by Gay Talese
“When you have sex,” Ebert quickly asked, “does your partner scream?”
Dibblee’s face reddened. Up until this point he had been courteous and cooperative, responding in the amiable manner that he practiced on airplanes; now, however, Dibblee had lost his composure, and, turning toward Judge Whisenant, he asked in a high-toned voice almost trembling with indignation, “Sir, do I have to answer that?”
“If it please the Court,” Ebert interrupted, “he’s the one who brought this up.”
The judge agreed with Ebert, and ordered Dibblee to respond.
“… On occasion,” Dibblee said sheepishly.
“What’s that?” asked Ebert, as if unable to hear.
“On occasion, I would say.”
“Every time?”
“No, sir,” Dibblee said, shifting on the stand, “not every time.”
“And do you force your girlfriend to have sex?”
“No, sir, I do not!” Dibblee declared.
“But she screams whether you force her or not?”
“Is this arousing to you that you’re asking me these kind of questions?” Dibblee asked, glaring at the prosecutor.
“What’s that?” shouted Ebert, unaccustomed to being challenged.
“Is this arousing to you that you’re asking me these kind of questions?”
“You answer my question, sir!” Ebert insisted, and at the same time he gestured toward the judge, who then turned toward Michael Dibblee.
“Mr. Dibblee,” Judge Whisenant said softly but formally, “just answer the question.”
“Can I hear the question again?”
“The question is,” said Ebert, “does your girlfriend scream whether you force her to have sex or not?”
“Your Honor,” said Lorena’s attorney Blair Howard rising to his feet, “I’ve got to object to this … this is totally irrelevant.”
“If it please the Court,” Ebert said, “… it’s not his witness, and, for that matter, I ask the Court to admonish Mr. Howard and have him sit down.”
As Blair Howard sat down, his colleague James Lowe got up to say, “Your Honor, I think we are reaching a point where going into his sex life is a little much on cross-examination—”
“If it please the Court,” Ebert cut in, “the very purpose for this man’s testimony is to establish that he heard somebody having sex, although he didn’t see it. He assumed from the noises that he heard that these people were having sex. And I think I’m entitled to inquire as to how he reached his opinion or conclusion. And they brought it out, I didn’t.”
“All right, sir,” said Judge Whisenant, “I’m going to allow that question because that was the purpose on direct examination. He was called and he so testified as to what was going on. There was no objection to that question. Go ahead, sir.” The judge nodded toward Dibblee, instructing him to answer Ebert.
“… Yes,” said the crestfallen Dibblee, “on occasion my girlfriend would scream while having sex.”
“More often than not?” Ebert asked.
“It varies, sir.”
“It varies?” asked Ebert. “And would it be fair to say that when you have sex she screamed more often than not?”
“Yes,” Dibblee went on, “I guess that would be fair to say.”
“Would she scream loud enough for other people as far as you’re concerned to hear it in the apartment project?”
“I wouldn’t know.”
Dibblee seemed to be almost listless at this time. He had entered the courtroom in the morning touted as a strong witness for the defense, but while on the stand he had been embarrassed and humiliated, and, when Ebert finally finished, Dibblee sighed with relief. After the judge had thanked him for his testimony, Dibblee left the courtroom and headed for the lobby. Along the way a reporter for the Washington Post caught up with him, and in the next day’s story Dibblee was described as “distressed.” Dibblee had told the reporter that he was en route to see his girlfriend, who was at home watching the trial on television. The Court TV Network was providing gavel-to-gavel coverage of the daily proceedings. The network had a national audience of approximately 14 million viewers.
