CASTRATION ANXIETY
In June of 1993, a Virginia manicurist named Lorena Bobbitt also made headlines for violence. The nature of Lorena’s crime made her infamous—she severed her husband’s penis with a kitchen knife while he slept, then flung it from a moving car into a field, where it was later retrieved and then reattached to its owner. Bobbitt’s act realized men’s deepest fears about women, at least according to Freud. South of the Mason-Dixon Line, the father of psychoanalysis’s castration anxiety was brought to life.
This dramatic and weird crime story was covered far and wide. Reactions riffed off of the darkly comedic element—David Letterman called her “my girlfriend Lorena” for cringe laughs while radio stations looped the song “Re-Attach My Member,” which took the tune of the Rolling Stones’ “Let’s Spend the Night Together.” A radio station covering the subsequent trial gave away cocktail wienies and Slice soda. Newsweek named it the “cut heard round the world.”
Bobbitt’s violent act quickly became a grotesque metaphor for the state of relations between the sexes in the 90s. A psychologist told 20/20 that the act frightened men. “A lot of men who are having a rough time in their relationship with the wife are much more nervous and anxious right now,” he said. Critic and professor Camille Paglia compared it to the Boston Tea Party and deemed it “a wake-up call” for men. Radio talk shows wondered whether the incident was isolated, or if “violence between men and women has now reached an unimaginable depth.” These characterizations prioritized male victimhood, and didn’t even begin to tell the whole story.
It soon became clear that the Bobbitts’ marriage was rife with domestic abuse. Lorena claimed that her husband, John Wayne Bobbitt, had repeatedly physically and sexually assaulted her, including raping her that very evening, and that she acted in self-defense. Her employer and landlord later confirmed spotting bruises on her body. County police had answered domestic violence calls at the Bobbitt home half a dozen times prior to the incident, and once arrested John for striking his wife in the face. Lorena alleged that she had suffered five years of marital rape.
News outlets did bring forth highlights from this history. But the domestic violence angle hardly got the attention it deserved. “I just remember feeling that there wasn’t any traction on the domestic violence part of it,” Kim Gandy, then executive vice president of NOW, told the Huffington Post in 2016. “Domestic violence organizations tried to have the conversation, women’s organizations tried to have the conversation, but the media wasn’t having any of it.”
Psychologist Elizabeth K. Carll distills the problem with the media’s sensationalistic coverage in her 2003 report “Violence and Women: News Coverage of Victims and Perpetrators.” Because the mainstream narrative inspired widespread jokes about castration “becoming a worrisome social trend” and caused men to fear “that other women might resort to this kind of sadistic violence,” the issue of violence against women was ignored in favor of empty fears about men becoming prey. The problem was that violence against women was “not viewed as a major social problem” at the time, Carll wrote. It was more gripping to imagine how women could be villains than to see how they were victims.
Instead of shining a light on partner abuse, the public and press villainized Lorena Bobbitt for committing “revenge.” Newsweek determined that the slice was the “handiwork of a bedroom vigilante,” and said, “You do not have the right to kill or maim someone you claim assaulted you an hour ago. That’s not self-defense. That’s revenge.” She became “a symbol of female rage.” ABC’s Hugh Downs called the crime “vengeance of a high-voltage nature,” unconvinced that Lorena was acting in self-defense, because the act was mutilation and not murder. “If . . . she had killed him instead of doing what she did, you could think in terms of a self-defense move,” Downs said. “This was not self . . . it doesn’t seem to . . . I mean, it could have been self-defense. She just made an embittered enemy.”
Lorena didn’t act like the textbook abuse victim the press and public shamed. ABC news reporter Tom Jarriel presented the other “options” Lorena had as if they were all equal and easy to choose—asking a neighbor for help, obtaining a restraining order, getting help from a friend of her husband’s who had been sleeping on their couch—but said instead “she chose the knife.” One victims’ advocate who initially defended Bobbitt later changed her mind. “Her abuse of him was so barbaric that the fact that she was allegedly abused is hardly an issue,” she told the Los Angeles Times. Bobbitt should only symbolize a “sick marriage between two angry people,” the paper continued, lest she “compromise the legitimacy” of other abused women who “strike back in self-defense.” Many Virginians were still unsure whether spousal rape was even a crime. In fact, Bobbitt’s cut took place the same year that the last of the fifty states—Oklahoma and North Carolina—criminalized the act.
