CHAPTER 19
Four Moments That Changed the Narrative
Novelist Virginia Woolf once remarked that “on or about December 1910 human character changed.”
Her pronouncement was delivered with the benefit of hindsight—in 1924. But even so, it was shrewd and indisputable. She was describing the dismantling of class, social, and gender barriers as bourgeois society became more urban, global, and cosmopolitan. More to the point, she was addressing how experimental artists were creating what would become known as modernism. “We hear all round us,” Woolf asserted—mentioning D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, and T. S. Eliot, among others—“in poems and novels and biographies, even in newspaper articles and essays, the sound of breaking and falling, crashing and destruction. It is the prevailing sound.”
Permit me to borrow from Virginia Woolf a century on. Permit me to put forward the idea that sometime on or about June 1994, American decorum changed.
By a changed American decorum, I am referring to the rapt attention that the public paid, then and thereafter, to media coverage of the disgrace of others. By on or about, I am referring to a six-week time window. The start: May 6, 1994, the day Paula Jones filed a civil lawsuit against Bill Clinton, alleging that while he was the governor of Arkansas he had made an insulting sexual proposition and later defamed her. (Clinton would deny the charges.) And then: June 17, the day a TV audience of nearly one hundred million watched the former football star O. J. Simpson, in a white Ford Bronco, being pursued by a phalanx of police cars, four days after the brutal murder of his wife and her male companion. Simpson’s subsequent trial would draw national headlines for more than a year.
The Jones and Simpson cases—along with two other incidents that served as bookends (the Bobbitt maiming in 1993 and the Pam-and-Tommy sex tape in 1995)—signaled a sea change. Earlier in the century, civilized individuals had come to modulate their baser instincts. Upon encountering a humiliating real-life circumstance, they may have been automatically drawn to it, but they were simultaneously repulsed. They recognized the virtue of turning away from the shameful, and of spurning (or at least taking umbrage against) the busybody, the gossipmonger, the snitch.
No longer. Our predominant impulse amid the rise of the media’s tabloid fixation, 24/7 news, and the Internet was to unapologetically eavesdrop, to leer, to pry into the private and often sexual affairs of others, particularly the affairs of the famous, whose desire for renown seemed to somehow justify our intrusion and offer cover for our own deflected shame. Moreover, the decision of the media—in a competitive, attention-fractured, and economically challenging marketplace—to turn every alleged wrongdoing into another excuse for spectacle helped news consumers come to accept and expect explicit details about embarrassing, sexually compromising, or criminal events.1
Amid this trumped-up coverage of scandal and pseudo-scandal, four particular incidents stand out. Each of them highlights the changing role of media in our lives, along with a new etiquette governing American standards of behavior—and reactions to misbehavior. It is in these four events that the tenor of the times found its guttural timbre.
Two of the incidents pivot around an exposed penis. Two involve alleged spousal abuse. Two involve acts of violence. Two involve vehicles making an escape. Three involve “forbidden” liaisons. All four involve lust, voyeurism, and a media run amok—resulting in the private aspects of an individual’s life being exchanged freely as public currency.
I present the events in reverse chronology, as a way of telescoping back to the sordid beginning.
Late October 1995. A locked Browning safe is stolen from the Malibu home of model and actress Pamela Anderson and her rock star husband, Tommy Lee. The contents include a “honeymoon” video showing the recently married couple in various states of connubial union. The thief and his associates take the footage and duplicate it, package it, and sell it off. Despite the lawsuits that follow, a copy of the pirated tape, acquired by an Internet porn mogul, is ultimately sold as a triple-X film and viewed by millions. The video eventually becomes the Citizen Kane of celebrity sex tapes. And people the world over—some of whom have never before felt compelled to watch porn—find themselves indulging.
This single “landmark pornographic home video,” writes Pamela Paul, “is credited with bringing more users online than any other single event.” Paul, now the editor of the New York Times Book Review, states in her 2005 book Pornified that the Pam-and-Tommy tape, with its “inadvertent combination of professionalism, celebrity, and amateurism,” may have also been the catalyst for an exponential rise in “the proliferation of porn.”
The details by now are familiar to many. The bride was a frequent Playboy cover model, best known as the curvaceous star of Baywatch. (Anderson declined invitations to be interviewed for this book.) The groom was the heavily tatted bad-boy drummer from the heavy metal band Mötley Crüe.2 The tape showed fifty-four minutes of the couple boating, camping, and engaging in sometimes endearing banter—along with scenes of the pair having sex. The filmmakers were none other than the newlyweds themselves.
This mom-and-pop home movie was shocking for three reasons. It was explicit. It was off-limits—clearly intended for the couple’s private consumption. And it was among the earliest videos to show famous people getting it on, at considerable length. As a result, it was such a pop-culture watershed that it practically defied the chattering masses not to watch it.
At the time, a celebrity sex tape was a relatively new phenomenon.3 As confounding as it might seem two decades later, a “leaked” video was virtually a career-killer. (And today, many public personalities have become so unfazed by such depictions that some have purportedly conspired to leak nude snapshots or homemade pornos, hoping that viral exposure might ignite fame’s flame.)4
But back to 1995. Early one morning as the couple slept—according to an impressively reported account by Amanda Chicago Lewis in Rolling Stone—they were paid a visit by an electrician who had done some renovations for Lee.5 The workman, Rand Gauthier (himself a sometime porn actor), would later reveal a motive, as writer Lewis describes it: he alleged that he’d been shortchanged by Lee for his labors and was once threatened by the rock star with a shotgun. (A case related to the incident would be thrown out of court.)
In Rolling Stone’s retelling, it was only after Gauthier had wheeled in a handcart, made off with the couple’s steel safe, and got it to a secure location that he discovered the Hi8 videocassette inside. A cohort, as Lewis relates in her article, soon took the initiative to “run off thousands of copies and to hire someone to put up a few websites: pamsex.com, pamlee.com, and pamsextape.com. The sites didn’t have the video itself; they merely gave instructions to send a money order”—for $59.95—“to the New York outpost of a Canadian T-shirt company, which then funneled the money to a bank account in Amsterdam.”
Despite court filings by Anderson and Lee against an array of defendants, the pilfered tape had already gone full Pandora. Pirates soon made pirated copies, as Lewis recounts; Penthouse and Variety ran reviews. And, seeking his own piece of the action—and attendant PR—the young porn king Seth Warshavsky decided to crank up the volume. “Warshavsky,” writes Lewis, “aired the tape on [his porn site] Club Love on a loop for five hours.”
The Lees tried to shut him down, but to no avail. Later that month, Anderson and Lee chose to end the escalating madness by settling their lawsuit against Warshavsky, granting him Web rights, even as copies of the tapes continued to sell briskly. The result, according to the Independent newspaper, was that by early 1998—three years after the original taping—“anyone with $35 to spare [could go to a video store, buy the tape,] and… gasp as the camera catches [the couple] in graphic close-up in the first flush of conjugal love, groan as they fellate and fish away a four-day boating trip.” A year later, the Wall Street Journal would report that Warshavsky’s company, which continued to stream the movie online, had already “sold an estimated 300,000 copies.”
