Many in the media, including Ladies’ Home Journal and Gay Talese on assignment for The New Yorker, questioned whether it was an oxymoron. (He was acquitted.) At the time, marital rape only recently had been made a crime in all 50 states and was nearly impossible to prove in Virginia. Lorena is correct, of course, that most people forget that before she was tried for what she did, John was charged with marital sexual assault. “And it’s like they all missed or didn’t care why I did what I did,” she said.
That was all the media, before now, before the Women’s March and the #MeToo movement, when we were all less evolved as humans, wanted to talk about. “They always just focused on it …” - as in her husband’s detached and reattached and then, a couple of years later, surgically kind-of enlarged penis.
COFFEE FOUND NOT GUILTY FULL
They found it, put it on ice in a Big Bite hot dog box from a nearby 7-Eleven and rushed it to the hospital where in a nine-and-a-half-hour feat of urological and plastic surgery it was reattached and restored to (almost) full function. By “them” she means the police who, sometime after 4:30 a.m., clutched their loins and went digging through the overgrown roadside grass for the missing member. “I’m not a vindictive person because I told them where it was,” Lorena Gallo, as she is now known, said. “I tried to drive the car, obviously, but I had this thing in my hand so I couldn’t drive so I got rid of it.” Obviously.įurther down the road is the nail salon where she worked and fled to that night. There, she said as she drove us around in her Kia on a recent afternoon, was the hospital where surgeons reattached John Wayne Bobbitt’s penis after she cut it off with a kitchen knife as he slept on the night of June 23, 1993.įifteen minutes away, near Maplewood Drive, was the gravel-strewn field where she disposed of the detached penis out the driver’s side window. Lorena is very matter-of-fact about the whole thing.