The procession of defense witnesses who followed Dibblee to the stand were more successful than he had been in voicing their support for Lorena and emphasizing to the jury that her marriage to John Bobbitt had depressed her, had dehumanized her, and had brought her much physical suffering. Lynn Acquiviva, a customer at the nail salon that employed Lorena, recalled seeing her at work “with extensive bruising” on the top and sides of her head. Another customer, Roma Anastasi, described Lorena as characteristically “tense, nervous, and very sad.” A onetime neighbor of Lorena’s, Mary Jo Willoughby, had remembered her at times as “… hysterical … crying, just shaking.” The assistant manager at the Bobbitt couple’s apartment building, Beth Ann Wilson, told the jury that “Lorena seemed to be intimidated by John, had a hard time looking towards him.” One of Erma Castro’s daughters not only denounced John Bobbitt to the jury but presented them with some of the Polaroid pictures that she had taken of Lorena’s bruised body in 1991 after Lorena had quarreled with her husband and had sought refuge in the Castro household. These photos were offered in evidence by Lorena’s attorneys.
More than a dozen witnesses would testify on behalf of Lorena before she herself took the witness stand on the afternoon of the third day of the trial—Wednesday, January 12. For two and a half hours on this day, and well into the following day, Lorena sat answering the cordially posed questions of her attorney James Lowe, who was hoping to present her to the jury as a virtuous young woman who had been raised in a Latin American family that subscribed to the moral teachings of the Catholic Church.
“What is the family view concerning premarital sex?” Lowe asked.
“My family wouldn’t allow it,” said Lorena.
“What is the family view concerning unchaperoned dating?”
“My family wouldn’t allow it.”
“Did you have any unchaperoned dates before you came to America?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“What is the family view on abortion?”
“My family would not allow it.”
“On divorce?”
“My family would not allow it.”
“Was there any background of violence in your family as you grew up?”
“No, no.”
“How do you believe that differences should be resolved within the family?”
“My parents will close the door or just talk about the matter. Just resolve the problems talking. No yelling, no screaming, no violence.”
Her first experience with screaming and violence came via her husband, she said, adding that he was easily infuriated. She recalled a time when she was preparing Thanksgiving dinner in their new home in Manassas during her second year of marriage. Her mother was then visiting from Venezuela, and her husband, John, was sitting in the living room watching a football game on television. Lorena decided on her own to switch the channel to the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade, explaining to her husband as she did so that her mother would find this program more enjoyable than football. He reacted by jumping up from his chair, shoving her across the room, and then—after he had run out of the house and had climbed up on the roof—tearing down the antenna.
Lorena remembered that John had also behaved wildly and had manhandled her after they had gotten into an argument over what kind of Christmas tree they should purchase and display in their home during the holiday season. He had wanted a pine tree. She had preferred a plastic tree.
“To me, a plastic tree is a tradition,” she explained to James Lowe. “In South America, you can’t have pines. It’s not cold weather. So, I guess it meant a lot to me, because I grew up with a plastic tree.”
And how was this issue settled?
“He squeezed my face really tight, and he said, ‘Don’t tell me what to do,’ and he pushed me around,” said Lorena. “And he told me again, ‘D
on’t tell me what to do.’ And he slapped me and then he pulled my skirt up.”
“Did that put you in a mood to have sex?” asked James Lowe.
“No,” she said. “I escape. I ran away from him.”
James Lowe later asked Lorena to describe the morning of June 23, 1993, when, after her husband had allegedly raped her and had then fallen asleep, she had gotten out of bed and walked into the kitchen.
“I just tried to calm myself down,” she said, “and I pour some water from the refrigerator, and … the only light that was on was the refrigerator light, and I saw the knife.…”
“Do you remember cutting him?” Lowe asked.
“No, I don’t remember that. No, sir, I don’t remember that.…”
During the cross-examination, conducted by the assistant prosecutor Mary Grace O’Brien, Lorena was questioned further about what she remembered from the morning of June 23.
“You don’t remember cutting your husband’s penis off?” O’Brien asked.
“No, ma’am, I don’t.”
“It’s your testimony that the last thing that you remember was being in the kitchen, holding a knife?”
“Yes, ma’am. I was in the kitchen holding the knife.…”
“After time passed, you calmed down some, didn’t you, over the months that have passed since then?”
“Ma’am, it’s really hard to, even now, go through the situation. I really wish that I could forget about it.”
“I’ll bet you do,” O’Brien said sarcastically.