Bobbitt had told police her husband was selfish in bed and never gave her orgasms, contributing to the narrative that she was either an erotomaniac or sexually frigid. A television series celebrating National Lampoon’s twenty-fifth anniversary satirized the incident in an episode called “He Never Gave Me Orgasm: The Lenora Babbitt Story,” about a “crazy, sexually frigid hysteric.” A popular joke at the time was “How does Lorena feel after sex? She gets a little snippy.”
The villainization of Bobbitt continued into her January 1994 trial where she was charged with malicious wounding. Attorneys typically present their opponents in an unfavorable light, and John’s attorney, Gregory Murphy, chose to cast Lorena as a jealous vixen. Murphy claimed that his client was seeing other women, and that Lorena was “vindictive and said: ‘If I can’t have John, no one can,’” wrote the Los Angeles Times. He even read Lorena’s statement about her husband denying her orgasms on television, as if that were further proof of her erotomania and guilt. Lorena’s attorney didn’t seem to help matters when he dismissed what his client had said as a problem with a “language barrier” (she was born in Ecuador, raised in Venezuela) and the fact that she was “hysterical at the time.”
Because of the violent act she had committed, her claims of rape and abuse were drowned out or their veracity was questioned. Jarriel presses Lorena on her rape claim, asking four different ways if her husband clearly understood that she wasn’t consenting to sex. “How emphatic were you when you said no sex?” Jarriel asks. “He never slowed down and he never agreed to stop and he knew, he knew very clearly, that you were fighting him and you were resisting him?”
A judge acquitted Lorena after she pleaded temporary insanity, and ordered her admission to a psychiatric hospital for forty-five days. But feminists who tried to explain that Bobbitt was a victim were attacked—they made her an “instant feminist pin-up girl,” lamented a column in the Baltimore Sun. A trial spectator called the Bobbitt knifing “every woman’s fantasy.” The media couldn’t separate rape and sex abuse from the comedy and tragedy of a missing penis. Writing in Mother Jones about the attack, Katherine Dunn summed up the media’s characterizations of Lorena in this way: “The female criminal violates two laws—the legal and cultural stricture against crime and the equally profound taboo against violent females.” Both Bobbitt and Fisher breached the barrier of womanhood in this way, and thus were denied their victimhood. They were savaged for their crimes because the ultimate betrayal of femininity is violence, and they had both crossed that line.
PATTERN OF ABUSE
The blame lobbed at Nicole Brown after she was murdered was typical for domestic violence victims in the 90s. Women who suffered domestic violence were faulted for not walking away from powerful abusers, especially when there were children involved. Domestic violence was widely believed to be a personal matter to be dealt with in the home, rather than what it actually is—a crime perpetrated (universally) to oppress women. The tide has since turned against star athletes accused of spousal and partner abuse. But it was in the 90s, during the O. J. Simpson trial, that the country was forced for the first time to confront the
epidemic of domestic violence. Sadly, Brown had to die and be blamed for it first.
Eighteen-year-old waitress Nicole Brown met thirty-year-old, world-famous, multimillionaire O. J. Simpson at a Rodeo Drive nightclub, the Daisy. They began dating before his first marriage ended. The couple was living together by the time Brown was nineteen. They married in 1985 and filed for divorce in 1992, the Year of the Woman. Some accounts describe Brown as a devoted mother to her two children with Simpson. Others framed her as a party girl who “zipped around Brentwood in a white Ferrari” (or a Porsche, or a Mercedes) and banked a hefty divorce settlement and monthly child support. Friends called her generous—she frequently picked up checks and gave babysitters hundred-dollar bills to take her kids to dinner without requesting the change. They also recalled her bluntness. She would criticize a friend’s bad haircut, or call Simpson an “asshole” if he was being obnoxious in public. Others thought her to be unapproachable. Close friends, like TV personality Kris Jenner, called her shy. “Nicole wanted her space and needed to keep her distance because she was going through a lot during those years,” Jenner told journalist Sheila Weller, who wrote the book Raging Heart about the Simpson marriage.
