The Other Hollywood (61 page)

It took us seven months to get the scene out of her. We get burned more than they do.

MANASSAS, VIRGINIA
1993

JOHN WAYNE BOBBITT
:
I had been out with one of my best buddies, Robert Johnson. We’d spent a hard day at work unloading trucks at a warehouse, and we were really beat. So we went over to this club, Legends, where I sometimes worked as a bouncer. We had a few beers and a couple of shots. Then we went to three more clubs. We were just out girl-gazing. At 1:30 in the morning we ended up at Denny’s and had coffee. But I was still exhausted when I got home, and that’s it. I wasn’t drunk, just exhausted.

LORENA BOBBITT
:
I went to bed, and I was awakened by the strong closing—the slam door, so I wake up. I look at the clock; it was maybe from 3:15, 3:30. I said if he have work today, and he said, “No, I went to bar.” I went back to bed, and he slip by my side. I went to sleep.

LARRY FURST (PORN WRITER)
:
On the early morning of June 23, 1993, ex-marine John Bobbitt came home from another night of heavy drinking in Manassas, Virginia, and climbed into bed with his Ecuadorean wife, Lorena. She claims he was drunk and abusive, pinning her to the bed and raping her.

LORENA BOBBITT
:
I feel like pull down to my underwears, and then he was on top of me again, and I wake up. I was like try to find out what is going on, and he grabbed my wrists and press down my hips. I felt like I couldn’t breathe—his chest and right shoulder was on my face and my mouth. I said, “I don’t want to have sex,” and he wouldn’t listen to me. He wouldn’t let me go, and he started to pull down my underwears with his foot.

JOHN WAYNE BOBBITT
:
I remember laying down on the couch, then taking off my clothes, folding them up, and putting them on the ironing board. Before I fell asleep I remember doing something sexual with Lorena. I reached inside of her panties or something. She tried to get me erect again, but she couldn’t because I’d been drinking.

LORENA BOBBITT
:
I tried to keep my legs closed, and I tried to keep my underwear on, but I couldn’t. I only grabbed my right side with my three fingers and I hear a rip on my right-hand side of my underwear.

He took it off. He pulled my underwears down, and he force himself into me again. I was just crying. I tried to cry loud, but I couldn’t breathe. It was hurting me. He hurt me. I feel like, I don’t know, my vagina was ripping up or something.

JOHN WAYNE BOBBITT
:
But she’d had it all planned out already. The week before she’d threatened me with a knife, but she didn’t point it at my dick. She knew exactly what she was doing when she sliced me. Believe me, it was premeditated.

LORENA BOBBITT
:
When he finished, I put my underwear on again. I was sitting in the bed, and I told him, why does he do this to me again and again and again? He pushes me away, says he doesn’t care for my feelings. I went to the kitchen for a glass of water.

I was drinking the water trying to calm myself down—the only light that was on was the refrigerator light, and I saw the knife. I remember many things.

LARRY FURST
:
She severs his penis with a kitchen knife, flees the apartment, and then tosses the penis out of her car window.

LORENA BOBBITT
:
I don’t remember cutting him. I was driving. I couldn’t make a turn. I couldn’t make a turn—my hands were busy—I tried to turn—but I couldn’t because my hands were busy—and I just scream and I saw it—and I throw it out.

DR. DAVID BERMAN
:
The first question I asked was if they had found the severed part. At the time, they hadn’t. Apparently, Lorena didn’t know she was carrying it, and then when she realized she was, she rolled down the window and threw it out into a field. She went to her friends’ house and told them where she threw it, and they called the police and the paramedics.

HOWARD PERRY
:
I’m a police officer with the City of Manassas Park, and I am a volunteer at the Yorkshire Volunteer Fire Department. We received a
call in the early hours of June 23. We went to 8174 Peekwood Court, Apartment Number 5, the residence of John Wayne Bobbitt. We were looking for an extremity.

A penis.

We conducted a search of the apartment for half an hour. There was a large amount of blood on the bed leading to the bathroom, down the stairs, and to the parking lot. There was a butcher’s block in the kitchen with some knives missing. The search was not successful.

JOHN WAYNE BOBBITT
:
All I could think was, “My wife cut me.” I walked into the next room where my friend who was crashing at my place was sleeping and woke him up. I told him he had to take me to the hospital. He gets up and goes and brushes his teeth! I was holding myself to try to stop the bleeding.

