On the Friday after New Year’s, 20/20 is broadcasting a two-hour special “The Bobbitts: Love Hurts” (January 4, 9 pm). According to ABC, “stunning new interviews and new details you have never heard” will be revealed about the formerly married couple, Lorena and John Wayne Bobbitt. In 1993, Lorena Bobbitt infamously cut off her husband’s penis with a knife while he was asleep in bed in their Manassas, Virginia home.
Lorena claimed that night her husband raped her before he felt asleep. (Surgeons were later able to reattach the severed appendage, which Lorena had thrown in a field after leaving the house. Police found it.) John Bobbitt was acquitted of rape. Loren Bobbit was found not guilty due to insanity causing an irresistible impulse to sexually wound her husband. The couple divorced in 1995.
For the 20/20 special, John Bobbitt is interviewed. He reports that his penis is back to normal. “It’s been through the ringer,” he laughs. In the promotional clip below, ABC uses the 1981 synthpop cover of the Motown song “Tainted Love” by the one-hit wonder band Soft Cell. The song includes the lyrics: “Don’t touch me please / I cannot stand the way you tease / I love you though you hurt me so / Now I’m going to pack my things and go.”
In April 2018, it was announced that Oscar-winning director Jordan Peele (Get Out) and Amazon are making Lorena, a four-part documentary series told from Lorena Bobbitt’s point-of-view that will address issues of sexism and domestic abuse. Amazon executive Heather Schuster said the goal of Lorena is to “peel away all of that joke fodder, to tell the real story of an abused woman who felt trapped in her life and her marriage.”