Brown’s story and character would ultimately be defined by others when she became a world-famous battered and then murdered wife. There were reams of evidence of the abuse she suffered at Simpson’s hands. Much of it was made public, some of it even prior to the murders. With only a quick Google search, you can hear chilling audio of Brown’s beatings and frantic emergency calls. She sounds terrified and also exhausted as she begs yet another 911 operator to dispatch yet another cop. “He’s going to beat the shit out of me,” she says in one such call from 1993. “He’s going to kill me! O. J.’s going to kill me.”
Before Simpson’s fame fueled the celebrity spectacle of his murder trial, celebrity worship, particularly by law enforcement, excused Simpson of an established pattern of assault and torture of his ex-wife. Simpson pleaded no contest to spousal abuse in 1989. The Los Angeles district attorney called the police handling of the case “a terrible joke.” Police arrived at Brown’s home to the sight of her leaping from the bushes covered in blood. Not only was Simpson not initially arrested, he fled the scene in his car. Officers didn’t chase his vehicle that time. Police reports logged Brown’s screams, Simpson’s threats, and the bedlam at the couple’s home. But some officers chatted up the former Heisman Trophy winner and courted his autograph. Gutless policing and a pushover judge allowed Simpson to dodge jail time. He breezed into a light sentence of phone calls with a counselor.
Not only did he remain a spokesman for the Hertz car-rental company after his conviction, but he was anointed an NBC News sportscaster later that same year. “We regard it as a private matter to be treated as such between O. J.’s wife and the courts,” Hertz’s executive vice president said publicly. Simpson defended his conviction at a press conference celebrating this plum gig: “It was really a bum rap. We had a fight, that’s all,” he assured his new employers and the media. Prominent sports agents speculated that Simpson never would have been hired had the “rap” been a drug charge. But domestic violence was, apparently, forgivable.
The injuries Nicole Brown suffered were many and multifarious. Photographs documented countless cuts and bruises. Police reports recalled her bloodied teeth, bald scalp where her hair had been torn out, and handprints on her neck from strangulation. Brown’s journals detail grisly acts of verbal, physical, and psychological abuse, in both private and public. A sushi bar manager recalled that Simpson once repeatedly shouted, “Fuck you, bitch!” to Brown at his restaurant. Simpson stalked her, controlled her, threw her from a moving vehicle, beat her during sex, and threatened her life.
These incidents, taken together, scream of Simpson’s guilt. But the prevailing sentiment about domestic violence in the 90s—that it was a private affair to be dealt with at home, not in public, and certainly not by law enforcement—made the case against O. J. less than bulletproof.
A CRIME OF PASSION
Marcia Clark has always called the Simpson-Brown relationship a classic case of domestic violence. But to many, Brown didn’t appear to be the pitiful victim. Even friends claimed that Brown wasn’t innocent in these disputes, calling her “feisty” and “not a doormat.” Weller, the journalist who spoke with some eighty friends, colleagues, and associates of Simpson and Brown for her book about the couple, later said that five people told her independently that Brown “knew how to push O. J.’s buttons.” Weller and others in Simpson’s inner circle believe that the story wasn’t a “classic” case of domestic violence murder, but rather “a crime of passion.” And while relationships certainly contain countless shades of gray, the fact is that Brown ended up dead.
“People looked and said, ‘Let them handle it in the family. It’s not a law enforcement issue. It’s not a crime,’” Clark told me. Victims felt the same way. The most common reasons they gave for not reporting abuse to police were the belief that it was private and personal, the fear of retaliation, and incredulity that law enforcement could help, according to a 1998 report on intimate violence by the US Department of Justice. While the prosecution established a pattern of Simpson’s abuse in their arguments and offered evidence and witnesses to support this, it wasn’t the thrust of their case. Clark says this was because jurors weren’t ready to hear a domestic violence argument, especially not when the abuser in question was a beloved sports and movie star.