It is hard to overstate the reach of the purloined video. Before the end of the decade, a not-insignificant percentage of the Internet’s tens of millions of Web pages (many of them utterly unrelated to porn) would be metatagged with the words “Pam” or “Pamela” or “SexTape”—the websites’ owners merely hoping to draw residual clicks; gelt by association. “When the commercial history of the Internet is written, whose names will appear among the chief catalysts?” the Wall Street Journal’s Thomas E. Weber asked in 1999. “[One could] make a powerful argument for including Pamela Anderson Lee, actress, chronic centerfold and star of what is now perhaps the world’s best-known home movie.… As Madonna’s cultivation of the music video once helped convince viewers that the MTV network was for real, the 31-year-old Ms. Lee—even if unwittingly—has done a huge amount to hammer home the viability of the Web as [an] engine of commercial importance.”
But at what price? Ever since the Pam-and-Tommy tape, online marauders have felt emboldened. The penalty for trafficking in someone else’s personal nudes or sex clips—disseminated by an ex-lover, extortionist, hacker, or revenge-porn purveyor—rarely seems to match the punishment inflicted on the person whose privacy has been violated. Personalities such as Paris Hilton, Kim Kardashian, Kendra Wilkinson, Jennifer Lawrence, and Leslie Jones would protest—along with others, many of whom would become mired in costly litigation—often to little avail.
June 13–17, 1994. In the affluent Brentwood section of Los Angeles, the bloodied bodies of Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman are discovered outside Ms. Brown’s condo. The deceased have been slain in grisly fashion. Goldman has been stabbed twenty-two times; Brown’s head is almost sliced off, hanging from the spinal column. The prime suspect is Brown’s ex-husband, Orenthal James Simpson (a.k.a. O.J.), the football great, rental-car pitchman, and occasional actor.
Five days after the murders, one of Simpson’s lawyers tells the press that his client is about to turn himself in to the LAPD. But when authorities move in to arrest him, he is nowhere to be found. Instead, Simpson (possibly suicidal, possibly homicidal, possibly planning to head out of town to elude capture) gets into a white Ford Bronco, brandishing a gun. His friend and ex-teammate Al Cowlings is behind the wheel. The pair—later determined to be carrying $9,000 in hard currency, Simpson’s U.S. passport, and a disguise kit (including a false mustache and goatee)—spend more than an hour driving around L.A., pursued by squad cars and a squadron of news-and-traffic helicopters. Their “slow-speed chase,” televised live, draws an audience of ninety-five million. Simpson and Cowlings eventually arrive at Simpson’s house, where he phones his mom, gulps down a glass of juice, and surrenders.
Many called it the first real-world reality-TV show—a serial melodrama about murder and jealousy, race and wealth, sports and Hollywood, bucolic suburbia and domestic violence. And it was, at the most elemental level, a tale of sexual obsession and abuse. Simpson, Brown’s ex-husband, had previously beaten her and threatened her life. His history of violent behavior became evident with the release of recorded 911 calls (“He’s O. J. Simpson. I think you know his record.… He broke the back door down to get in”) and in incriminating letters and Polaroids that Brown had stowed in a safety deposit box. Simpson would harass and stalk his ex-wife, even peering through her window, according to a boyfriend’s grand jury testimony, while Brown was having sex.
But from the viewing public’s perspective, the saga started with the Bronco ride.
Had the police been poised to take just about any other defendant into custody, the arrest would have been a relatively minor matter. This, however, was qualitatively different. Not only did the pursuit involve a fugitive in flight and a police chase and a double homicide. It also had, at its center, a celebrity with a gun (the barrel sometimes snug to his temple, sometimes lodged under his chin), threatening to take his own life, possibly with video crews recording the scene. What’s more, here was a black man in flight—and a famous one, at that—two years after the L.A. riots had enflamed the city. According to the consensus narrative that was being made up on the fly, the forces of law and order were going to nab this dark menace. (Simpson’s mug shot would be deliberately darkened on the cover of Time’s next issue.) Indeed, a routine apprehension of a murder suspect was being conflated into a scene right out of Cops.
But in the age of 24/7 newsbreaks, skyborne cameras, and TV stations flooding the zone with teams of reporters, it was somehow unavoidable that when the gridiron’s great running back made the run of his life,6 we would all be there. We would gather: hundreds of citizens on L.A. roadsides and overpasses,7 tens of millions of viewers at home. And we would wonder how a live TV feed of the incident could become an extravaganza, a prime example of what novelist Saul Bellow had previously called “event glamour.”
There could be no hoarier exercise in ’90s pop-psych: revisiting the social lessons and cultural inanities of the O.J. fiasco. But in this context a few points are worth restating. First, the Bronco chase turned out to be a new incarnation of must-see TV: saturation coverage of spontaneous celebrity combustion. And because the story was soaked in the kerosene of double homicide, interracial marriage, sports fame, Hollywood sizzle, and a real-time LAPD showdown, the nation’s business stopped, plans were canceled, pizzas were ordered in. (That day Domino’s sold a then-record number of pies.) CNN, ESPN, and the networks broke from their regularly scheduled programming, and all eyes turned westward, like a field of sunflowers.
What’s more, the Bronco ride was merely the O.J. Show’s “cold open.” Throughout 1994 and into the next year’s trial—which dragged on for a staggering 372 days—the crime would become a daily staple of the news cycle, a nightly fixture of cable TV, and a weekly raison d’être of magazines and tabloids. (The National Enquirer became the crime’s house organ.) The O.J. saga turned into a ’90s craze, like bandanas, JNCO jeans, and Doom. Part of its appeal came from the case’s pu pu platter of celebrity dish, domestic minutiae, and colorful bit players. Part of it was the gladiatorial aspect: two high-profile legal teams jousting all the way to a final verdict. Part of it was the fact that so much of it seemed to demand an audience: the initial chase; Simpson’s “Dream Team” of lawyers; the presiding judge, Lance Ito, who fairly preened for the cameras; the legal experts who, like a colony of bats, would sweep into the cable news green rooms every night, smelling blood and rot and money; the fetishized evidence (the knife, the Bruno Maglis, the bloody glove); the bureaucratic pageantry of Court TV and CNN, with their clinical but hypnotizing parade of natty suits and scuffed briefcases, their appearances and hearings and motions and press conferences. Novelist James Ellroy would call it, hands down, “the most publicized crime of all time.”
