A Writer's Life (53 page)

My article went on to describe the family background of John and Lorena Bobbitt: how they met, why they married, the marital incompatibility that prompted a series of 911 calls to the police, and finally to the morning of the mutilation. I was not displeased with the article that I faxed into Tina Brown's office on Thursday morning, September 9, but I was then so tired after writing all night that my satisfaction was probably derived from having met my deadline. It reminded me of my youthful
days as a daily journalist, writing under pressure, doing my best, while realizing that I was capable of doing better had there been more time. After I had sent in my final page, I called the telephone operator at my motel, requesting that calls to my room be withheld. I wanted and believed that I had earned the right to sleep undisturbed for the remainder of the morning and into the afternoon.

When I woke up, it was nearly 4:00 p.m. I noticed an envelope tucked under the door. It contained a faxed letter from Tina Brown.

I was disappointed in the extreme. I had not only blown an opportunity to be published in
The New Yorker
but I had let down the editor who had in the past often professed admiration for my work, and on this occasion it had been me who had failed to fulfill a story idea that had been of my own choosing. Yet I believed that there was
still
time for me to redeem myself, so I immediately faxed her back:

A fortnight later, still thinking that I could salvage the situation, I accompanied John Bobbitt to his foster parents' home in Niagara Falls and joined several family members on Friday night, September 24, to watch 20/20. Before the program began, John Bobbitt had predicted that his wife would have tears in her eyes as she complained to the ABC correspondent about her marriage, and this turned out to be true. But I thought that she had probably gained considerable sympathy from the TV audience, and I myself responded favorably to a shot showing her seated on an upholstered chair in Janna Biscutti's living room, presumably reading a hardcover book that she held open in front of her. A close-up camera view of the book's title was clearly shown on the screen. It was
Unto the Sons
, one of my books that I had sent her.

Finally, on October 5, Tina Brown ended our correspondence about the Bobbitts.

In a gesture of generosity that sweetened to a degree Tina Brown's decision, she did permit me to attend the trials as a correspondent for
The New Yorker
. Although I did not tell my journalistic colleagues in Manassas that my assignment had been terminated, I now felt differently about myself as I sat in the courtroom each day among members of the working press. I sensed that I was now more an observer, less a reporter. I listened carefully to the proceedings, but I rarely took notes. I knew that if I someday wanted to describe the trials in a book of my own, as Tina Brown had suggested, it would be relatively easy for me to obtain all the transcripts and to go back and read old newspaper clippings that had dealt with the trials.

The “marital sexual abuse” case against John Bobbitt began on the early afternoon of Monday, November 8, after a morning in which many prospective candidates for jury selection had been interrogated and had finally been reduced to the required number. Nine jurors were women; three were men. This did not augur well for John Bobbitt, it seemed to me, but I would be proved wrong. After a three-day trial, during which much of Lorena's testimony was perceived by the jury to be contradictory and unconvincing—the female jurors were especially doubtful about the trustworthiness of her recollections—John Bobbitt was acquitted.

His foster mother, seated in the front row, suddenly leaped to her feet after the foreman's announcement and cried out, “Oh,
yes!”
John Bobbitt stood up, pumped his fist in the air, then turned to embrace his attorney, Gregory Murphy. The prosecutor, Paul Ebert, expressed disappointment. “I believed her,” he said at a news conference. He had little doubt that
Lorena had been raped, he reiterated, but he also believed “that what she did in response was not justified.” Lorena, who had gone home during the jury's four-hour deliberation, received the news via a cell-phone call made from outside the courtroom by Janna Biscutti. Lorena had listened quietly, and then began to cry. Her media consultant, Alan Hauge, had no comment for the press, although the ruling had all but negated his chances of obtaining enough money to finance a film built around Lorena's personal story. Such a project had been predicated on the assumption that Lorena's character would be presented heroically—a woman who had justifiably defended herself against a rapist husband, and such a characterization of John Bobbitt could now be refuted by his lawyer in light of the acquittal.

