine. But you have to know that this is real.’ I wanted her to see that I have a ring on my finger and I wasn’t lying.” According to Lorena, the woman broke off with John; he completely denies the affair.

threw it away,” Lorena says. “I screamed when I threw it away. I mean, I screamed.”

Lorena turned to her neighbors Ken Willoughby and his wife. “I said, ‘You have to help me, please. He’s hitting me and he’s going out with this girl.’ “ Ken is a pastor and he says he tried to counsel John. “John was not responsive,” he says, spending a couple of reluctant moments discussing the Bobbitts. “I will extend a helping hand to people that respond to it. But there is a quote from the Bible: ‘Don’t cast your pearls before swine.’ “

Why did Lorena stay with John? She was making about $17,000 a year at the nail salon; she had a far steadier income than John after he left the Marines. But Lorena says John told her, again and

again, that no man would treat her well, that she was ugly and undeserving. “He always said I wasn’t going to have anybody. I thought, Maybe this guy is right. I’m not going to have anybody. He always said men was going to treat me so bad and I didn’t deserve anybody. I always remember those things. I was scared to meet somebody else. ... I feel like maybe I have to please him.”

But in October of 1991, John left for a year. The bank moved to foreclose on the house on Pine Street, and Lorena went back to live with Mrs. Castro.

According to John’s lawyer, John left because he was the victim—of Lorena’s “explosiveness, her aggressiveness, and her thievery.” In fact, Lorena was a thief. She shoplifted a couple of dresses from Nordstrom, but her primary victim was Janna.

While she was living on Pine Street, Lorena began to steal products from the salon, planning to do nails at home on the side. With John drifting from job to lowpaying job, Lorena says, she wasn’t getting any help with the bills, and money was tight. “So I show that to John,” she says. “I told John, ‘I stole these products for you.’ It was embarrassing.” When John threatened to tell Janna about the theft, she says, they both went to her and Lorena confessed. She apologized and Janna forgave her.

But she didn’t tell Janna that she had also been embezzling money. In fact, she had been falsifying tickets that she wrote up for customers and pocketing the difference. One day, after finding some evidence in the trash, Janna put the facts together. Naturally, she was furious. She went over her books and estimated that Lorena had taken $7,200. Lorena, who says she always intended to pay back the money, says she was astonished that it was so much.

But pay it back she did. Instead of pressing charges, Janna began docking Lorena’s commissions. She charged her an extra 10 percent, in interest or just in case she missed something when she calculated her losses. Janna felt that Lorena had stolen because she was under so much financial pressure with no help from John. “I was shocked that she did it to begin with,” she says. “It wasn’t that she was coming in with new jewelry and expensive clothes. “

“I just feel like a big desperation,” Lorena says. “I feel like I wanted to do something. I cannot buy food, cannot pay the mortgage payment, or utilities.” But she acknowledges that she wasn’t just paying for necessities; she also put in a satellite dish. Again, she says, she did it to please John. And she says she shoplifted the dresses for the same reason. She was caught, however, and had to do community service. “What can I say? I’m sorry,” Lorena says. ‘ ‘I thought maybe if I dressed up, maybe he doesn’t see another woman.”

After the year away, Lorena says, John came back and pleaded for forgiveness. He got a job at Burger King, though he didn’t keep it long. Soon he had returned to his old ways. But they stayed together, and in April 1993 they moved to Maplewood Park, a cluster of boxy gray apartments with a view of a strip mall dominated by a Shoppers Food Warehouse discount grocery store. Life continued its monotonous grind of disputes and abuse, but Lorena hatched a plot, she says, to tape-record John secretly. She bought a microcassette recorder and hid it in her purse or in her sweater pocket. She would turn it on when he started one of his tirades. Her main purposes, she says, were to show friends how abusive John had been and to gather possible evidence for a divorce. One Friday in June, John found the tape recorder in her purse, took out the cassette, and destroyed it. The two got into a spectacular fight. Lorena says he pushed her, hit her, kicked her, and raped her. At one point she scratched his face. Finally, he left. Lorena said a neighbor helped her get some boxes ready so she could move out. John remembers the argument over the tape, but denies attacking or raping Lorena.

