How Lorena Bobbitt’s Place In The Conversation About Domestic Violence Has Evolved

Details

Publish Date:
February 15, 2019
Author(s):
Source:
Time
Related Person(s):

Summary

Jordan Peele, an Executive Producer of Amazon’s new docu-series Lorena, available to stream starting Friday, has said that the series “reframes Lorena Bobbitt’s story around issues of sexism and domestic abuse” and will provide a “new view into how America got her story wrong and maybe continues to get it wrong.”

The fact that domestic abuse is so top-of-mind for the people behind Lorena is itself evidence that American society has come a long way since 1994, the year Bobbitt was acquitted of “malicious wounding” after she cut off her husband John Wayne Bobbitt’s penis with a kitchen knife and threw it out her car window near their home in the Manassas, Va., area. The jury came to its decision by reason of her temporary insanity, and she spent 45 days in a mental hospital; the penis was found shortly after the incident and surgically re-attached to her husband, who was also found not guilty of sexually assaulting his wife. John Bobbitt denies claims that he abused her, though that has long been the window through which she has spoken about the incident. “I had a history of domestic violence, so that drove me to do what I did to him,” she told TIME in June on the anniversary of the incident.

The fact that the jury found her not guilty represented a new level of public awareness too, legal experts said. “Fifty years ago, Lorena Bobbitt would have been convicted without a shadow of a doubt,” Lawrence Friedman, a Stanford law professor, told the magazine back then. “They would not have listened to any argument that her deed was justified by a history of abuse. They would have focused on the act itself, which horrifies all males.”

Read More