Lorena and the Limpet

22 July

Lorena and John Bobbitt, photos from the trial.

This episode is all about Lorena Bobbitt vs John Bobbitt, or as it's more commonly known, that case were an abused woman cut her abusive husband's penis off. Joe explains Virginian laws at the time, and Sandra talks about the trials, the media aftermath, and the documentary series "Lorena" from executive producer Jordan Peele. Sandra got her information from wikipedia and the before mentioned documentary series, available to watch on amazon prime. Joe got his information from:

The photos of Lorena and John Bobbitt from the trial can be found at Rolling Stone, and the poster can be found at IMDb.

Audio transcript

Midweek murders contains graphic and explicit content, listener discretion is advised. Somebody once told me the world has gone around me i aint the sharpest tool in the shed... Joe! [Laughter] I helped you out. Wow. I should be a recording artist, I know. hashtag some moron in the place where i grew up... Upplands Vasby. No! You know that ain't the truth. Gonna get to the stage where that's gonna be genuinely where i thought you grew up. And i'm gonna believe you. Oh no, wait, did I? [Laughter] I think some moron put alcohol on a tampon and put that up their butt. It was a boy obviously. You say obviously... They tend to be a bit careless. Is that just because of all of the stories of women putting vodka soaked tampons anywhere revolve around the vagina? I don't think they would do that. It has definitely been done. The ph balance is so fragile, I don't know how that would turn out. I mean they didn't enjoy it. Very badly, I'm assuming. I can 100 percent assure you that I have read AE reports where people have put... Oh good lord. Spirit soaked tampons in their hoo-ha. Speaking of... We're not allowed to say that word live on air. Speaking of the va-hoo-ha the episode... VA-HOO-HA! I'm saying va-hoo-ha what more do you want?! Jesus christ, fucking immigrants. [Laughter] Let me have my natural segway that you just talked over! Speaking of the va-hoo-ha, play the jingle. [Laughter] What I was gonna say is... No leave it in, you can't top that. [Music]

Are you sure you haven't been drinking? I do have water, I'm not an animal. Of course you do, because you're so dry. You're listening to midweek murders and this week we're going to discuss the case... it already went to shit. Speaking of which, natural segway, no I'm just kidding. Play the jingle! Take it seriously man, this is our livelihood at stake. It is if you keep not hitting your sales target. Well if you'd have set up a go fund me by now we could be bajillionaires. I don't think bots have money. Just like me. I should just become a bot! Would we legally be able to accept payments from the russian government? I don't know, let's say yes. I know a lawyer, I'll ask her. Yeah if it comes straight from Putin's va-hoo-ha then maybe not. It means vagina. Okay welcome to midweek murders, this week... oh shit. It's wednesday, and that means it's time to talk about crime, but you know that already bots because you've been listening to all of our episodes. Thank you AI and elon musk. I'm your host sandra and this is your host Joe. You did it again, you left me with fuck all to say. What am I supposed to say? You said it that way last time so I thought that was a okay. But some fussy little princess sitting in his tower... I'm sitting in my bed actually, and just because it's on the fourth floor doesn't mean it qualifies as a tower. I've checked. Okay what do you want me to do? Also, I introduced you that way last time to make you feel deliberately uncomfortable so that you would appreciate the position that I'm in whenever you introduce me that way. Oh it was your british passive aggressiveness shining through. And if that didn't work then please see my statement of 10 seconds ago. What do you want me to say? Hey dudes [Laughter] this is my dude Joe, and this is my dude Sandy G. Sandy G in the house! In the house! Do we have any working version of that now? I don't think we have. Why don't we [Laughter] just throughout the whole podcast through the whole 40 minutes, but no it's gonna be more like two hours, but through like the whole two hour recording just genuinely snip out the individual words of the introduction. You're, listening, to, midweek, murders, that means it's time to talk about crime. I'm gonna use that one. I'm your host sandra, and I'm your host joe. Perfect. Nailed it in one. They do call me one take Juan on on the film sets that i'm on. Introduce the case!