The case coincided with a curious cultural moment. The Internet and early reality TV were beginning to democratize fame. The media’s unremitting data dump about celebrities’ lives had made the stars, whether lowly or lofty, seem somehow “familiar.” The Boomer-next-door had started to buy into the illusion of belonging, of procured privilege. One could upgrade his or her social status, for example, by paying for splurge experiences or party invitations or luxury-box admission to rub shlubby shoulders with real VIPs. In this age of me-too celebrity, many Americans—like the citizens of Brentwood and Beverly Hills—began to sense a macabre connection to the trial and to the members of its ensemble cast.8
On an entirely different level, the case raised chilling questions about spousal abuse and domestic assault, which proved invaluable in forcing legislative action. “Within days of Simpson’s arrest,” sociologist Andrew Cherlin has recounted, lawmakers in New York voted to make it mandatory that cops “arrest suspected perpetrators of domestic violence whether or not the victim was willing to press charges. Los Angeles County immediately allocated millions of dollars of additional aid for shelters for battered women. Within two months, the House of Representatives had approved nearly all the provisions of the Violence Against Women Act, which had first been introduced, without success, six years earlier.”
For all this, the issues at the center of the case revolved around race.
Writer Toni Morrison would call into question the overarching establishment narrative. “The Simpson spectacle has become an enunciation of post–Civil Rights discourse on black deviance,” she would argue in her introduction to the essay collection Birth of a Nation’hood: Gaze, Script, and Spectacle in the O.J. Simpson Case. That “national narrative of racial supremacy”—which prejudged Simpson as guilty in the murder of two Caucasians and conferred credibility on his accusers (the LAPD and the prosecutors)—“is still the old sham white supremacy forever wedded to and dependent upon faux black inferiority.” The press, the tabloids, and TV news outlets, in Morrison’s view, actively promoted this narrative from the start, “arous[ing] immediate suspicion” and making many believe that some kind of “white mischief” was at play. “One is struck by how quickly guilt was the popular verdict,” she wrote. “The narrative of the entertainment media and their ‘breaking story’ confederates was so powerfully insistent on guilt, so uninterested in any other scenario, it began to look like a media pogrom, a lynching with its iconography intact: a chase, a cuffing, a mob, name calling, a white female victim.” As a result, Morrison stated, the outsize play that the case received in the news and in popular culture “made Mr. Simpson’s guilt increasingly remote to some African Americans.”
The other subtext, of course, was the sex. There were whispered tales of drug-and-sex parties involving Nicole and her buds. There were rumors about the Simpsons’ sex life and infidelities (while married) as well as O.J.’s fixation on Nicole after they were divorced. A porn-star pal of Al Cowlings would testify before a grand jury. Simpson’s girlfriend Paula Barbieri would appear in Playboy—four months after the murders. Nicole Brown’s gal-pal Faye Resnick would do her own Playboy spread and write a quickie memoir (Nicole Brown Simpson: The Private Diary of a Life Interrupted), divulging their sexual antics and disclosing the practice of what locals called “a Brentwood hello”—a blowjob administered to a sleeping, unsuspecting friend. Even a member of the jury agreed to pose naked in Playboy.
Amid this carny show the murder victims were marginalized. (Even the name of the saga—“the O.J. case” or “the Simpson trial”—left the deceased on the sidelines.) And still America was spellbound. Art Harris, who broke many of CNN’s exclusives, today has his own formula for America’s fatal attraction to the case:
(fame + tabloid media + sex + race + drugs + murder) × daily exposure = public addiction
“The intimate details of domestic violence and double murder,” says Harris, “along with the much-debated police investigation, would likely never have come out in an earlier time period before 24/7 cable or if the protagonist had not been as famous. But when celebrity met the media hydrogen bomb—POW.”
And all of it hurtling to a cliff-hanger finish.
An estimated audience of 150 million tuned in for the verdict, to be rendered by a jury consisting of nine African Americans, two Caucasians, and one person of Hispanic descent, ten of them female. The broadcast, according to a 2012 Nielsen poll, would become the country’s third most “universally impactful” televised news event in the past few decades, ranking just behind the September 11 attacks and Hurricane Katrina.
As Simpson stood and faced the jury box, a courtroom and a nation heard the following statement, read by the court clerk, as the camera kept its focus on the defendant and his legal team: “In the matter of The People of the State of California v. Orenthal James Simpson, case number BA097211, we, the jury in the above-entitled action, find the defendant Orenthal James Simpson not guilty of murder.”
Not guilty. The verdict was instantaneously polarizing. The jurors, as well as much of the public, had come to believe that the LAPD had bungled the handling of the blood samples. Moreover, some of the police who testified had not come across as credible, which cast doubt on their evidence. In addition, the prosecution had spent too much time discussing forensics and had failed to clearly establish the level and frequency of Simpson’s acts of violence against Brown. Finally, the testimony of detective Mark Fuhrman, who had made racist statements in the past, became suspect, according to juror Carrie Bess, who would state, “Fuhrman found the glove. Fuhrman found the blood. Fuhrman did everything. When you throw [such potentially discredited evidence] out, what case did you have? You’ve got reasonable doubt.” In short, the LAPD and the prosecution team had botched the thing.9
The jury’s decision remains a matter of intense debate. In 2014, Harvard law professor Charles Ogletree observed, “When you ask people today, African-Americans will overwhelmingly say… not that he’s not guilty, but the government didn’t prove that he was guilty. White people will say that he killed two white people and got away with it.” Critic James Poniewozik would make the case that the prosecution and the defense “were presenting the jury a choice of two questions: ‘Is O.J. guilty?’ versus ‘Are you going to stand up to racist cops?’ The [opposing] lawyers—and the black and white audiences reacting to the verdict… might as well have been in different dimensions.”
All this time later, two other aspects of the case also resonate powerfully. First is the notion that Simpson’s attorneys were presenting—and the 24/7 newshounds were regurgitating—a new dialect of the lie: the utter whopper solemnly conveyed as credible. The DNA evidence against Simpson was invalid because it had been tainted by investigators. The bloody glove, introduced in evidence, was not Simpson’s because it fit him too snugly—no matter that the murder victim’s blood, presumably, had caused it to shrink. Straight-faced falsehood and pseudo-narrative—the vernacular used by autocrats and cheating spouses—would become the common idiom for defending oneself in a scandal; for TV spinmeisters and crisis managers; and (as discussed earlier) for national political discourse, from Clinton I to Bush II to Trump I. When fighting charges of criminal wrongdoing, sexual misconduct, or scandal, why be beholden to rules or facts or—as Al Gore dubbed it in another context—the “inconvenient truth”? (Until, of course, one was caught red-handed. Only then would one be obliged to issue a cleansing public apology.)
Second, the Simpson affair seemed to usher in a new sort of American citizen—a person who is largely a member of an audience. During the newly wired ’90s, America was coalescing into a nation in which watchers outnumbered doers, in which individuals were valued as members of their demographic or, in time, their social-media community. This was the body politic as fan base, as an amalgam of market niches.