“Yes, ma’am,” Lorena said, tearfully. “I wish I could just forget about it.…”
O’Brien’s cross-examination continued for more than an hour, touching upon many phases of Lorena’s life—her girlhood in Latin America; her settling in Virginia under the guardianship of Castro; her working for Janna Biscutti as a nanny and nail sculptress; her involvement with John Bobbitt and her willingness, while claiming to be a practicing Catholic, to marry him outside the Church (“It was his idea,” Lorena told the jury). But O’Brien kept returning to the main question in this case: What was Lorena’s state of mind when she severed her husband’s penis on the morning of June 23? Had she been so traumatized and depressed as to be governed by what her attorneys called an “irresistible impulse”? Or did she attack her husband in a spirit of maliciousness? If the jury found her guilty of “malicious wounding,” she could be fined and could serve twenty years in prison. There was no doubt in the minds of Mary Grace O’Brien and Paul Ebert that Lorena had known what she was doing at the time, and had approached John Bobbitt calculatedly and maliciously. “This is a man who was asleep in his own bed,” O’Brien told the jury; “he was defenseless.” Instead of using a knife, O’Brien went on to say, Lorena should have left the apartment after the alleged rape and gone directly to the police station to file a report.
But the defense attorney Blair Howard differed with O’Brien when it came his turn to speak. Lorena had been unable to think clearly at the time of the cutting, Howard explained as he delivered his closing argument on Thursday, January 20, the seventh day of the trial. “This lady is ill,” he said, nodding toward Lorena, who was seated at the defense table, maintaining a posture of serenity as the eyes of the entire jury were now focused upon her. “This lady has been stripped of all dignity, of all self-confidence,” Howard continued in a soft voice that invited commiseration. “She’s been done in by the man she loved, the man that she tried to be a good wife to, the man she was faithful to. And as a result of all this battering, she needs a lot of help. She needs your help. And I would say to you that by your verdict, ladies and gentlemen, you can restore a little bit of self-respect so she can walk out of this courtroom not heaving and crying, but with her head up. It has been a tremendous ordeal. I know in my heart you’re going to do the right thing. And that’s because justice, ladies and gentlemen, is for all. For the weak as well as the strong. Thank you.”
By the time Blair Howard had sat down, it was midafternoon, and although Judge Whisenant had promptly dispatched the jurors into the deliberation room, the day ended without their reaching a verdict. Lorena left the court building shortly before 6:00 p.m., accompanied by her attorneys and her close friends Janna Biscutti, Erma Castro, and the latter’s two daughters. Lorena walked out into the cold wind and through the snowy sidewalks toward the parking lot, being greeted along the way by hundreds of Latin American supporters who held up signs reading NO ESTÁS SOLA (“You Are Not Alone”), and they were cheering repeatedly, “Lo-Re-Na … Lo-Re-Na … Lo-Re-Na!” She was hatless and wore a dark wool coat, and in her arms she held a teddy bear and a bouquet of flowers that someone had given her. Though she smiled and blew a kiss toward a camera crew, she refused to speak to the press as she slowly moved ahead through the crowd, closely guarded by two police officers and her friends.
“Sometimes women have to take the law in their own hands,” I was told by an Ecuadorean journalist who was standing next to me. Her name was Maria Gomez and she was covering the trial for a television station in Quito. “What Lorena did was very brave,” Gomez said as we watched Lorena climbing into Janna Biscutti’s car and being driven away. Parked along the curbs of the streets around the court building were nearly twenty satellite trucks, and among the masses of pedestrians were vendors selling penis-shaped pieces of chocolate candy and T-shirts bearing the messages LOVE HURTS, and MANASSAS, VA.—A CUT ABOVE THE REST. There had been a press release distributed earlier in the week by the town’s information bureau, reminding readers that the Bobbitt cutting had not occurred within the city of Manassas but, rather, within the territory of Prince William County.
On the following day, Friday, January 21, the court building’s lobby and corridors were once more filled with spectators and journalists who were eagerly anticipating the jury’s verdict. Throughout the morning and most of the afternoon the jurors had remained in the deliberation room, reviewing and debating the relevance of the evidence. At one point their discussions became so raucous that the bailiff knocked on the door and requested that they control themselves.
