Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, September 24, 1993 TAG: 9309240085
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
"He would be on top of me . . . and he would use his two thumbs to actually choke me, and every time he did that, he hit me," Lorena Bobbitt, 24, of Prince William County, told ABC's "20/20" in her first interview since the incident in June.
"It felt like there's no air anymore. I kind of feel like I was going to pass out, and everything was white. . . . He choked me again, and that's how he forced me into sex."
Bobbitt faces trial on a malicious wounding charge stemming from the incident, to which she has admitted her involvement.
Her husband of four years, John Wayne Bobbitt, 26, has been charged with marital sexual assault - a charge he denies.
The incident grabbed international headlines and provoked a media debate on relations between the sexes.
In the interview with "20/20" reporter Tom Jarriel, Lorena Bobbitt described a pattern of fights and beatings that she said drove her to the mutilation.
"He told me that that kind of . . . forced sex excited him, and I would just cry."
She came to America as a tourist in 1985 at the age of 18, met John Bobbitt and married him shortly afterward. Trouble began almost immediately, she said. On at least one occasion, he was arrested and charged with assault and battery for hitting his wife in the face. They reunited in September 1992 after one year's separation.
The Ecuadorean-born Bobbitt said that after she told her husband she was pregnant, he said she would not be a good mother and suggested she get an abortion, which she reluctantly did.
She said she felt her husband, a former Marine based at Quantico, used hand-to-hand combat training on her.
John Bobbitt declined to be interviewed for the program, but his attorney, Greg Murphy, said his client absolutely denies abusing her.
"He is not known to be a person who is easy to anger," Murphy said. "There is nothing there other than her saying that this went on."
Lorena Bobbitt said that on the night of June 22, she had packed her bags to leave but spent the night at the house. She was asleep in bed with her clothes on when her husband and a friend came home after a night out drinking, she said. The friend went to sleep on the living room couch, she said, and John Bobbitt went into the bedroom and forced her to have sex.
Afterwards, "He said, `I don't care for you,' " she said.
"I was crying, and I just wanted to get a glass of water and I just turned, I was drinking the water and the first thing I saw was the knife,"
Asked what she was thinking at the time, Lorena Bobbitt said: "Things about the abortion. That I am not going to be a good mother. . . . So many things. He torturing me. When he was beating me up, when he had forced sex with me. Everything, it just came so fast."
Then she went back into the bedroom with the knife, lifted the sheets back and cut his penis completely off, she said.
She added that after she drove away, she discovered she was holding the penis in her hand, and threw it out the window into a field.
An emergency crew later recovered it, and it was reattached in a 9 1/2-hour operation.
He faces a jury trial Nov. 8. Her trial is set for Nov. 29. If convicted, both could serve up to 20 years in prison.
by CNB