Ella Jones is a 70-year-old Jehovah’s Witness who lives in the ground-level apartment directly below the one occupied by John and Lorena. She suffers from respiratory ailments and stays home a lot, close to an oxygen tank. Around this time, she remembers overhearing a loud argument between John and Lorena. She says she heard Lorena say, “Give me my purse,” and then she heard “banging, banging. ... It sounded like they were hitting on something up there.” Lorena maintains that this is the fight that occurred when John took the tape from her.

A few days later, Jones was walking up the sidewalk when she saw Lorena cleaning out her car in the parking lot. Lorena told Jones that she was going to give away her things and move. “She had said he had raped her,” Jones says. Lorena also said she was worried about AIDS, apparently because she thought her husband had been unfaithful. (In fact, Lowe says Lorena asked John to get tested before one of their reconciliations, which he did. His results were negative.) Jones made plans to go to Lorena’s apartment the next day to see if she wanted to take anything. “She was planning to walk away,” Jones says, “and I just wish she had done it.”

At this point, Lorena says, the stress of her situation had started to affect her work. “I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t eat. People were complaining about my work. ... On many occasions, I would just leave my work and go to the bathroom and start to cry. My body start to speaking. I’m a good nail technician and I never have problems, but this started affecting me.” She went to her doctor, who referred her to a women’s abuse hot line. Lorena says she spoke to someone who advised her to seek a protective order to keep John away from her.

Lorena and John were now vowing to divorce each other, but Lorena says he told her that he would find her even after their marriage was over. “He said, ‘Oh, yeah. And I can follow you and have sex whenever I want. People after they’re divorced become best friends and they have sex.’ ... He told me that he’s going to follow me even though I didn’t tell him where I’m going to live after the divorce.” Greg Murphy says, “He was divorcing her. Why would he follow her?’ ‘

On Monday, June 21, Lorena went to the Prince William County courthouse to seek a protective order. She filled out the papers but was told it would be three hours before she could pick them up. She decided to leave and return Wednesday. “I didn’t want to wait there and stay alone,” she says. “I didn’t want to be alone.” She felt fairly safe at the apartment, she says, because a friend of John’s was staying there. He had arrived a few days after the fight over the tapes.

The next morning, Tuesday, Lorena awoke and John and his friend were gone. Before leaving for work, she admits, she took $100 from the friend’s wallet, convincing herself that John had given him some money that really belonged to her. “It was stupid,” she says. “I never really should take that, but I take it.”

That night, Lorena spent the evening with a neighbor and then went to Kentucky Fried Chicken to get something to eat. She went home and fell asleep, wearing spandex shorts and a T-shirt. She remembers waking up when she heard the door slam sometime between 3 and 3:30 in the morning. She asked John if he went to work that day. “No, I went out,” he said. He later told police he had been barhopping and that he had had as much as five beers and several shots.

She went back to sleep. “The next thing I remember, he was on top of me. I said, ‘No, get off of me. I don’t want to have sex.’ And he wouldn’t get off of me. ... I was fighting and I just grabbed my pants. ... I heard my underwear rip. And his chest was really on me. And he’s heavy. I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t scream. ... I couldn’t even move.”

As she tells the story, she speaks slowly, staring at nothing. By now, night has fallen in Jim Lowe’s backyard. There is no sound except for Lorena’s voice in the dark and the loud chirping of the crickets on this late-summer evening.

“He opened my legs and he put his tongue inside [my throat], very, very low,” she says. “I felt like I was going to throw up. . . . He continued doing it, having intercourse, and he pushed me away. And I was just crying. I stand up. And I said, ‘Why you do this to me?’ He pushed me away and said, ‘Leave me alone.’ So I stood up from the bed and I was just looking for my pants. I put my spandex shorts on and I just said, ‘You can’t do this to me. And you did it again and again and again.’ And I said, ‘Why you do this to me?’ And then he said he doesn’t care, and he said, ‘Leave me alone. ‘ I cry and I cry. “

She went to the kitchen to get a glass of water. “The refrigerator light was on,” she says. “The door was really wideopen. ... It was just so many things together. I was scared. ... I was physically hurt. I was feeling hurt. I don’t know. It was everything together. I couldn’t describe it. I don’t know the words to describe it. . . . The first thing I saw was a knife, when I turned. I grabbed that knife and, um, I went to the bedroom, and, and he was there, I guess, and he kind of, like, moved or something. I don’t know. And I took the sheets off and I cut him.”