On the twentieth anniversary of the Bronco ride, Lili Anolik, writing in Vanity Fair, would explore this terrain, developing her own hypothesis. The murder and trial, she asserted, comprised not only the first real-world reality show, it was also the miniseries that launched the serial reality genre: “That wasn’t a car chase, it was a test run, a pilot episode, the taste that got us hooked.”
Anolik’s theory would brine nicely with time. “It’s the children of the O.J. people,” she observed, “who’ve really caught fire reality-TV-wise. Because if the Simpson case was the daddy of reality TV, it was every bit as much the baby daddy.” Her point? Various members of the O.J. pilot would try their luck as reality-TV participants (Faye Resnick, notably, and Kato Kaelin, the part-time actor who inhabited a guesthouse on Simpson’s property). More significantly, by Anolik’s calculus, three of reality TV’s true superstars emerged from Brentwood’s murky Petri dish: Kim Kardashian, the daughter of attorney Robert Kardashian, Simpson’s friend of three decades; Brody Jenner, the “son of Linda Thompson, Elvis’s old flame” (who herself happened to be the ex of Caitlyn Jenner, the former “Olympic gold medalist who married Kris [Jenner] after she split from Robert [Kardashian]”); and the one and only Paris Hilton, for years a pal in good standing of Kimmie’s, and whose “sister Nicky,” Anolik wrote, “is also the goddaughter of Faye Resnick.” Got that?
Anolik was making a more salient point. During the 1990s, viewers “at least had the sense to be embarrassed by [their fascination with the O.J. saga as] a tabloid story.… It was trashy, and they knew that it was trashy, and that to give in to the trashiness was to give in to their worst selves.” Not anymore. Since that era, she believed, “the feelings of shame… vanished.” America refined its taste for tastelessness, a nightcap that we took neat, without the old chaser of guilt. Indeed, the audience had lost its ability, says Anolik, to distinguish high from low. “The standards and mores and customs of Nicole and Ron,” she concludes, “of Kato and Faye and Paula and Kris, of O.J., too—have turned into the standards and mores and customs of a nation. So, O.J., regardless of whether the jury got it right or the jury got it wrong, you have blood on your hands. You killed popular culture.”
May 6, 1994. Paula Corbin Jones files a lawsuit against President William Jefferson Clinton for violating her constitutional rights through sexual harassment and assault, for intentional infliction of emotional distress, and for defamation.
The civil case stems from a 1991 encounter in a Little Rock hotel suite. Jones claims that at the time, while she was an Arkansas employee working the registration desk at a conference, she was flattered when Governor Clinton dispatched a state trooper to invite her to a private meeting, supposedly believing it might result in a better administrative position. Jones, aged twenty-four, accepted the invitation and was escorted upstairs by the trooper.
But once she was alone with Clinton, so Jones contends, he shocked her by trying to kiss her, touch her inappropriately in the area of her culottes, and then, after making a few passes, literally dropped his trousers, asking her to “kiss it.” (Clinton would deny all of Jones’s accusations.) Her suit—seeking $700,000 in damages—alleges that she told the governor, “I’m not that kind of girl.… I’ve got to get back to my registration desk.” She claims to have swiftly departed, flustered and offended, telling several close associates about the incident. As part of her affidavit, Jones would declare that Clinton’s penis had had a “distinguishing characteristic”; it was, she would recall, “bent or ‘crooked’ from Mr. Clinton’s right to left.” (An affidavit later prepared by Clinton’s urologist would attest that, to the contrary, the president’s penis “was perfectly normal.”)
Initially, Paula Jones had zero intention of taking Clinton to court. She told intimates that she was embarrassed by the encounter and nervous about losing her job. (The governor had been her nominal boss at the time.) Even when the news broke about Clinton’s affair with Gennifer Flowers, Jones had resisted calls to step forward, reportedly telling her friend Debra Ballentine, “No, no, no. I don’t ever want anybody to know.”
Jones’s reluctance was understandable, even more so given her devout upbringing in Lonoke, Arkansas (population 4,000). Her family, as described in a Washington Post story by Howard Schneider at the time of the lawsuit, was accustomed to “nightly Bible lessons and church three times a week.… No jewelry. No television. No stylish haircuts.” In Jones’s early years, as legal scholar Ken Gormley would explain in his book The Death of American Virtue: Clinton vs. Starr, Paula was very much the daughter of Bobby Corbin, “a lay Nazarene preacher” and factory worker who had died suddenly at sixty, shortly after being “stricken while playing the piano at church.” (The family’s strict rules were reportedly relaxed as she and her sisters grew up.)
Was Jones an angel? Her brother-in-law Mark Brown tallied her sexual encounters in Penthouse and, according to the Washington Post, would give “hints that there are other instances of alleged harassment that she discussed but never pursued, and a history of financial interest in men.” (According to a subsequent piece in Newsweek, “Brown was recovering from brain surgery at the time [he made his accusatory statements]. Later, he updated his stance, saying that he believed Jones ‘absolutely.’”) According to Gormley, Judge Susan Webber Wright would state, “It is hard to see how [the hotel-room encounter] could cause emotional distress, the single incident she was talking about, even if you assumed it happened”; moreover, Wright would reportedly say to Jones’s attorneys in a closed-door conference, “Don’t tell me, counselor, that she’s some blushing magnolia.”
To be fair, much of the above amounts to blaming the victim. Jones was the allegedly aggrieved party. She was invited upstairs by Clinton. She hurriedly departed. She remained silent—for three years—about whatever did or did not occur in that hotel room.
That is, until a sleaze-laden story in 1994 by journalist David Brock came out in the conservative American Spectator. The article dissected Clinton’s extramarital affairs, making a series of scandalous charges (some demonstrably false). One sentence spoke of a woman—simply called “Paula”—who after meeting the Arkansas governor in his hotel room had allegedly told a state trooper that “she was available to be Clinton’s regular girlfriend if he so desired.” Had that sentence not appeared in Brock’s controversial exposé, Jones’s name and tale, in all likelihood, would have slipped into oblivion.
But the sentence incensed Paula Jones. So on May 6, 1994, with forty-eight hours to go before the statute-of-limitations deadline, she decided to file. And from that instant, nothing seemed to break Bill Clinton’s way.
At the time, an independent prosecutor, Robert Fiske, had been appointed by Attorney General Janet Reno to look into the Clintons’ real estate transactions, in what would come to be known as the Whitewater scandal. (In the end, the Clintons would be cleared of all charges.) But by August, Fiske had been replaced, due to a conflict of interest, by Kenneth Starr, the man who would become Clinton’s chief legal nemesis. As the months passed, Newsweek’s dogged Michael Isikoff would pursue the Jones accusations with little letup, having been given wide berth by his colleagues, some of whom (after their zeal during the Gennifer Flowers melee) were disinclined to report on purported high-level indiscretion. “Newsweek, frankly, had become almost a sponsoring media outlet for the Paula Jones case,” Clinton would later testify, “and [the magazine] had a journalist who had been trying, so far fruitlessly, to find me in some sort of wrongdoing.”
