Lorena was sleeping beside him when she decided she would not endure another night.
It was 1993, they lived in Manassas, Virginia, and in the early hours of June 23, Lorena Bobbitt took a kitchen knife and cut off her husband John Wayne Bobbitt’s penis while he slept. She then got into her car and drove with it in her hand until she threw it out the window into a nearby field. Doctors recovered it from the underbrush and reattached it in a surgery lasting nearly ten hours.
Lorena, who was born in Ecuador and had been married to John since 1989, always maintained that the attack was the final explosion after years of physical and sexual abuse. The couple divorced in 1995, but their story has never stopped raising questions: what makes someone reach that point of no return? Today, with the help of therapy and through her foundation for women who are victims of domestic violence, Lorena speaks of a much slower and quieter process: learning, after trauma, to set boundaries before it is too late.