She struggles to explain her thoughts at that moment. “I remember many things,” she says. “I was thinking many things. I was thinking the first time he hit me. I was thinking when he raped me. I was thinking so many things, just really quick. I don’t know. ... I just wanted him to disappear. I just wanted him to leave me alone, to leave my life alone. I don’t want to see him anymore.”

Jim Lowe intends to use a temporaryinsanity defense, arguing that Lorena was in the grip of an “irresistible impulse.” He will argue, if the occasion arises, that an altered mental state is common in those who have been subjected to repeated battering. He also will argue that she acted in self-defense—which could be a difficult case to make, since the alleged rape had already occurred.

After the incident, Lorena dashed from the apartment, hooking her purse over her arm. She ran to the car, opening the door with her left hand, in which she apparently also clutched John’s severed penis, although her account is not clear on this point. She started the car and took off, she says. “And I drove and I drove really quick. But then I couldn’t make a turn. I couldn’t make a right turn. Because I have, um, my hands were busy. And I looked at them and I screamed. And I throw it out. I throw that away.’’

She kept driving. “I just wanted to see Janna. I never really have this kind of sensation. I just drove really fast and I wanted to see her. I stop at the Nail Sculptor, maybe thinking that she was there or something. I couldn’t open the door, ‘cause I have a knife in my right hand. So I throw that in the trash can. I wanted to grab the phone, but then I saw a little blood in my hand, in my left hand. I ran out and then I fell and really quickly stand up and I went in and I washed my hands. And I wash my hands really quick and I dial the phone.”

She got the answering machine. So she drove to the house and pounded on the door. Janna’s husband answered. “And then I was just freaking out,” Lorena says.

When Janna heard her husband call, she says, the first words out of her mouth were “Oh my God. What has John done to her now?” Because she never imagined, she says, that in fact Lorena had done something to John.

Lorena told her that she “cut” John. At first, she didn’t make herself clear. Only by telling how she threw the penis out of her car window was she able to convey what she had done. “I remember when I screamed, I saw, I saw that thing,” she says. “And so I remembered what I saw then and I said I realized that was what I cut. “

Janna said they would have to call the police, and Lorena agreed. When they got to the station, the police asked where the “body part” was. “I just said the body part was close to the stop sign at 7-Eleven somewhere,” she says. “I threw it away. I screamed when I threw it away. I mean, I screamed. ‘ ‘

Lorena has a hard time saying whether she feels any remorse. She cannot seem to articulate how she feels about her attack on John now. She can’t say exactly why she cut John the way she did. She wishes she had never done it, she says. Does she think he deserved it? “I don’t know,” she says at first, but then adds, “Nobody deserves this. Nobody deserved any of it. This is a nightmare.”

At first, John told the police that he didn’t have sex with Lorena that night. But the evidence suggested otherwise. “She definitely had intercourse,” says prosecutor Paul Ebert. “I can tell you that. Which was contrary to [John’s] position. ... He finally said he did have sex with her, but it was consensual.” He ultimately told police that he often had sex while sleeping, but couldn’t remember it. He did remember removing some of Lorena’s clothing.

The charge of marital sexual assault against John is controversial. Virginia has a rape law which carries a possible life sentence, a spousal-rape law that also carries a possible life sentence but that applies only if the parties are separated, and a marital-sexual-assault law that carries a maximum 20-year sentence. Women’s rights advocates object to the distinctions, arguing that rape is rape. Ebert points out that the current law is an improvement over 15 years ago, when a husband could not be charged with the rape of his wife.

‘He had no long hair, tattoos, earrings,” Lorena says. “And he was in the military.”