Okay this week we're going to talk about bobbitt versus bobbitt, and the dancer not the weirdest thing that has happened in in media after that i can say that john bobbitt has been participating in very very strange things on the internets well not on the internets on the tv but now it's on the internets because everything you do stop saying internets [Music] everything it's just the one man try that for math but you wouldn't have it that's because it's mathematics tell that to the americans it's not the internets you know i've written that on the website right well it's not the internet no i've written my no i've written my interests include the interwebs with a c because like that pubs and joe's dog ollie where the fuck does the sea come in in interwebs no i mean said what oh i don't know the alphabet you know it escapes i am hashtag confused and you're gonna be more confused because i'm gonna tell you about the case of Lorena bobbitt versus john bobbitt or as it's known more commonly in the media the dick chopping case it started with once upon a time in the land not far away depending on where you're situated in the world a man called bobbitt and a lady called bobbitt had a little fraca in the bedroom what is fraca google it bitch okay sorry you you do your shit it's starting to shit talk oh for fuck's sake let me finish so you don't have to keep cutting me out [Laughter] okay god damn it it's that one was on purpose that one was an accident oh did you have another [Laughter] But guess who does not? John Bobbitt. Not true, he does. Didn't they surgically reattached it? Yeah, spoilers.

So it started on the 23rd of june 1990 yes with a 9-1-1 call where there was a woman telling the police that she had cut her husband's penis off and she also told them that she had thrown the penis out of the car while driving i mean who hasn't made that call at least once in their lifetime maybe in our fantasies then the firefighters and the police searched for the penis on the curb of the road where she said that the firefighters were called because they're used to handling big hoses spoilers seen the picture the firefighters were not required [Laughter] okay so so i think a police officer accidentally stepped on the penis no way yeah which i genuinely didn't know that which also figures in your fantasies extensively i can only imagine only if he was wearing high heels and then he told or maybe it was a firefighter somebody stepped on the deck and then they as long as there's a service man i don't mind and then they bagged it took it to the hospital it was washed with antiseptic and packed in saline eyes and then surgically reattached to john bobbitt's stump after nine hours of surgery yes if you're listening to this ladies and gentlemen and considering penile amputation it takes nine hours to reattach true story bro and i should also say that i got my information from wikipedia and a documentary series on amazon prime called lorena uh i got mine from also wikipedia and encyclopedia.com does dollars when she was arrested she told the police he always have orgasm he doesn't wait for me ever to have orgasm he's selfish this conversation with detective peter wentz was tape recorded and then read on the trial so let's start with the trial that came first the trial that came first was the trial against john bobbitt for his i think the charge was like marital abuse there was a a rape charge in there as well. yes so at the trial they told lorena and her defense that they could only because of the the way that the loss was at the time in virginia i think it was was that she could only discuss or present evidence from five days within the incident or maiming or amputation of the penis happened so they were not allowed to talk about or present evidence from any other time than just those five days which for me is quite crazy yeah that's that's a pretty messed up law yeah then what happened at that trial was that the defense said the defense for john bobbitt said that lorena had been angry and he was asleep he constantly repeated the fact that he was dead tired blah blah blah and then she had just chopped his dick off and he didn't even kind of notice like well he noticed obviously but like he was so tired in air quotes that he said that he kind of just remembered her holding her his penis and then the mutilation happened and he was like what the hell the prosecution stated that he had been sexually assaulting raping abusing lorena in their marriage but they couldn't present evidence enough evidence for this because they were only allowed to present evidence from the five days that were around the incident although i would say that they could have found evidence against him during those days if they had looked further into it they did have several people that provided character witness statement against him and things that he had said i don't know if that falls into the remit of the five days but there was definitely somebody who testified in the first trial, to say that there was an established history of abuse both mental and physical, against john bobbitt. yeah i think that was the second trial though because they weren't allowed to talk about past er happenings as i saw in the documentary series the only evidence that was presented was that she said that he had raped her before the incident with the knife happened.