Then I remember just going to the hospital. I had lost, like, half my blood. I never thought I would have my dick back again. I felt like I was in another world once I realized what had happened to me.

HOWARD PERRY
:
We left the apartment and proceeded to the intersection of Old Centerville Road and Maplewood Drive. We had received information that the penis was at that intersection. We recovered the penis. I picked up the penis and packed it in a clear plastic bag and packed it in ice. We got in the ambulance and proceeded to Prince William Hospital.

DR. DAVID BERMAN
:
It had to be
his
penis. You can’t take it from a cadaver or anything like that. The body would reject it.

JOHN WAYNE BOBBITT
:
I waited at the hospital for two hours while they looked for it. I was lying there thinking the whole time, “My penis is gone!” That was all that was on my mind during those two hours.

DR. DAVID BERMAN
:
The penis was pretty white, all drained of blood, like a cadaver’s penis. It was in a little baggie.

She cut it off at the bottom and left a little bit, about an inch. There are two main arteries at the base, and I had to repair and reattach those two major arteries along with two veins and two major nerves using microsurgery.

Microsurgery is fixing blood vessels and nerves under the microscope. Blood vessels that give the blood supply to the penis are a millimeter in size. People always ask, “How can you fix hundreds of thousands of blood vessels?” You only need to fix one or two main blood vessels, and the body will heal the rest. You connect them with very fine thread—finer than your hair.

JOHN WAYNE BOBBITT
:
Then the doctor told me how he could reattach it for me and that it would take two hours.

DR. DAVID BERMAN
:
It took nine and a half hours. But I’d never done one before so I was sort of learning as I went along. I went very slowly. Very carefully.

LARRY FURST
:
Lorena was arrested and charged with malicious wounding. It makes national headlines and women everywhere feel empowered by her act. Men grab for their crotches and think twice about pushing the old lady around after they’ve had a couple of drinks too many and want to tear off a piece late at night.

LORENA BOBBITT
:
I remember the put-downs and insults he told me. There were so many pictures in my head. I remember the first time he raped me. I remember how he did anal sex with me and hurt me. I remember when he told me about the abortion. I remember everything, everything.

JOHN WAYNE BOBBITT
:
A wife batterer? I was acquitted of that. Lorena tried to say that I raped her, but she couldn’t prove it. She cut her own panties and that came out at my trial. And she tried to prove battery but there was no evidence. Actually it was the Commonwealth of Virginia that pressed charges because they thought I did something so terrible to her to make her do something so terrible. They were searching in the wrong area. Her feelings were hurt. She didn’t want me to leave her. If she couldn’t have me, she didn’t want anyone to.

LORENA BOBBITT
:
I feel trapped. I don’t know where to go. I don’t know what to do. I was very scared of him. I didn’t want him to rape me anymore. I didn’t want him to hit me anymore. I did not want him to follow me and rape me.

JOHN WAYNE BOBBITT
:
Two weeks after the surgery, I woke up with a partial woody. I was in shock. Then I started wondering if I would ever have sex again. I called my mom up because I was so excited, and she got kind of mad at me. It was real exciting for me. The doctor had told me it might take two years.

DR. DAVID BERMAN
:
He actually got spontaneous erections early on, but they were only partial. It’s a gradual process.

LARRY FURST
:
So the Bobbitts file for divorce, and John is charged with marital sexual assault. Lorena is found innocent by reason of temporary insanity.

She states it was an “irresistible impulse” that drove her to whacking
off his wanger with their kitchen cutlery. John was later acquitted of his charges as well. Lorena’s lawyer, Lisa Kemler, said, “This case was not about a penis. It’s really about a life.”

Bobbitt’s reaction was typical for him. “You mean she got away with it?”

RON JEREMY
:
The John Wayne Bobbitt story was the most bizarre thing I’d ever heard in my entire life. A guy got his dick chopped off, it’s thrown out the window of a car, and then it’s refound and restuck on?

This is amazing. If you throw a hot dog out of a window, it ain’t gonna be there an hour from now. Some dog’s gonna eat it, or bugs are gonna crawl away with it, or a chipmunk’s gonna get it. How do you throw a dick in a park and have it be there an hour later?

And what do the cops say when they’re looking for it? You know, picture a bank robbery in progress: “Shut up, we’re looking for a dick right now”?

But when I heard the story, I never thought that I’d be involved with John a year later.