Legal analysts blamed Clark for not hitting the domestic violence angle harder and failing to convince the jury that Simpson was “a wife beater turned killer.” Clark had an “‘emotional resistance’ to the issue, apparently related to memories of being raped as a teen-ager and having shoving matches with her possessive first husband,” according to a review of Clark’s memoir. The piece was headlined “The Wrath of Clark,” and suggested that her own victim identity inhibited the central argument in her case. It was like double victim-blaming.
Other legal commentators agreed with Clark that a jury would not naturally sympathize with a domestic violence argument. UCLA law professor Peter Arenella said on ABC News that it would be “very, very risky” for the prosecution to “attempt to portray this as a traditional domestic violence case culminating in murder, where the predominant theme is control,” because it could “open the door for the defense to show that this woman was not to be infantized [sic].” In other words, arguing that Brown was a domestic violence victim could backfire because plenty of her friends had said that she goaded Simpson. “Back in the day it was difficult to get jurors to believe that she didn’t have it coming, she didn’t ask for it. It wasn’t just a fluke,” Clark said. Journalists covering the trial agreed with Clark. “The domestic violence piece was definitely present,” former ABC News Los Angeles bureau chief Kathy O’Hearn recalled, “but was the culture as evolved and conscious of it? Probably not.”
If Brown or any other woman was being mistreated, why didn’t she just leave? How could she stay with an abuser and not protect her kids? Victims’ advocates say these are common questions and assumptions that encourage victim-blaming. Clark knew this knee-jerk response to domestic violence all too well. “As of 1994, the prosecutors knew in general that victim-blaming was wrong. I don’t think the public was all the way on board back then,” she said.
It wasn’t just defense teams and media commentators who shaped victim-blaming rhetoric, like the kind that applied to Brown, Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes, and Lorena Bobbitt. There was a broader problem with terminology in the courts and on the streets. Definitionally, at the time, domestic abuse was misconstrued. In the 1970s, psychologist Lenore Walker codified the term “battered woman syndrome” to characterize the “learned helplessness” victims in abusive relationships succumb to in order to survive. This pathology proved useful in early 90s court cases—BWS was often cited to help convict batterers and to exonerate women who killed their abusers in self-defense. In 1991, governors in
Maryland and Ohio reduced sentences for women jailed for assaulting or killing partners because they claimed to be victims of battered woman syndrome.
BWS was said to translate the victim experience for society, explaining victims’ inability to change their circumstances once trapped in cycles of abuse. It also buffered against victim-blaming. But the BWS theory—which was inspired by a study of dogs that didn’t leave punishing environments when given the choice—was later disproved as outdated, unspecific, and stigmatizing to apply to abuse victims, whose experiences weren’t all analogous. It wasn’t just refuted; experts called it “misleading and potentially harmful” because it created a victim stereotype that not all victims met. BWS painted all domestic violence victims with one brush—the helpless, injured, pathetic woman. If a woman was spirited, like Brown or Bobbitt, she didn’t fit the BWS victim stereotype, and her victimhood could be undercut or denied. For instance, when Lorena Bobbitt’s lawyer claimed that she suffered from BWS, John Bobbitt’s lawyer was able to shred that argument simply by recounting Lorena’s crime. Defense attorney Gregory Murphy told 20/20, “To portray [John] as this person who is very physically abusive based on her word and his denial and to say that she’s this poor person that can’t do anything, um, is ironic in light of the fact that she’s mutilating him.”
The Simpson defense team recruited Lenore Walker as a trial witness, to strengthen their claim that Brown was no victim. But Clark correctly avoided a prosecution strategy that focused on Simpson’s history of domestic violence. Thus, Walker was never called to the stand. Meanwhile, Simpson’s lawyers weren’t afraid to discuss his record of domestic violence because they knew they could convince the jury that it wasn’t related to the murders. They even renamed it to suit their purposes. Simpson had been involved in “domestic discord,” Johnnie Cochran repeated, suggesting mere arguments, maybe pushes or shoves. But they loved each other very much. That was the message. “See, we’ve been saying for months that the—the case regarding domestic discord was—it should not ever be part of this case. And so finally they accepted that,” said Cochran after the prosecution decided to forgo calling some domestic violence witnesses to the stand. Civil rights attorney and trial commentator Leo Terrell denied that batterings were connected to murder. “That’s faulty logic,” he told an interviewer.
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