I would even go so far as to say that the initial litigation in May 1994 was the catalytic event that would drive a decade of sexual hazing in American politics and, to some degree, wider society. Had Jones not filed her case, it is almost a certainty that Clinton would never have been impeached. But as Ken Gormley would map out in The Death of American Virtue, there was a many-branched decision tree that grew out of Jones’s decision to sue. And each branch could have led to a different outcome had circumstances at any point broken the opposite way. A close reading of Gormley’s book suggests at least sixteen instances when history’s arc might have safely shifted from the path toward impeachment:
• If the overly politicized special prosecutor law (the Ethics in Government Act), established in 1978 after the Watergate crisis, had not been on the books.
• If journalist David Brock had not published his story in the American Spectator in the first place.
• If Jones had agreed to accept a $700,000 settlement that had been offered by Clinton’s attorney.
• If the arguably biased special prosecutor, Ken Starr, a man with staunch conservative bona fides, and interactions with Jones’s legal team, had not been assigned to head up the investigation of the Clintons.10
• If Starr, as the independent counsel, had confined his investigation to financial matters and not ventured into sexual terrain.
• If a government shutdown had not occurred in 1995, creating an ad hoc workplace environment in the White House—one that allowed Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky to interact after hours.
• If Clinton and Lewinsky had never started their affair to begin with.
• If Lewinsky’s Pentagon officemate Linda Tripp had not secretly tape-recorded their private conversations or encouraged Lewinsky to hold onto a dress with traces of Clinton’s DNA.
• If the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals had not overturned Judge Susan Webber Wright’s 1998 ruling to dismiss the Jones matter (on the grounds that the case was without merit).
• If the Supreme Court had not decided to let the lawsuit move forward.
• If Newsweek and the Drudge Report had not decided to aggressively pursue and expose Clinton and Lewinsky’s affair.
• If the FBI and Starr’s prosecutors had not threatened and coerced Lewinsky to make statements against her will.
• If Clinton had given different answers at his deposition.
• If the special prosecutor had not determined that there were sufficient grounds for the House of Representatives to consider impeaching the president.
• If the House had not approved impeachment hearings.
• If the House had not voted to impeach the president on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice.
But the Fates, in the end, had gone against Bill Clinton’s interests all sixteen times. And the original he said/she said episode in a suite in Little Rock’s Excelsior Hotel would turn into the basis of yet another Trial of the Decade.
Behind all the headlines was Paula Jones, with her scarlet lip gloss, swooping mane, and legal team that swung wide right. Her image was not helped by her shifting cast of conservative backers and advisers; her unpolished performances at her occasional press conferences or in TV interviews; her decision to appear in ads for No Excuses jeans (as the “scandalized” Donna Rice and Marla Maples had done before her). Her choices, moreover, were caught in the undertow of a comment that James Carville had made in reference to previous Clinton accusers: “If you drag a hundred-dollar bill through a trailer park, you never know what you’ll find.” Most damaging of all were Jones’s appearances in Penthouse: first, when private, unauthorized photos emerged in 1995 and 1998; then again in 2000, once the dust (and the lawsuit itself) was settled, and she decided to pose nude, which would send some of her former supporters running for the hills.
Yet Jones, from the very start, was never given a fair shot at defining herself. Her advisers did. The right did. The White House surrogates did. Worst of all, the press did. Indeed, the media’s initial avoidance of her story (and its rush to doubt her or to shame her) helped discredit her. Newsweek’s Evan Thomas would hang his head and write an apologia for having chastised Jones. Chicago Tribune columnist Mike Royko, a perennial defender of working-class readers, would point out that “members of the ‘mainstream’ press brigade” were too often following the spin of the Clinton infantry and proved to be “willing, even eager, participants in the kick-Paula campaign.”
I contact Paula Jones, hoping to hear her side of things. She agrees to have lunch in Little Rock, Arkansas. “I’m not a fancy person,” she says. “Let’s go to the Olive Garden.”
On the drive there, passing countless steeples, I realize I am on churchgoing turf. (The sign on the local shrimp shack says “Lent Central,” inducing the faithful to come in for catfish and oysters.) This is also serious Clinton country, where the Clinton Museum Store, just up the road from the presidential library, sells “I Miss Bill” T-shirts and Madeleine Albright brooches.
Jones arrives in a leather rock-and-roll jacket and a spangled aqua top. She wears sequined designer jeans, pear-shaped hoop earrings, and deep pink lipstick. Her hair shimmers chestnut. Jones, a part-time teacher, explains that she has left the real estate business and is going to night classes to train to be a doctor’s assistant.11 Her husband, she tells me, is out bass fishing that day.
Jones, wary at first, soon opens up and turns out to be great company, good-humored, and game for all questions. Early on in the conversation, for instance, she readily offers that she’d decided to get her nose fixed after braving a nightly television barrage of jokes about her appearance. (“Jay Leno.” She shakes her head. “Like he’s got some[thing] to make fun of.”) Back in the mid-’90s, she says, she “started getting calls from plastic surgeons all over the country, wanting to give me anything I wanted done because they thought I was being unfair[ly treated] and it wasn’t right.” She selected a New York doctor, she remembers, who also offered her a “boob job [but I] decided not to. I was scared to—because it was a foreign object.” She insists, “I swear they’re mine! I bet you think they’re not.”
“You brought it up,” I protest good-naturedly.
“I know,” she says. “I get that all the time.… They are mine. I’ve even had people squish them [and say,] ‘Okay, they’re normal—they’re real.’”
Right off the bat, she wants advice for her own book, which she hopes to publish to set the record straight about the real Paula Jones. “I’m very conservative—very conservative,” she says. She identifies herself as Southern Baptist, adding, “I grew up in a strict, strict religious family. Kind of like old Pentecostal—the bones, and no makeup, no cutting your hair, long dresses. Never have been a wild child or anything. That’s why I want to do a book. Because there’s so much to be told about me and my upbringing and how people have tried to portray me, as though this is why Bill Clinton did what he did to me. They tried to find the people who would make me look bad—as though I deserved what I got, you know what I’m saying?”
She has approached book editors, she explains, but has been continually shut out by the publishing community. “Nobody gives me an opportunity,” she says. “I’ve had people do several [outlines] for me, actually, and they never get anywhere.”
I wonder, aloud, if she’s ever considered doing an e-book (an option she dismisses), and inquire if she feels she may be dealing with people who are more concerned with their own interests than hers. “Where are the right people?” she asks. “Why are they not interested? I feel like I’ve got some kind of plague or something. Everybody who’s had any kind of scandal or anything ever come their direction—we’re talking murder, rape, molestation, it doesn’t matter what it is—they eventually end up as a Lifetime movie or they do a book. I have not been allowed—by some force—to ever do a book.” She says she can’t understand why she’s been stiff-armed while others with “notoriety”—such as “the Bobbitt guy”—still get publicity.