Lorena also may have to do some explaining in court. In a statement she gave to the police on the morning of the assault, she described the alleged rape and said that she was “mad” at John afterward. And then she complained, “He always have orgasm and he doesn’t wait for me to have an orgasm. He’s selfish. I don’t think it’s fair so I pull back the sheets and then I did it.” This statement, which could make Lorena’s act sound like vengeance for John’s failure to provide sexual gratification, puts a rather different spin on her story. Her lawyer maintains that those comments give a false impression and result from the lack of fluency in Lorena’s English, which degenerates especially when she is under stress. “What she’s really talking about is a long-term dysfunctional situation, not that morning in any sense,” he says.

If John’s penis hadn’t been successfully reattached, Lorena would be in more trouble than she is, facing a maximum sentence of 40 years instead of 20. At Lorena’s trial, if there is one, Lowe will try to use battered-spouse syndrome to bolster her defense. So far, the state of Virginia has not recognized the battered-spouse syndrome as a defense, but the prosecutor says this could be a case “where the courts recognize that as a valid medical syndrome.”

Around the Maplewood apartment complex these days, the kids refer to John as “Stubby. ‘ ‘ If John were to be tried by a jury of his neighbors here, he would have a rough time.

“You hate to wish it on anybody. Really, you do,” says a male neighbor. “But arrogance was definitely his lifestyle. He was very arrogant, into himself. Even now he makes comments. He said, ‘This is the best thing that’s ever happened to me. I’m going to be a very wealthy man.’... He made comments like ‘Don’t piss your girlfriend off. ‘ ‘ ‘

The neighbors say John used to hang around the pool, practicing martial-arts poses and hitting on women. Sometimes he would sign himself in as Jean-Claude Van Damme. “I side with her a lot ‘cause he is a dog,” says an employee at Maplewood. “Just seeing him at the pool, how he’d flirt with people. He used to say at the pool that his wife was married and he wasn’t. I feel she just couldn’t take any more and she went right to the source of what was hurting her.”

“Everyone around here is for her, and we didn’t know her too much,” says another resident. “We knew him.” Even the guys have no sympathy for John Bobbitt.

His employers don’t provide a much more favorable report. At the Red Lobster restaurant, he was shifted from his position of cashier because “he just wasn’t grasping the idea,” says a co-worker. He also noticed that John, who never mentioned the fact that he was married, was constantly trying to get dates. “We all kind of felt like he got what he deserved,” he says.

And at the Legends bar, a co-worker who claims John wasn’t a particularly good “host” says he has been back as a customer, boasting about the talk shows on which he will appear. “I don’t know how much he’s got going for him,” he says. “He was a host at a restaurant. He may as well make the most of whatever comes out of this.” Still, John’s nonchalance about the incident “sends chills down my spine.”

While John is telling people that his penis is going to be fully functional, his doctors differ on the prognosis. The two surgeons who reattached it agree that he is urinating without difficulty, but David Berman, the plastic surgeon who participated in the reattachment surgery, says it may take up to two years to determine “how much sexual function he’ll be capable of.” John is getting brief “reflex” erections now, which is encouraging, Berman says. “We’ll just have to wait and see if he’s going to be able to experience orgasm, and if he can, how much control he’s going to have.”

James Sehn, the urologist, is more confident that John will function normally. “He has a working organ,” Sehn says. “It’s very possible that he’s already had sex, and I wouldn’t be surprised. There are stories I could tell, but I won’t. There’s no deficit of testosterone. I wouldn’t count him out.” There are, in fact, rumors that John Bobbitt flirted with a young candy striper during his two-week stay at Prince William Hospital. Bobbitt’s lawyer confirms that the mother of the girl told his client to stay away from her daughter. Bobbitt seems unchanged emotionally, as compulsively flirtatious as ever, despite what—for some at least—would have been a rather chastening experience. Christine Sehn, who recently went to a dinner where John Bobbitt was present, says she found him to be strangely unaffected. It was “just as if he’d stubbed his toe,” she says.

It will take time to discover how Lorena will recover, if she manages to avoid prison, from the consequences of her own act—and the long-term scars from John’s alleged abuse. She says she cannot imagine even dating another man, and, indeed, it is difficult to imagine a man who wouldn’t have some reservations about dating her. “I have bad dreams,” she says. “Sometimes I wake up shaking. And when I wake up, I say, ‘Oh my God, this is not over.’ “