At 4:00 p.m., the jury sent a message to Judge Whisenant, asking him to clarify the meaning of “irresistible impulse.” After he had done so, the jury spent another hour in discussion. At approximately 5:00 p.m., they had come to a decision. This information was conveyed by the guards to the reporters and other people gathered in the corridor, and soon they were lining up and making their way into the courtroom, which within seconds was packed to full capacity. With the appearance of Judge Whisenant, followed by the arrival of the seven women and the five men who constituted the jury, the courtroom clerk called out in a stentorian voice, “Members of the jury, have you reached a verdict in the case?”
“Yes,” they answered collectively.
“Is this your unanimous verdict?”
“Yes.”
“Would the defendant please stand,” said the clerk. Lorena rose from her chair at the defense table. She was wearing a black skirt, a white silk blouse with a crucifix hanging around her neck, and her posture was perfect. Her three attorneys stood close by as the clerk proceeded to read aloud from a piece of paper that had been prepared by the jury foreman:
“… We the jury find the defendant, Lorena Lenore Bobbitt, not guilty of malicious wounding, as charged in the indictment, by reason of insanity.”
Gasps were heard throughout the courtroom. Lorena stood motionless, not indicating how she felt about the verdict. Finally she turned toward her attorney Lisa Kemler, who was positioned to her right, and asked, “Is that good?”
“Yes,” said Kemler with a slight smile. “You’re free.”
John Bobbitt had not been in the courtroom on this final day, but his foster parents, appearing that evening on Larry King’s television show, reported that John was “dumbfounded” by the jury’s decision. However, the executive vice president of the National Organization for Women, Kim Gandy, applauded the verdict. “We’re glad the jury rejected the twisted arg
ument that a battered woman should be locked up in a prison cell,” she said.
In the next day’s New York Times, an editorial writer posed the question:
What are Americans to make of the Bobbitt verdict? Some will pronounce it fair, a justification for revenge against abuse, and perhaps the verdict will indeed make some abusive men think twice before they strike again. But violence cannot be the standard answer to violence.
The Bobbitt case is the story of a violent, sick marriage that went over the edge. Maybe Lorena Bobbitt was temporarily insane, as the jury voted. Maybe driven by anger, weariness and suffering, she knew what she was doing but no longer cared.…
I returned home to New York thinking that I no longer cared, either, although I could not easily discount the fact that I had invested six months on this story and had little to show for it except for two thick folders filled with my notes and my ten-thousand-word magazine article, which Tina Brown had refused to publish in The New Yorker. After I had filed away this material near my desk—labeling it: “The Bobbitts—a work in progress (1993-1994)”—I thought that I would reread it someday soon, reminding myself that Tina Brown had said it might be worthy of a short book.
Years passed, however, and I never got around to doing it.
28
DURING THE ALMOST FIFTY YEARS THAT I HAVE LIVED AMONG millions of New Yorkers whose origins and spiritual beliefs are representative of most of the world’s nationalities, races, religions, languages, and eccentricities, I have become closely acquainted with very few of the city’s 400,000 residents of Chinese birth or ancestry—a circumstance that I attribute as much to their traditional reticence and insularity as to whatever Oriental wisdom and discriminating taste they may possess in keeping their distance from me.
I have, in fact, become friendly with only two Chinese New Yorkers. One is Dr. Allan Jong, a slender, bespectacled, and soft-spoken psychiatrist close to my age, who practices on Park Avenue and is one of nearly thirty children sired by an itinerant Cantonese merchant who had three wives and a dozen concubines. The other is Jackline Ho, a petite, strikingly attractive, and adventuresome woman I mentioned earlier, who resides near me in a penthouse apartment and also maintains hillside homes in Hong Kong and in the Kona district of Hawaii, and who is often accompanied to dinner parties and restaurants by two men from whom she is divorced—her first ex-husband, a homosexual, and her second, a heterosexual.