The subject turns to the instigator of it all: David Brock, the man whose article set her on this course. “That’s what got it started,” Jones claims. “I would have never told anybody. That’s not me. That’s not my personality.” Even so, she chose to move forward, she says, because of Brock’s initial assertions and the encouragement of “the attorneys that got involved. It had been three years. He’d already made the president. If I was going to come out and wanted to make him pay or hurt him, I would have done it during the election.”
Mindful of her initial reluctance, I ask, if Jones had to do it all over again, would she have gone through with the lawsuit?
“Yes,” she says. “Because I’m who I am today because of it. I’m a stronger person. I was a very, very introverted, shy, quiet, submissive type person before all this. [In addition,] it has made a lot of key laws. Like, for instance, if somebody files a lawsuit about sexual harassment in the workplace, they’re going to go get my case. I think it’s probably made it a lot better for women in the workplace because of what happened with my case.”
Regrets, she’s had a few—especially about the “bickering” among her legal and support team. “My lawyers,” she says, spurred her “to do certain things that they wanted me to do and it’s almost like they were pushing me. They were using me for their own agenda.… Both sides were using me.
“Then, when I posed for Penthouse—Lord, I was a heathen! Oh, I couldn’t have been a Christian—that’s what so many people thought.” Today, she says, things have changed: young women take selfies and make sex tapes. “The world’s going to hell in a handbag,” she says, laughing. But back in 2000, she maintains, her Penthouse appearance was not about vanity but about cash, plain and simple. “I needed the money,” she says. “I was going through a separation at the time, a divorce.… I had to pay taxes [on earnings from the settlement]. I had to buy a home for me and my boys.… The IRS was after me.”
Did she recognize, I ask, why people might find the act of posing naked to be exploiting the situation, given the fact that she had been the victim of sexual harassment? “But why?” she asks. “It had nothing to do with a man harassing me. Nothing. Two different things. That was a decision I made as an adult. And that, over here, was a decision I did not make, when he first forced himself on me.”
She admits to having felt “used” and then discarded—not by the Penthouse editors but by her own former backers. “People that were supposed to be my friends and people that were supposed to help me [while] I’m over here in financial straits,” she recalls, echoing comments she has made elsewhere. “When I posed for Penthouse, those same people were like—they just squished me. It’s like I was a nobody. They just ignored me and dropped me like a hot potato. I never heard from them again.” She says she feels particularly betrayed by conservative pundit Ann Coulter, one of the supporters who pitched in to assist her legal case. “I was her Rosa Parks,” she claims. “Now I’m no better than—what did she say that I was? You can find it out on the Internet. It was horrible what she said about me.” Coulter would write the following after Jones’s Penthouse appearance: “She used to have dignity and nobility and tremendous courage. Now she’s just the trailer-park trash they said she was.” (Jones would continue to bash both the Clintons and traditional conservatives, agreeing in 2016—on the eve of one of the presidential debates between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump—to appear as part of a Trump-hosted panel of Bill Clinton accusers.)12
I bring up one last sore subject: “You obviously never intended—in exercising your legal right to prove sexual harassment—to trigger the invasion of privacy of Monica Lewinsky, who was in a private, consensual relationship with the same man who you believe [had] harassed you. Her life, like yours, was turned upside down and tarnished, and she became a household name. How do you feel about what she had to go through in order for you to prove your case?”
“But that’s what we had to do,” she says, without a hint of remorse. “That was my lawyers’ job. That’s the way I look at it. She shouldn’t have done it [in the first place]. He was the president of the United States. He was a married man.… He sure didn’t have no business doing it. So why should I feel bad?… I didn’t expose her. Linda Tripp did.”
“Do you regret the damage it did to her?”
“I think she’s just fine,” Jones replies. “I don’t think she’s a basket case tied up somewhere in a padded room. I think she’s fine.”
Jones v. Clinton would make its way to the Supreme Court, which decided—9 to 0—in Jones’s favor, allowing her case to proceed. The suit would eventually be settled for $850,000, seven years after the initial encounter, with no admission of wrongdoing on Clinton’s part. But before it was all over, the Jones matter would:
• Uphold the principle, reestablished when Richard Nixon was forced out of office, that no sitting president is above the law.
• Reinforce the idea that no woman should be denied the right to seek damages if a workplace superior puts her in a sexually compromising position.
• Expand the level of explicit detail that average citizens and the press would use in discussions about sexual matters involving government officials.
• Prompt the public exposure of the private affair of a government employee, Monica Lewinsky, whose name was revealed in depositions taken in the case and in testimony demanded by the independent prosecutor.
• Lay the groundwork for the second presidential impeachment in the history of the republic, based in part on charges that Clinton, while under oath in the Jones matter, had committed perjury when discussing his relationship with Lewinsky.
June 22, 1993. In Manassas, Virginia, ex-Marine John Wayne Bobbitt goes out for a night on the town. Upon returning home inebriated, he has sex with his wife, Lorena, a nail-salon employee from Ecuador and Venezuela who has suffered from clinical depression. (He claims in court that his wife initiated their lovemaking that night but that he was “too exhausted to perform.” She, unequivocally, calls it rape.) At about 3 a.m., while he is passed out in bed, she goes into the kitchen, finds a filet knife and, in a single motion, slices off his penis. She then gets in her car and drives away, the lopped-off object in hand, stopping briefly to hurl it to the side of the road. In the morning, a member of the local fire department, as part of a search team, discovers the fleshy mass in a grassy area near a 7-Eleven, slips it into a baggie, and puts it on ice. It takes a medical team nine hours to reattach it.
Domestic violence. Spousal abuse. Mental illness. They take their insidious toll. Evidence of such suffering usually occurs behind closed doors. But a single rash act involving an eight-inch kitchen utensil turned a wife and husband’s private anguish into a cause célèbre. And before their separate trials were over, their relationship would be thoroughly scrutinized, the subject of marital rape would became part of a national debate, and many advocates for victims of domestic violence would find common ground.
The Wife with the Knife would be heralded as a women’s rights renegade. Camille Paglia affirmed that “in some sense, Lorena Bobbitt has committed the ultimate revolutionary act of contemporary feminism.” According to Katie Roiphe, “Lorena Bobbitt has become a symbol of female rage.” After the Bobbitt verdict, Kim Gandy of the National Organization for Women would note, “This whole saga drives home the need for swift passage of a comprehensive version of the Violence Against Women Act.” (The law, in fact, would be adopted later that year.)