Wait so hold on let me ju just to try and get this clear in my head so there were two prosecutions one was against lorena for chopping his dick off yes and the other was against john for serial domestic abuse yes and as you said rape as well and yeah so which which one went to trial first the prosecution against john bobbitt went first so the serial domestic abuse rape charges yes no well yes but the character witness to say that he was a massive sex pervert was definitely in his trial no that was as a defense for lorena a defense for her temporarily temporarily temporary insanity plea she pleaded not guilty on the grounds of temporary insanity okay sauce fine i was also confused why his he was on trial for the rape that happened before she chopped his dick off it's called like marital abuse or something like that yeah virginia law at the time was weird i have a specific point about that but we can bring it up when we're not just bringing me up to speed no you can say it now is it the first trial or the second so it was the trial against him yeah for his rape and sexual abuse and he was acquitted on those charges and the reason he was acquitted or one of the reasons he was acquitted was because under virginia law at the time the legal definition of rape was that it only applies to couples living apart or in cases where the victim suffers serious physical injury so because they lorena and john were sharing a home and lorena didn't have any serious physical injury it couldn't legally be classed as rape yes fucked up it's so fucked up but an interesting point about the forensic science bit was that i messaged you yesterday when i was watching the documentary it was a forensic scientist who gave expert testimony about the fact that she said that he had ripped her panties off and he said that he looked at the tearing of the fabric of her underwear and said that it had been cut most likely it had been cut he didn't say 100 and you say that it's very easy to see if it had been cut or not yeah it's incredibly easy to tell forensically if a fabric or material has been cut versus ripped or shred and to give you an analogy if you've ever tried to sew something and have bitten your thread and tried to thread that through the eye of a needle versus if you've snipped your thread with scissors and tried to put that through the eye of the needle i don't know if you've ever done both of those of those and i would just like to say to all of the listener bots that i can't do both all right this isn't a platform for your home care bragging i didn't know that it wasn't you have to tell me this from the top shouldn't put it in the contract joe most people present company excluded would find that the thread that has been bitten or ripped is much harder to thread through the eye of a needle than one that's been cut and that's the same with fabric or papers or whatever under a microscope a rip or a tear is really jagged and it has lots of sharp edges and it's really obvious to see that it's been torn apart whereas a cut is literally just slicing through the fibers so it's very straight it's very neat it's really equal on both sides so the forensic evidence of underwear of being ripped versus being cut would be really really clear-cut and the only reason the expert witness has said that it's most likely to have been cut is because in these kind of situations you can't 100 guarantee anything but if the forensic witness has said that the evidence shows that it was more than likely cut then that is what i would be inclined to believe had happened yes and the problem with that i think is that it didn't correlate her police report it wouldn't have been a problem if she said the panties were cut but it was a problem because she said the panties were ripped and the thing is that it's very very common in domestic abuse cases that when they first do the police report the victim will often underplay the situation so the victim will say like oh he pushed me or he grabbed me or he did this or that but it's very often a case of something more serious but because of the thing that we talked about couple of episodes ago with the internalized shame about these kinds of situations it's very hard especially for someone who she i heard the recordings from the police interview and from the start of the first trial and stuff like that her english isn't that good so i think it might be even harder for her to make an accurate statement about what has happened partly because she was abused for so many years before this happened but also because she might not have understood all of the questions or chosen the right words.

