The psychology that drives a lady to chop off a person’s penis

As Lorena Bobbitt is the first to acknowledge, hers is an ordinary life. Married with a college-age daughter, together the family enjoy simple pleasures like film nights or walks in the sunshine.

‘So far, so good,’ she says. ‘I can’t complain, we are happy.’

Certainly, today, 55-year-old Lorena would live in relative anonymity were it not for one startlingly notable thing.

‘The whole world knows I cut his penis off,’ as she herself puts it. ‘There’s no way to candy-coat it; that’s what happened.’

The penis in question belonged to her then-husband John Wayne Bobbitt, a former marine two years her senior to whom Lorena had been married for four years when, on a Wednesday evening in June 1993, she sliced it off with a butcher’s knife.

She then drove from the family home in Manassas in northern Virginia and threw the severed member into a field, where it was later retrieved by police and infamously preserved on ice in a hot dog box before, via the extraordinary skill of surgeons, being reunited with its owner following nine hours of surgery.

The case sent shockwaves around the world and even now, 31 years after the event, the Bobbitt name remains fixed in the public imagination (not to mention the Oxford English Dictionary, where it is defined as a byword for having something vital removed).

Yet as a compelling new ITV documentary reveals, contrary to public assumption, the case was far from an isolated one. It was one of many around the world.

Speaking to perpetrators as well as psychologists and a British male victim, the programme explores what drives someone to commit such an act and why individual cases continue to exert such fascination.

Lorena believes she has some idea, saying that even today the world at large ‘misses the essence of what this whole story was about’, often assuming it is the act of an unhinged ‘psychopath’.

‘There was no element of revenge in my case,’ she insists. ‘I didn’t want anyone to suffer. That’s not who I am, so it’s not why I did it. It’s about what put me in that position.’

Certainly, by anyone’s reckoning, Lorena’s was a love story that went sour. She was just 17 when she arrived in the US from her native Venezuela and was working in a nail salon when she met the handsome and charming John Wayne.

It was not long before he proposed with a ring he had found at the bottom of a swimming pool.

Following their wedding in 1989, what Lorena calls the ‘red flags’ came quickly, with the relationship quickly mired in domestic violence and sexual abuse (John Wayne has always denied these allegations).

‘The escalation of abuse was not only physical – there were bruises on my arms, on my legs, shoulders, on my face – and it escalated to the point that I was raped,’ she claims.

‘Trapped’ and ‘scared’, Lorena felt that she nonetheless had no option but to stay. ‘There’s no way out,’ she says. ‘He told me: ‘No matter where you go I’m always going to find you.’ How can you leave like that?’

Even so, Lorena admits she has no idea why the incident that would come to define her finally happened. ‘It could have happened Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday… any day of the week,’ she says. ‘It just happened to be that day: June 23, 1993.’

She claimed that she had fallen asleep after a long day at work when she woke to find John on top of her. ‘I was half asleep, half awake, I was like: ‘What’s going on here?’ That’s all I remember,’ she says. ‘I know that I went to get a glass of water, I don’t remember seeing the knife; I don’t remember any of that.

‘The next thing I do remember was that I was driving in the car and I had the penis in one hand, and the knife in the other hand.

‘I couldn’t drive straight, I have no idea how I got into the car,’ she recalls. ‘I got scared and I threw it out of the window, his organ. I was not in my right frame of mind. There was no way I could plan this; I mean who would plan this?’

Four months after John Wayne’s surgery which reunited him with his penis (he famously went on to be a porn star), a jury found him not guilty of rape, and a few months later his now-estranged wife was acquitted of ‘malicious wounding’ on the basis of temporary insanity. She was ordered to spend 45 days in a mental hospital.

The trials were a global media circus, with food and drink stalls set up outside court and vendors selling branded t-shirts.

While the Bobbitt surname remains notorious for something that was seen as a unique crime, in fact, as Jacqueline Helfgott, a professor in the Department of Criminal Justice at Seattle University, explains bluntly: ‘Men and women have cut off penises since the dawn of time.’

What’s more, on occasions countries see ‘outbreaks’, she explains: ‘If you look historically there’s lots of examples of penis cutting around the world. And there have been waves of what’s happened in countries like Vietnam, Kenya – so in a community where you have one, you see patterns of a series of women. A whole wave of that could be a contagion effect.’

Thailand was among the countries that experienced this in the 1970s, with what Dr Apirag Chuangsuwanich from Siriraj Hospital in Bangkok calls ‘an epidemic of amputations’ with approximately 100 cases of ‘penicide’ nationwide.

‘We started receiving such patients one after the other,’ he reflects. ‘I believe it led to copycat incidents. In some cases the wife had tried to destroy the severed part by flushing it down the toilet or throwing it to animals to eat.’

So prolific were the occurrences that the Ministry of Public Health began sending out information leaflets explaining how to preserve severed organs (one tip was to use hand pressure to stop excessive bleeding). Latterly though, the cases have dwindled to almost nothing. And while the majority of penile amputations are committed by partners, it isn’t always the case.

The documentary examines the troubling case of a New Yorker called Brigitte Harris, who cut off her father’s penis following years of sexual abuse as a child. In poignant interview footage Brigitte, now 43, recalls how, after her mum walked out on her when she was just two years old, she and her older sister were raised by their father Eric. Within a year, he had started physically and sexually abusing her.

