WASHINGTON — In a case that has captured the lurid fascination of a nation, a 24-year-old manicurist from Venezuela went on trial in a small Virginia courthouse Monday for cutting off her husband's penis to avenge what her lawyers say was years of abuse and rape.
Looking tired but composed, Lorena Bobbitt was whisked through a phalanx of TV cameras and reporters in Manassas, Va., to face charges of malicious wounding in the same courtroom where her husband, John Wayne Bobbitt, 26, was acquitted in November of sexually assaulting her.
She faces up to 20 years in prison, if convicted.
In opening remarks to the jury of seven women and five men, Mrs. Bobbitt's lawyers indicated they plan to argue that she was driven to the mental edge by years of physical and verbal abuse by her bar-bouncer husband--driven to the point where, on the night of June 23, 1993, she cut off his penis with a kitchen knife in a temporary fit of insanity as he lay sleeping after what she says was a bout of forced sex.
Beaten so badly that she sometimes looked like she had been attacked "by a wild animal," pressured into having an unwanted abortion and constantly humiliated by her muscular, 200-pound, ex-Marine husband, Mrs. Bobbitt was the "classic battered woman," said defense attorney Lisa Kimler. In the end, Kimler said, she was driven over the edge by one sexual assault too many in the four-year "reign of terror" that was her marriage.
"What we have is Lorena Bobbitt's life juxtaposed against John Wayne Bobbitt's penis," Kimler said. "It was his penis from which she could not escape and . . . I submit to you that at the end of this case you will come to one conclusion: that a life is more valuable than a penis."
Drawing on testimony from friends, acquaintances and medical experts, the defense team will try to convince the jury that Mrs. Bobbitt surrendered to an "irresistible impulse" when she went into the kitchen of her Manassas apartment, came back with a knife and severed her husband's penis after he forced himself upon her after a night of bar-hopping and beer-drinking with a friend.
But John Bobbitt, taking the stand as the prosecution's first witness, denied that he had forced his wife to have sex with that night. He said she had initiated the love-making by fondling him in bed, but he was "too exhausted to perform" and quickly fell asleep.