So he was acquitted, as we already said. He went on this grand tour of being a dick essentially he was on like talk shows where his brother said that they went looking for lorena after this happened with the attempt to kill her he also went on howard stern's like christmas show where howard stern raised money for him because he had gotten his dick chopped off and like it was done in such a horrible way there was like a lot of naked women in this christmas show and it was like oh yeah i don't believe your ex-wife because she wasn't that pretty i don't believe her rape allegations because she had pimples howard stern said that i was like what in the hell is going on why isn't this man not allowed to be on media anymore because he still is in the media and after john's grand tour of america the second trial started and because there wasn't a limitation of the five days around the incident they could present evidence of past abuse so not only did they have evidence in the way that they had numerous police reports there was numerous times where police had been to their apartment because of domestic abuse there was also recorded history of her injuries and a woman who went to lorena's place of work during these five days before the accident or the mutilation or amputation or whatever you want to call it she had seen Lorena on tv after the first trial and realized that oh shit i could have been a witness so she called the prosecutor that was handling the first kiss and was like i didn't know this was happening i'm a very busy like she had small children and stuff she was like i didn't know but i was one of her clients at the nail salon lorena worked at a nail salon and she told me what was going on because she had come in for her appointment lorena had rolled up her sleeves to do the nail thing i've never no thing yeah i've never been to a nail salon does it show and she had like these horrible bruises all on her forearms and the client had like gasped and lorena had quickly like rolled them down again and the client had asked where did you get those bruises and lorena has said my husband hurts me so the client had tried to help and be like oh there's this number you can call there's this shelter you can go to you could go home with me and she asked "do you have anywhere to go?". And Lorena said no and she was like you can come home with me if you want and stay at mine and lorena had said i can't because he told me that if i leave him he will kill me and he will also kill you for protecting me and she had said like oh well how do you know like and she had said no i have tried to leave before he has found me before and the abuse just kept getting worse because he would punish her for living so she had been like distraught she had been crying shaking extremely like emotional and this is not very uncommon the abuse victim sometimes hides abuse from their friends and family because they're embarrassed about the situation and they have said like oh no he's not gonna do that again he promised me he won't do that again but they will open up to someone who has no connection that's not uncommon at all they also had evidence of him being he had like signed a statement he had pled guilty to abuse of lorena in the past and in the interviews that they did with him in the documentary he was like i am so i was super strong i was so strong i could do anything i could run super fast i was super strong i was like the strongest marine i was like john claude van damme but i would never ever be violent to another person and not only has he pled guilty for it and there is police reports of it and all of that shit has also done it afterwards because the pattern of abusers is like escalating if people can commit violent offenses and do like and be so horrible to another person it isn't a behavior that escalates so i think he will kill someone someday and she should be in jail but that's not what happened.

Do you have any forensic science evidence about the second trial remind me what the second trial is against her but a lot of violence was about the abuse so the jury was split nine women and three men that's the first trial yes ah fuck that's okay no i don't have shit on the second trial that's fine well the first trial is at the evidence that was presented i kind of get why it didn't lead anywhere because there was so much limitations to what the evidence could be well in in the first trial i found quite an interesting quote in that and the jury agreed with the defense lawyer in that the evidence was too circumstantial and a direct quote from the jury was if someone had heard her scream or if there had been some sort of bruising that would have made more substantive evidence and that stuck with me because that kind of made my skin boil in the they're not looking at any kind of character witness or previous history or anything like that they're just looking for physical evidence at the time that this happened and i don't feel like that's how prosecutions should work particularly for sexual abuse trials. yeah it did feel very disappointing because it kind of felt a little bit like they didn't do their job but i also understand that they were so limited within the five days they could have talked to the neighbor for example because as we all know or a lot of us know that the most dangerous time of leaving an abusive partner is one either when you're pregnant or two when you're leaving your partner or the six months after leaving your partner and lorena had moved her stuff in to her neighbor because she was leaving john bobbitt and he had all this shit talk about uh she only got mad because i said that i wanted a divorce and stuff like that that's his explanation of what happened but the fact was that she was leaving him and he had become increasingly aggressive like saying that i'm gonna shove you over the balcony railing and tell everyone that you jumped you're never gonna be able to move on from me because i own you blah blah blah and the neighbor lady that had lorena stuff in her apartment that happened the day before or two days before.

