A Writer's Life (45 page)

Women's studies programs proliferated on college campuses and were well represented by female faculty members who ridiculed Sigmund Freud's concepts about penis envy, and Jacques Lacan's postulations about the penis as a “universal signifier,” and the theories of biologists and brain specialists who suggested that physical differences between men and women, more often than not, produced sexually identifiable patterns of behavior. Such thinking was dismissed by most women as prejudicial, phallocentric, and sexist, and thus linguistic adjustments were made to conform to the new sense of correctness:
chairman
became
chairperson
, and
sex
became
gender
. With increasing frequency, women's hair was now seen under the hard hats of construction crews, the caps of police officers, the helmets of combat soldiers. The designers of military apparel were contemplating the creation of uniforms that would allow female troops in the field to urinate standing up. The stylishly uniformed young airline stewardesses who had once filled the friendly skies with the aura of their allure had now been replaced along the aisles of airplanes by gender-blended “flight attendants” who were employed more on the basis of how well they did the job than on how well they looked when doing it. Much of what had been described as masculine was now machismo and perhaps abusive. With so many highly educated and motivated women currently established in the legal profession as prosecutors and judges, it was unlikely that untoward male behavior would ever again be excused, or made light of, under the old adage that sometimes “boys will be boys.” And with younger women joining their male contemporaries as editors and reporters in the print media and television news departments, there was heightened and unrelenting coverage of stories that an earlier generation of primarily white male editors would have dismissed or downplayed as gossip, innuendo, or too difficult to prove. The extramarital interests of John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr., had not been seen as headline material by the mainstream editors of the sixties. These editors generally believed that individuals of such prominence were entitled to a life of privacy as long as it did not interfere with their effectiveness as leaders—and editors who thought otherwise usually worked for one of the trashier tabloids. But what separated the journalistic judgment of mainstream editors from that of their sensationalist colleagues was not always discernible in the 1990s. Much of what had been “scandal” was now “social history,” and the practitioners of journalism high and low were equally aggressive in pursuing stories about the prowlings of politicians and high-profile cases dealing with sexual harassment, acquaintance rape, date rape, and marital rape.

I had never read about marital rape until I came across Dr. Altman's
article in the
Times
about the Bobbitt couple, and since I was having lunch that day with Tina Brown, and assumed that she had also read it and would want to know more about the incident and how it would be resolved in court, I added this story idea to the list of proposals that I intended to discuss with her. But after I had joined her at her table at the Royalton Hotel and we had made our selections from the menu, and I had asked about her reaction to the piece, she replied, “I haven't had a chance to get through the paper yet. What's it about?”

“It's about a man whose penis was sliced off by his wife after he'd supposedly raped her, and about the two surgeons who operated on him and sewed his penis back together.”

“This is making me sick,” said Tina Brown.

“It's all in today's
Times
,” I said, urging her to read it when she returned to her office. I also suggested that it might be the basis of a major article in
The New Yorker
because it showed how hostile some women were capable of becoming and it escalated the already heated debate about the Gender Wars—and furthermore it would remind men about the vulnerability of their penises.

“Oh, please,” Tina Brown interrupted, pushing aside her salad, “this is
really
making me sick.”

So I dropped the subject and we discussed other ideas during the duration of our lunch. But on the following morning, I faxed her a letter:

A day later, Tina Brown replied:

B
EGINNING IN MID
-J
ULY 1993
, I
COMMUTED REGULARLY BETWEEN
New York and Manassas, Virginia, interviewing dozens of people who were directly or tangentially connected to the Bobbitt story: the couple's lawyers, their doctors, their media advisers, their relatives, their friends, their neighbors and coworkers—Lorena's female associates in the nail-cutting salon, and John's cargo-loading buddies who had been working with him at the depot on the day before his misfortune and who were known in the trucking trade as “lumpers.” I also interviewed the police sergeant who had discovered John's penis in the weeds, and the female police officer who found the bloody knife that Lorena had tossed into a trash bin, and the detective who was overseeing the investigation.

The latter was forty-nine-year-old Peter Weintz, a gravel-voiced man of six feet three inches and 260 pounds who smoked four packs of Marlboros daily and whose antipathy toward lawbreakers once extended to his arresting and imprisoning his own son. Weintz's son, who had been sixteen at the time, had been heavily engaged in drugs, alcohol, and sometimes in stealing. After driving off one day with his father's car and two cases of beer, he was apprehended by Weintz and escorted to jail. Following his son's release, Detective Weintz invested about thirty thousand dollars toward his rehabilitation, which would turn out to be successful.

When I first made arrangements to meet with Detective Weintz, I anticipated a difficult interview. I had been told by a few local journalists that he disliked dealing with the press. But I found him to be approachable and candid, and since he had been the first official to interrogate Lorena Bobbitt after she had surrendered to the police on the day of the cutting, he had a sense of her state of mind and her deeply personal remembrance of what had occurred just before, during, and after her attack on her husband on June 23. Detective Weintz had tape-recorded what she had told him, and six weeks later, at the preliminary hearing on August 4, which I and dozens of other media representatives attended at
the county courthouse, he read aloud to Judge Paul F. Gluchowski the transcription of Mrs. Bobbitt's statement.

