John Wayne Bobbitt Still Sends Love Letters to Lorena

Before Lorena Bobbitt’s story was treated as a great tragedy, it was treated as great comedy.

Bobbitt was 24, a relatively recent immigrant to the U.S., when, in the summer of 1993—finally breaking, she would later say, after years’ worth of escalating physical and mental abuse from her husband, John Wayne Bobbitt—she took a large knife from their kitchen, approached her sleeping spouse, and severed his penis. What happened next was profoundly predictable, even without the aid of some 25 years’ worth of retrospect: all the gleeful “A Night to Dismember” and “A Slice of Wife” headlines. All the jokes about the need for men to be wary of women lest they, too, be Bobbitted.

Soon, the Late Show with David Letterman was offering up a list of Top 10 Lorena. Robin Williams a Lorena bit in one of his stand-up shows—complete with a mocking Spanish accent (born in Ecuador, Lorena had moved from Venezuela to Virginia, where she had family, in the late 1980s). Rosie O’Donnell and Mike Myers as Lorena and John, respectively, on , speaking with Al Franken’s character, , the perma-smiled self-help guru. After asking the faux Lorena why she’d been mad at John—“He forced me to have sex!,” she replied—Smalley asked her to speak to John’s penis and apologize for what she had done to it. ’s studio audience howled with laughter.