And as Lorena describes it, John Bobbitt and his friend comes back shit-faced from the club or pub or whatever it's called in the americas. And John Bobbitt had raped her and then she had gone into the kitchen opened the fridge door the fridge light had illuminated the knife on the counter she had taken the knife and then she doesn't remember anything as she said it until she's sitting in her car and i'm not sure if that's true or not but it is also a pretty common response to a traumatic incident like that there must have been a lot of blood stuff like that i don't think she her brain wouldn't let her believe it kind of but she knew that she had chopped his dick off because in the car she had the knife in the one hand and the dick in the other so she was like well this must have been what happened she didn't have the knife in the car she had the dick in the car she had the knife in the car she stopped at uh she she threw the knife in in the bin yeah at a 7-eleven no she threw the dick at the 7-eleven pretty sure she threw the knife in a bin at the 7-eleven because there was a forensic scientist expert that described going to the 7-eleven and retrieving it from the bin right i might be wrong but i have an image of it because she took images of it the forensic science person and you've just been googling dicks. no that's what you do with your spare time. You have to wait until you go to the third page of google before pictures of Trump stopped appearing.

And John Bobbitt, the absolute asshat, he also spewed a lot of lies about like she just wanted to use me she just said this because she i was leaving her blah blah blah i think it's interesting that you mention the lies because what i found intriguing about the trial was that the jury somewhat decided to follow his story yet his story changed three times in the legal proceedings so the first time he said that he came back and lorena tried to initiate sex but he was too tired so he turned her down and he went to sleep and the next thing he knew his dick would been cut off then he changed his story to they might have had sex but he was quite tired so he can't be a hundred percent sure and then he had half a dick and then he changed his story again to say that it was quite a regular occurrence for him to have sex with her but when he was asleep so that might have happened and they actually had a police officer testify and i quote if he had sex with his wife then he may have done it while he was asleep and that's an officer of the law defending a rape allegation by saying he can have sexual intercourse with his wife while he is asleep yeah i just don't understand that at all no it's crazy and he also lied consistently through the trial about saying that he was just dead tired he was so tired blah blah blah but the police or the medical staff calling the police about getting the dick back so that they could reattach it said that he was extremely intoxicated and yes their whole defense was that john bobe was so simple-minded that he could not tell lies that was their whole defense i was like this is incredibly shit like this makes no sense whatsoever after that she was acquitted by reason of temporary insanity or a mental state that could not allow her to resist her impulses and they compared this to ptsd and said that it's a form of ptsd because of the constant abuse the rapes and also the fact that it was escalating the threat to her life was escalating because she was leaving him.

Funny enough the last episode of the documentary series filmed him being in his car and on his motorcycle and stuff and he had custom-made license plates for both his car and his motorcycle on his motorcycle said trump on his car it said DJ Trump, and I was like good lord. I think they waited to show those images because they wanted to like show everything else first which was very good cinematic storytelling but a thing as well is that as i said he was or he was prosecuted and convicted for sexual abuse and battery and stuff like that afterwards towards other women he also did like poor movies and shit like that yeah you'll be glad to know listeners that his dick recovered full functional capabilities which i feel like is so unfortunate yes i feel like oh it's such a shame why couldn't that happen to the tree surgeon rather than the dick wielding rapist yeah i can't really hear you right now that's probably because my double chin ate my microphone [Laughter] maybe so thing is that his behavior was escalating he also tied one of his girlfriends to a bed and tortured and raped her for three days until she played dead where he proceeded to wrap her in a sheet and untied his her from the bed so that he could hide the body but when he opened the when he unlocked the door she ran for her life and fortunately she didn't die but that just goes to show that he will murder someone someday yeah he was also charged with a lot of battery cases and violent offenses after his relationship with lorena yeah and also as he would say i would have never been violent towards another person in my life said the marine who was literally deployed to kill people yeah after this and still to this day he keeps sending letters and messages to lorena's workplaces and he has gotten a hold of her personal information so he keeps stalking her to this day and she said in the documentary series which was very funny she was like "I cut his dick off, why won't he leave me alone?". I thought that was quite funny. Lorena went on with her life to be a victims advocate and she does a lot of work for domestic abuse victims.