The purpose of the preliminary hearing was not to address her guilt or innocence but, rather, to determine if there was sufficient evidence against her to support the prosecutor's claim that she had “maliciously” cut her husband “with intent to maim, disfigure, disable, or kill,” and should therefore ultimately be brought to trial for committing a felony. The prosecutor summoned four police officers to attend the hearing and offer evidence against her. The first officer called to the witness stand, Cecil F. Deane, exhibited to the court the photographs he had taken of the bleeding and bandaged John Bobbitt as the latter lay on a gurney in the emergency room shortly after Deane's arrival there at 5:15 on the morning of June 23. The second officer, Michael Perry, testified that he had retrieved the severed section of the penis along the roadside at approximately 6:15 a.m., had placed it in a Ziploc bag with ice, and then delivered it by ambulance to the hospital. The third officer, Sindi Leo, confirmed that the red-handled fillet knife that was presently on display on a table in front of Judge Gluchowski's bench was indeed
the
knife that she had found at around 8:30 a.m. in the trash can in front of the nail salon that employed Lorena Bobbitt. And the fourth officer, Detective Weintz, recited from the transcipt of Lorena Bobbitt's testimony that he had obtained from her at the Manassas police station on the afternoon of June 23.

Weintz quoted her as saying that her husband had returned intoxicated to their apartment at around three o'clock in the morning. He had been accompanied by one of his boyhood friends from Niagara Falls, New York, who was staying over on the couple's sofa in the living room. After her husband had closed the bedroom door and had fallen asleep beside her for about an hour, he woke up and took off his clothes—and, despite her protests, he forcibly removed her panties and proceeded to rape her. “I tried to scream or do something, to push him,” she told Detective Weintz, “but I couldn't because he's so heavy for me.” Later, as her husband drifted back to sleep, she slipped out of bed, put on some clothes, and walked into the kitchen for a glass of water. Seeing a block of knives on the counter—“I was angry,” she recalled to Detective Weintz—she took one of them, held it in her hand, and returned with it to the bedroom. “I asked him if he was satisfied with what he did,” she said, “and he just—half asleep or something—did not care about my feelings.… He always has orgasm and he doesn't wait for me to have an orgasm. He's selfish. I don't think it's fair. So I pulled back the sheets, then did it.”

As Detective Weintz continued with his reading of the transcript,
squinting through the aviator glasses that framed his hazel eyes and rested high on the bridge of his bulbous nose, Lorena Bobbitt sat in front of him at the defendant's table, next to her attorney. She said nothing, although she occasionally lowered her head and wept, allowing her long wavy dark hair to hang down along the sides of her face, touching her shoulders, enshrouding her as if she were wearing a mantilla. I was getting my first look at her. She was delicate-boned and petite (five-two and ninety-five pounds, one hundred less than her five-eleven husband); she wore neither jewelry nor makeup, and had on a long-sleeved belted purple dress of modest design that was buttoned at the throat. When she was not weeping, she appeared to be praying—her lips moving slowly, her hands folded in her lap, her eyes cast down. She projected an image of innocence and vulnerability; and while I reminded myself that her small manicured fingers and her slender wrists had in a split second directed a knife through her husband's manhood, I believed that she would later prove to be convincing as a witness in her own defense, instilling doubt in the minds of the jurors that she could have willfully done what the prosecutor had charged her with doing.

I had often tried to interview her prior to seeing her at the preliminary hearing, but both her lawyer and her media adviser had been uncooperative. I later learned that her media adviser had promised her story exclusively to
Vanity Fair
, which would feature her in a photo spread done by the noted photographer Mary Ellen Mark, along with a lengthy article written by Kim Masters. The issue would be published in the fall or early winter, presumably coinciding with the start of Lorena Bobbitt's trial. Her media adviser had also come to an understanding with the producers at ABC-TV for her to be interviewed on the weekly 20/20 television program sometime in late September. In the meantime, her attorney announced that she had received dozens of phone calls and letters of endorsement, mostly from women, volunteering to contribute to her legal expenses and to assist her in other ways. An article in the
Washington Post
—under the headline
A SYMBOL OF SHARED RAGE
—described her as emerging into a “feminist folk heroine.” It quoted a thirty-one-year-old dress shop worker in Washington, Rose Maravilla, as saying, “I will be livid if they put her away.” Also expressing support for her in the article was thirty-six-year-old Evelyn Smith of Maryland, who had shot her cantankerous husband to death in 1991, had been acquitted by a jury in 1992, and had recently begun a foundation to assist battered women. In a column in
Newsweek
magazine, the author Barbara Ehrenreich wrote, “If a fellow insists on using his penis as a weapon, I say that, one way or another, he ought to be swiftly disarmed.”

On the day before Lorena Bobbitt's appearance at the preliminary hearing, her husband had been indicted by a grand jury on the charge of marital sexual abuse, and, while awaiting the announcement of his trial date, he was released on a five-thousand-dollar personal-recognizance bond. His attorney, who accompanied him while he was being booked and fingerprinted, later spoke to the press and emphasized his client's quarrel with Lorena's version of the truth. “The only fact that is not in dispute is the fact that she committed the heinous crime of mutilation against my client,” the attorney said; and Bobbitt's media adviser repeated the statement that had earlier been distributed in the name of John Bobbitt: “Contrary to a few published reports and the desperate excuses of my wife, Lorena, I did not attack her the night in question … she will have to answer for her actions in criminal court.” Bobbitt's doctors, who had released him from the hospital a month earlier, explained that he was urinating without a catheter but remained numb below the cut. One of the doctors told me privately that Bobbitt had been given a copy of the porn magazine
Chic
, hoping that Bobbitt might be aroused by the photographs of erotically posed nude women. So far this had not happened. As John Bobbitt walked to and from the court building, a reporter from the
Potomac News
noted that he was taking “long strides.” He was nevertheless trailing his wife insofar as gaining widespread public support.