LARRY FURST
:
After Bobbitt healed and Lorena faded from the public eye—declaring she hoped to lead a peaceful married life and raise a family—John moved to Las Vegas and started cashing in on his newfound celebrity.

JOHN WAYNE BOBBITT
:
I’m the very first man on earth who had his penis sliced off and then successfully reattached. The doctors tell me that I’m a first, a real medical miracle.

CLEVELAND/BORON, CALIFORNIA
1992–1993

RICHARD ROSFELDER
:
I was having lunch with one of the editors of the
Cleveland Plain Dealer
, when I got paged and informed by the Strike Force that Reuben Sturman had escaped from prison.

I was surprised. I thought it was pretty cool. I mean, we had fought with the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals over his bond—saying that he was a flight risk—and they basically disagreed. Then, when we charged him in the tax case, they reduced his bond from three million to a hundred thousand. It was total vindication of the position I took.

ROGER YOUNG
:
Reuben escapes from Boron Prison on Pearl Harbor Day, intentionally. Reuben Sturman never did anything that wasn’t carefully planned out.

ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER
, DECEMBER 9, 1992: PORN KING FLEES
:
“The head of an international pornography ring vanished from a federal prison camp in the Mojave Desert and may have fled the country,” authorities said.

“‘Reuben Sturman, 68, was missing at a 9
P.M
. Monday bed check at the minimum security Boron Prison,’ associate warden Jim Slade said Tuesday.

“Sturman was present at a 4
P.M
. Monday head count at the camp.

“‘The FBI, the U.S. Marshal’s Service, the Kern County Sheriff’s Department and other law enforcement agencies were searching for Sturman,’ Slade said. He refused to say whether investigators had help in escaping. No other prisoners were reported missing.”

CLEVELAND PLAIN DEALER
, DECEMBER 10, 1992: STURMAN MAY HAVE LEFT U.S.; AGENTS SAY PORNOGRAPHY CZAR HAD WORLDWIDE CONNECTIONS
:
“Federal agents were worried Reuben Sturman might make a run for it before his sen
tencing hearing in June, so they kept a close eye on him. But the surveillance ended after marshals delivered him to a minimum-security prison camp near Boron, California, in the Mojave Desert.

“On Monday evening, six months after he arrived at the camp, which has no fences, Sturman walked away.

“‘It was a surprise,’ said George Rezny, chief of the IRS’s Criminal Investigation Division in Cleveland. ‘Our people did their job.’

“Authorities yesterday said Sturman might have fled the country and might be using international contacts and finances built up through his Cleveland-based pornography empire.”

RICHARD ROSFELDER
:
I figured he’d be sitting on the beach over in Spain, sipping on whatever he was gonna be sipping on, and that at that juncture, the only question would be, “Who won?”

CLEVELAND PLAIN DEALER,
DECEMBER 10, 1992: LOOKING FOR A RUBE
:
“At press time, Reuben Sturman hadn’t been found. Authorities seeking Sturman are amazed at how he pulled off his escape—there’s nothing near the prison but miles of sand and scraggly bushes. For now, those authorities say they have no idea where the ‘porn czar’ could be.

“Sturman has all the attractiveness of a reptile, and we root for his quick capture.

“Maybe they’ll even make a film about his escape. Perhaps they’ll call it ‘From Behind the Jail Door.’”

RICHARD ROSFELDER
:
His Swiss accounts were never frozen, so he could’ve gone and gotten the money. He could have operated his businesses from there. I don’t know why he didn’t.

CLEVELAND PLAIN DEALER,
DECEMBER 10, 1992: STURMAN MAY HAVE LEFT U.S.; AGENTS SAY PORNOGRAPHY CZAR HAD WORLDWIDE CONNECTIONS
:
“It is unclear whether authorities could get Sturman back if he did flee the country. The United States has extradition treaties with 103 countries, but the terms of those treaties differ as to what type of criminals they will hand over.”

REUBEN STURMAN
:
I thought being in a big city was the easiest way to get lost. I figured if I stayed in Los Angeles and stayed away from everybody I knew there, I’d be fine.

RICHARD ROSFELDER
:
Why didn’t he go to Switzerland? My guess—and it’s pretty much a guess—would be that he wanted to be close to his daughter and that his wife wouldn’t leave.

Naomi didn’t want to relocate. His job was taking him elsewhere, and she wasn’t interested in leaving.

REUBEN STURMAN
:
I couldn’t stay away from my wife and child.