And what of John Wayne Bobbitt? He would appear on a Howard Stern radio-thon. He would start a medical and legal defense fund. And, most memorably, he would become the country’s least likely porn star, appearing in adult features such as Frankenpenis and John Wayne Bobbitt Uncut.13
What made the Bobbitt case resound across American society quite simply was the primitive nature of the violation. The deliberate severing of a male member is an act so rare in contemporary Western society that one has to go back to Freud, Grimm’s Fairy Tales, or Greek tragedies to find cultural precedents.14 “My first reaction when I heard the Bobbitt story,” anthropologist Helen Fisher would tell People at the time, “was amazement that it has not happened more often. We’re playing with very strong emotions.”
People responded viscerally. Castration as comeuppance became a female-empowerment meme, drawn from a reservoir of anger that was similar to the one that, two summers before, had been tapped by the film Thelma & Louise. “This was a watershed act,” said pop psychologist Dr. Joyce Brothers, “dividing men and women.” And even as the ensuing crop of Bobbitt jokes punctuated comedians’ monologues, the incident was uneasily rehashed in households across the country. The Bobbitt case was an opening to address inadequate laws, the silent fury experienced by abused partners, and the larger questions of female subjugation in male-dominant relationships. Others used it as an opportunity to lash out at feminism’s excesses, asking why the battle of the sexes seemed to disproportionately penalize men (an apt word here). This unkindest cut, journalist Kim Masters would state in Vanity Fair, was merely “the latest, and perhaps the ultimate, escalation.”
The underlying message was twofold. First, many American women considered Lorena Bobbitt’s action a call to arms: they were going to stand up against abuse, once and for all. Second, on an entirely less profound level: when someone’s dick made the nightly news (whether Bobbitt’s or Michael Jackson’s, whether Pee-wee’s or the president’s), the country was going to discuss it incessantly around the beverage dispensers. The American penis was no longer a topic reserved for the tabloids or edgy art shows or porn films. Gossip about the Bobbitts, like crude utterances two years before at the Clarence Thomas hearings—with senators muttering about dongs and pubes—had seen to that.
I invite Lorena Gallo Bobbitt, who lives near Washington, D.C., for a quiet dinner in Georgetown. She arrives with a female confidante.
Lorena tells me about her four-year-old daughter and says she’s been happily involved with a man for fourteen years. She talks about her life in Virginia, her long road back to equanimity, her work involving a shelter for victims of domestic violence and her related foundation, Lorena’s Red Wagon. She also brings up her jobs as a Realtor and licensed hairstylist who provides skincare, facials, and bikini waxes.
Before I get into conversation, however, let me recount the Bobbitts’ claims and counterclaims.
The Bobbitts had had a rocky marriage. They had gone through a prolonged separation or two. John, as Kim Masters would report, liked to party, often without his wife. He would invite friends or relatives to live in their small apartment. Lorena, who had taken a while to master English, often felt alienated. Though she expressed a desire to start a family, she claimed to have allowed John to persuade her to have an abortion. She would insist that John beat her and pressured her to have sex, including anal sex, against her will—charges he would dispute in court. At John’s trial, various witnesses described his behavior as being consistent with that of a batterer, a characterization he has continued to object to. At one stage, Lorena filed a police report about an alleged choking incident; John accused her of kneeing him in the balls. Two days before the maiming, she said, she had made moves to file a protection order against him, executing the proper forms. Bobbitt, meanwhile, said he was in the process of removing his belongings from the house, intending to leave her for good.
When I meet Lorena (on Mother’s Day weekend 2010) I find her compact, feisty, intense—almost coiled. Gone is the wallflower persona. Gone too is the dark hair; she’s now a strawberry blonde. Although she is quick-witted and focused, the tears do well up in her eyes now and again. She can display a guarded, haunted look, her attention seeming to drift.
I tell her that many women, including my friend Donna Ferrato—the premier photographic chronicler of domestic violence—have described her as a trailblazer.15 Ferrato, whose charitable work has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for victims of sexual assault and partner and spousal violence, had recently told me that Lorena Bobbitt’s action was bold and, in her case, long overdue. “She had to disarm him,” Ferrato says. “He was using his cock as a weapon.”
Does Lorena consider herself a pioneer? “I do,” she says. “Before my case, nobody really cared as much [about] domestic violence. After what happened, laws have been changed, the police have a [justification] to put a man in jail, if necessary.… Because of what happened to me, because it was such a circus—and it was worldwide known that domestic violence come up to the surface and everybody have to say, ‘That happened to me.’ Millions of women felt like me.”
The adulation, however, went only so far. “It was horrible,” she continues, explaining her private torment. “At a personal level, I experienced all the physical abuse, the psychological abuse, the economical abuse, and emotional abuse.… I was not talking to anybody [about it]. I felt ashamed of saying my husband was abusing me. It is very common [among women trapped by domestic violence].”
In the 1980s and ’90s, she says, more and more women began to set up shelters and treatment centers and call for legal changes, realizing that they had to take matters into their own hands. “I look at it like a sisterhood type of thing. A lot of women felt it was important to help other women. [The women’s movement of the ’70s] opened their eyes a little bit more [and made them] say, ‘Look, we have to stick together because we don’t want these things to happen anymore.’”
She remembers this sense of solidarity at her trial and at rallies on her behalf. Some protestors would raise their hands in a “V” and make a scissors-snipping gesture. “The women who came to my trial in support,” she recalls, made her feel “more confident. I wasn’t alone.” Describing her foundation, set up in 2007 to educate women about the remedies for escaping domestic violence, Lorena explains that it took her almost fifteen years to gain the strength and equilibrium to become a public advocate. “I wasn’t mentally ready to help others,” she contends. “People were dying [for me] to write books and I said, ‘You know what? I don’t want to talk about the incident. All I did was cry and remember.”
Her ex-husband, in contrast, took a different path. “He made hundreds of thousands of dollars,” she says. “He is an adult. He can choose whatever he wants to.… Doing the porno movies. I have never seen [them. But] he took advantage. He could have [used his earnings from the films] to help others.” On balance, however, she says she doesn’t resent his having profited from the incident, allowing that others may have taken advantage of him and led him astray. What galls her the most, she says, is that her husband was found innocent of marital sexual assault.
Did John get what he deserved?
“I don’t think he has what he deserved because I would have like to seen him in jail for what he did—not because of what I did to him. That’s not right.”
And what you did to him?
“Was wrong,” she tells me.
If you had to go back, you wouldn’t do it again?
“No. No. No, no. No, no, no, no.” Later she adds, “Yes, I did wrong. But I wish people would stop judging me.”
But why did she do it in the first place?