‘I thought I was being punished, that I was the bad person, it was my fault that I was the bad guy,’ she recalls. ‘I couldn’t understand sex, rape, sexual abuse, any of these terms, I was a child.’ At one point Eric took his daughters back to his native Liberia, where he continued to abuse Brigitte, until she managed to borrow enough money to buy a flight to New York when she was 17.

She worked hard to rebuild her life, becoming a courier driver and a security guard at JFK Airport until, in her mid-20s, she learned that Eric had returned to the US.

When she visited her sister, to find her five-year-old niece sitting on her father’s lap, something inside her snapped. With no proof of what had happened to her, she believed police would not take any report she made to them seriously. This meant in her ’26-year-old mind’ that it was down to her to protect other young girls.

‘I remember what he did to me when I was sitting on his lap and there was no way I was going to let that happen, so I made up a plan… to stop him doing to others what he did to me, to stop him hurting anyone else,’ she recalls.

Over the course of three weeks, Brigitte researched ways to castrate her father without killing him, including looking into the Bobbitt case.

‘When I read about the Bobbitt case and that they were able to reattach his penis I wanted to make sure that couldn’t happen so I would destroy it,’ she says.

She bought a scalpel on eBay and handcuffs from a party store, and, on a hot and cloudless summer day in July 2007, she invited Eric to her apartment where she confronted him with his past abuse and asked him to sign paperwork admitting what he had done over the years. 

He refused. ‘I think if he admitted it I probably wouldn’t have done it,’ she says. While Brigitte says the unfolding events are something of a blur, she recalls handcuffing her father to his chair, and shoving a gag in his mouth to stifle his screams before slicing off his penis with a scalpel and fleeing the apartment.

After throwing his penis in the ocean she called the police and an ambulance crew, who arrived to find that Eric had suffocated after choking on his gag.

‘People don’t want to believe it, but I really did not want him to die,’ she says.

Brigitte was taken to a mental health ward before being charged with murder. During her subsequent trial, which unfolded two years later in September 2009, prosecutors maintained that Harris’s actions towards her father showed premeditation which warranted the charge.

After her sister testified that Eric had abused her too, the jury convicted Brigitte of manslaughter in the second degree, while some jurors even wrote letters to the judge saying they hoped she would receive only probation.

However, the judge was unmoved. Brigitte was sentenced to the maximum of five to 15 years in prison but was released on parole after three. Today, she runs her own catering business and feels thankful she got a second chance.

Like Lorena Bobbitt, she rebuffs the idea that her actions were motivated by revenge.

‘I wanted him to be punished as well as not hurt any more,’ she insists. ‘It’s not about getting revenge – it’s about making sure what happened to me did not happen to anyone else.’

Harriet Wistrich, founder and director of the Centre for Women’s Justice, puts it a different way: ‘We often say it’s not an abnormal act – it’s a normal response to an abnormal experience. You need to look at the circumstances of what took place and the woman’s specific history.’

Yet as the documentary shows, sometimes that history is not always obvious. One British man from south-west England, identified only as ‘Ollie’, reveals the horror of being attacked by a woman he had been dating only casually – and he believed amicably – who had previously shown no propensity for violence.

‘The attack was out of the blue, she’d picked her moment, she’d picked her target and she’d done it when I was at my most vulnerable,’ he says. The attack took place in 1988, after only a few months of dating ‘Linda’ – who has since gone on to change her name and cannot be traced.

‘I’d see her maybe once or twice a week, it was just a casual relationship,’ Ollie recalls. ‘Over a period of time it was coming to an end as far as I was concerned.’

The day of the attack unfolded just like any other of their dates: the couple went to the pub and then returned to Linda’s home.

‘It was a case of we’d go up to her bedroom and that’s where it all began and that’s where it all ended,’ he says. ‘The lights were off, curtains were drawn, I couldn’t even see anything – and that was when she produced the Stanley blade.’

When she struck he recalls feeling no pain but what he calls ‘more of a sensation with the blood’.

‘The first thing I said was: ‘What have you done?’ And she just went out and I thought: ‘Boy I’m in trouble.’ Acting on instinct, he ‘grabbed hold of himself’, covered up and ran to a phone box 200 yards down the road.

Only later did Ollie learn, at Linda’s court case, that she had convictions for GBH and ABH.

While in hospital recovering from successful surgery to reattach his organ, he met Sue, the woman who would go on to be his wife. However Ollie admits it took a long time to build up trust again.

The couple have now been married for 28 years and, to Ollie’s surprise, have two healthy daughters. He was told there was only a 50 per cent chance he would be able to father children.

Interviewed for the documentary about her own take on proceedings, Sue admits she thinks that Linda committed her heinous act as she knew her relationship was coming to an end: ‘It was a case of she did it so nobody else could ever have him.’

For Brigitte such explanations are reductive. ‘People talk about what I did – not about what he did to me,’ she says.

Meanwhile Lorena Bobbitt, a woman whose name will be forever synonymous with an act that reverberated around the world, sees herself as a survivor.

‘Sometimes I wish it didn’t happen to me, but my life is not a tape that I can rewind,’ she says. ‘I became a mother, I have a relationship with this wonderful man, I’m not only a survivor, but I have a new life.’

I Cut Off His Penis: The Truth Behind The Headlines airs on ITV1 and ITVX at 9pm tonight.