Do you have anything more to say about it? no no no. I don't understand how he got off, but I think it's because of the the legal wording of rape. It's so crazy. After that a lot of victim of domestic abuse advocates have like tried to get this the urgency of legislation that will not allow people like him to get off yeah it was the same in the uk um i think it was in the the early 90s that it wasn't actually possible to prosecute a husband for raping his wife because the law and wording of the law was so old that the wife was still deemed property of the husband and it wasn't until i think either the 80s or the 90s that they changed it so that it was actually possible to prosecute for rape within a marriage so i can imagine that southern states in the us were still behind in that regard yeah and also like he did serve a prison sentence at once for one of the cases where he had assaulted one of his girlfriends but it was like 15 months i was like that's nothing it's crazy.

I would also like to say before we say goodbye that if you or someone you know is a victim of domestic abuse the phone number for the victim abuse hotline in england is zero two zero seven nine two two seven eight nine one.

i did say all of the numbers correctly yay [Laughter] every time someone asked me about my number i'm like oh shit oh no oh there's a there's a set [Music] don't worry about it i also need to look up my own phone number in my contact book it's a struggle i feel like relative to the struggles we've been mentioning in this podcast you uh you don't have the worst of lives. i can't remember my phone number oh what was me. Tell that to my itchy butthole. i'm just kidding.

Did you walk the dog before we did the recording uh yeah yeah four times today yeah oh good lord maybe he is an itchy butthole as well no he only pooped twice hmm but woke up from a nightmare in her box today in half i'm not safe in my castle and then she threw up in the hallway okay that's cute okay let's hope to god that this is recording this time because i definitely saw a little red recording sign at the beginning so unless you've pressed stop record we should be okay this is the second time we're recording we're skipping this week true story i was bound to happen sooner or later can't trust technology to immigrants [Laughter] i might apply for a permanent settlement citizenship thing yeah i've lived here for five years now i am allowed to actually have to do a test like they do in the us is it math or maths if they checked my browser history they would never let me stay in this country more like on a scale of one to ten how racist was winston churchill and then question 1b explain your reasoning just remember winston churchill is very highly regarded in a conservative government and so if you rate him too highly as a racist your application for permanent residence will be declined gosh darn it i have to go back to the tundra the the only acceptable scoring is between three and five dig a little hole in the snow scurry up boodle comes in has a nightmare throws up in the corner of the igloo kick sand back at you because she pooped in the entrance oh yeah and by sand i mean snow that definitely would have been more funny if i'd got that right the first time [Laughter] and if you're listening john bobbitt i hope your dick falls off and if you're listening james potter alohomora [Laughter] funny because we got an email from a james potter i know i was there yeah but it's delicious we tell them our lives tmi definitely tgif wtf omfg yo [Laughter] i had to look up where to put the periods in eg today for our placeholder text in our form i'm very happy with the form you're welcome they come after the abbreviated letter yeah but i wasn't sure if it was a another period after the g or if it was just one period between the e and the g it comes after the g2 because that's also abbreviated of course i knew that the whole time it just fills me with confidence that does i was just testing you for your permanent settlement in german etc translates as unsolved etc is usw oh yeah i have a funny language trivia nicholas is it about moose more like moose knuckle no she means vagina [Laughter] Niklas reading the news and then it said there was a norwegian news article below the swedish news article and turns out bomb threat is called bombay trocel in norwegian is the least threatening word i could ever imagine it sounds like someone like oh i had a little bomb but through sun this morning i can add that to your norwegian dictionary of depression and other terrible things that they just make sound like sunny afflictions that will just skip away in the future how do you want to know dirt bag in the region what bag dirt bag oh sure did it sick um that's not as fun sorry okay sorry you should have put it in the contract joe only speak norwegian when it's hilarious [Laughter] because otherwise we'll hate you for being a polyglot jokes on you it's always hilarious okay thank you for listening to this switch thank you for listening to this rickshaw shout out of midweek murders we've been shunned from joe plays the outro love you see you next week you james i'm talking about you [Music] bye

Topics

Lorena
The Bobbitt case
Lorena Bobbitt
John and Lorena Bobbitt trials
1993 Bobbitt scandal
domestic abuse
outdated laws
rape legislation
Lorena documentary series
crime podcasts
infuriating legislation
domestic abuse advocate

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