When Lorena was taken into custody and was asked to recount the incident, she gave this statement, which sounded to many like an attempt to explain her motivation: “He always have orgasm and he doesn’t wait for me to have orgasm. He’s selfish. I don’t think it’s fair. So I pulled back the sheets then and I did it.” In hindsight, she insists, “I didn’t make [the statement to the police] in my right state of mind. What I tried to say is that he raped me. And I couldn’t say it, that he was raping me. So my way of saying that: ‘[We] don’t finish [to] have an orgasm’ or something, like you enjoy as a couple with your wife, in a couple, intimacy. I was not able to communicate in English.”
There is another question I want to ask her, though. From where in the depths of her despair did such a primal impulse emerge? How is it that she even conceived of the idea of an act so rare in contemporary society that it seemed both historic—and prehistoric?
“I don’t remember anything what happened,” she contends. “It was more like a bad dream, from the abuse that happened.… A lot of people thought it was premeditation. It was nothing ‘premeditation.’… I don’t know [where the impulse came from]. I don’t know. I honestly [don’t].”
At one point I ask about John, gingerly. “Do you ever hear from him or talk to him?”
“Oh yeah,” she says, taking out her BlackBerry. “He just texted me he loves me. You want to see the text? It’s crazy. He texted me on Valentine’s Day: he loves me, he wants to marry me.”
Dumbfounded, I look at her smartphone and see a string of messages from the same number—a 716 area code, in upstate New York. One is from two days before. Good morning. Happy Cinco de Mayo, cha-cha-cha. XXX’s and OOO’s, JB. There’s another from April 21: Lorena, We have to love. It’s the greatest force the world has ever known. Love is God. Do you feel it. The texts, back in April, appear to have come in bursts, several sent in a matter of minutes, then every hour or two. Love never dies and it’s never too late. I can teach you. Do you think it’s too late for all that? Please, be nice. What life would be like for us if we got back together and you got pregnant?
Lorena says she considers the text barrage—along with the cards she claims he sends on holidays—to be harassment, especially since John knows that she has a child and has been in a serious relationship for years. “It’s just ridiculous, really,” she says, brushing it off and explaining that she rarely responds, usually deleting the messages in batches. “I’m above that. I’m above the person who had caused so much damage to me.… This is reality. This is what happens to women.… It’s just sickening.”
Another message says, Please forgive me. And then, LOL.
I copy the phone number and, with Lorena’s permission, call John Bobbitt a while later.
He answers and says that he is, indeed, the John Wayne Bobbitt. He tells me that he works as a carpenter and limo driver. He says he goes on dates but finds it challenging to be in his forties and meet the right partner. He is forthcoming about his former porn career and claims he was supposed to have been paid $10 million for his appearances but that he never saw much of it. “I got ripped off,” he says. “Somebody else got it—agents, the production company.… There was a lot of negativity involved in the adult entertainment business.”
He contends that his private parts still function. “I did the films to prove myself,” he says. “To prove I had my penis cut off”—but that he was subsequently repaired.16
When I ask about his incessant texting, he responds that, yes, he does send Lorena messages saying how much he loves her and wishes they could get back together. “Yeah, I do. But she almost killed me, but I realize now, looking back”—he tries to explain how things might be better if they reconnected now—“we got married and we never lived alone. We always had somebody with us [in our apartment].”
But why, I ask, would you send affectionate text messages if she cut your dick off?
“Yeah, but…”
“Why?” I ask.
“Well, Benjamin Franklin said that a lot of people criticized him and complained, and most people do, but it takes character and self-control to be understanding and forgiving. I was the cause of her pain. She needed me to be [in] as much pain as she was in. Then, knowing that I was leaving her, she didn’t want anybody else to have me, if she couldn’t have me.… That’s the way she was. When she didn’t get what she wanted, she would get really mad.”
The attack, he says, was not a reaction to a sexual assault but to the fact that he was moving out and abandoning her. “She was charged with malicious wounding.” For a moment he sounds like he is reading from a script. “Malicious means—it’s a deep-seated, often unexplainable desire to see another person suffer harm, injury, or distress, or even death.… This make-believe thing that I raped her or beat her had nothing to do with that at all. The important thing to know of this whole case was that she did what she did because she was heartbroken. She was jealous. She was angry. You should have seen the expression on her face when my best friend arrived [to help me pack up] and I told her, ‘See you, Lorena. I’m leaving. We’re getting a divorce.’ We went through this tumultuous relationship, back-and-forth fighting, and going to court. The judge told us, ‘If you can’t work your marriage out, get a divorce.’ I said, ‘Damn, you’re right.’”
Were there any incidents, I ask, in which you were trying to do things sexually when she didn’t want to do?
“No, that’s what she wants you to believe,” he says. “We experimented one time with anal sex—it was a failed attempt.… But there’s no evidence. She’s never been hospitalized for repeated anal sex or rape. If I did, wouldn’t she go to the hospital? The only sign of violence—that night when I had my penis cut off—was me, in the hospital, bleeding to death.” After a pause, he reflects, “Okay, yes, I was a bad husband. I wasn’t there for her. I was out—with my friends. I wanted a divorce. Neglect. I stopped communicating with her. That’s why [she did it]. I wish I would have been a better husband.”
Both partners, at one time or another, had said that they’d had sex that evening. True?
“As soon as [I] got home, I fell asleep. I went into a deep sleep, and she was trying to have sex with me. I didn’t respond to her. I couldn’t. I was too tired. And she was trying to talk to me but I couldn’t understand what she was saying. She said, ‘You hurt me. You do it again and again and again. Are you happy?’ That was the statement. Basically, she was referring to the three times I left her. This was the third and final time. People don’t understand. People are so shallow-minded that they don’t know the real reason why. There it is.”
John Bobbitt admits that he did hit her on occasion. “A lot of times we’d fight. We’d throw things. We’d yell, pushing and shoving or whatever. But no battery.”
Obviously, I stress to him, she’s now in a serious relationship. She has a family, a new life. So why would you send her texts?
“I’m trying to look for some closure,” he says.
The number and type of texts, I tell him, might arguably verge on harassment. What drives you to send them?
“That’s me trying to make amends or trying to say I forgive her. I wasn’t ready to be married then. I’m ready to be married now.”
Do you feel you’re fixated on her?
“I know,” he agrees. Then he asks for advice. “Is our relationship unrepairable [sic]? That’s just a question. She wanted to have this dream [marriage], and I wasn’t ready to fulfill her dream.”
I explain that Lorena has been distressed by his texts, which is why she didn’t respond. I say that she has moved on.
“Oh,” he says, taking it in. Then he wonders aloud, “You’re basically saying to me that it’s foolish for me to get involved with a woman who cut my penis off.”
“That’s what I’m asking,” I respond.
“You’re asking now?”
“What do you think?”
“I think it went beyond that. It went deeper than that. It’s about love.… [About] transforming an enemy into a friend.”
At their trials, each had faced twenty years in prison. John Bobbitt would be cleared of marital sexual assault charges. Lorena Bobbitt would be found not guilty of malicious wounding due to temporary insanity and would spend a month in a psychiatric unit.