The acquittal had come about, according to one juror whom I interviewed after the trial, because the jury had placed a lot of faith in the physician who had testified that he had found no sign of forced sex when he had examined Lorena at the hospital. Another juror had further explained, “If someone had heard her scream, or if there had been some sort of bruising, that would have been more substantive evidence.” A third juror told me that in addition to Lorena's unconvincing recounting of what had occurred, she projected an uncertain presence on the witness stand—she had not looked directly at the jury, nor at her husband, as she testified; she had sat almost sideways on the stand, using her long and dangling dark hair as a kind of veil within which she cloaked her countenance. She seemed to be hiding from who she was.

Lorena, to be sure, would change all this when she next appeared before a jury at the “malicious wounding” trial, which would begin on Monday, January 10, 1994. She requested that her attorney, James Lowe, bolster the legal staff—he would add Blair Howard and Lisa B. Kemler. Kemler offered valuable advice on how Lorena should appear in court: her posture, what she should wear, her hairstyle.

“Lorena's a changed person,” one reporter remarked as Lorena walked into the courtroom with her attorneys on the opening day. “She's completely made over.” Lorena's long hair was pulled back in a clip from her face, making her complexion seem lighter, since it was no longer shadowed by low-hanging curls. With a crucifix hanging around her neck, she sat next to her attorneys at the defense table, and, when it came her turn to testify, she made eye contact with the jury and spoke with more clarity and less timidity than she had done at the first trial. Even before she had taken the stand, the opening statement delivered by Lisa Kemler described her as a woman of changeable character and impressionability, a frantic and fearful wife who had been provoked by a horrible husband
into behaving horribly. Lorena had been guided by an “irresistible impulse” when she had taken a knife to her husband, said Kemler, a slender brunette who wore a dark suit and directed her comments to the jury in a self-assured manner. “Ladies and gentlemen,” she said in conclusion, “what we have is Lorena Bobbitt's life juxtaposed against John Bobbitt's penis. The evidence will show that in her mind it was his penis from which she could not escape, that caused her the most pain, the most fear and the most humiliation. And I submit to you, that at the end of this case, you will come to one conclusion—and that is that a life is more valuable than a penis.”

Disagreeing with all this, of course, was the fifty-six-year-old prosecutor, Paul Ebert. He had lost the first case to John Bobbitt, and, making every effort not to lose again, he made good use of a blond and articulate thirty-five-year-old female attorney who worked in his office, Mary Grace O'Brien, who responded to Lisa Kemler's statement with one of her own. “This is not about self-defense,” said O'Brien. “It is not about insanity and most certainly it is not about a choice between a life and a penis. This is a case about anger. It is a case about revenge. And it is a case about retribution.” Taking a step toward the defense table and casting her blue eyes down upon Lorena, Ms. O'Brien said sharply, “What
she
did cannot be excused, it cannot be condoned, and it cannot be justified!”

During the eight-day trial, forty-two witnesses were summoned to testify before a jury that was made up of seven women and five men. One of the witnesses for the defense was a Continental Airlines flight attendant in his late twenties named Michael Dibblee, who, with his girlfriend, a United Airlines flight attendant, had been renting an apartment next door to John and Lorena Bobbitt at the time of the incident. Dibblee had returned home after an international flight on the evening of June 22. After sleeping for a few hours, he had been awakened before dawn by what he thought were the sounds of sexual activity coming from the Bobbitts' bedroom on the other side of the wall.

Dibblee was accustomed to hearing people having sex, often being registered in hotel rooms next to them when on extended trips away from home—and, thanks to Nytol, he usually managed to get his rest even amid the resounding rhythm of a headboard hitting against the wall within an adjacent room, set in motion by a copulating couple. But the sounds coming from the Bobbitts' bedroom in the early-morning hours of June 23 were “different from anything I'd heard before,” he said in a pretrial deposition and in interviews with the press. He explained that Lorena had been “screaming” in a manner that told him she was experiencing
little pleasure and much misery. It was possible that she was being molested.

Michael Dibblee was, therefore, a potentially valuable witness in Lorena's defense. He could lend credibility to her claim that her husband had raped and brutalized her on the morning of June 23. In the first trial, the jury had disbelieved her, in part because there had been no reports of screaming or sounds of a struggle coming from the Bobbitts' apartment before the cutting. Dibblee's failure to make his information known in time for use in the first trial had not helped the cause of the prosecutor, Paul Ebert. When Ebert later asked Dibblee why he had not told the police about the screaming when they had interrogated him shortly after the incident, Dibblee replied that he was not asked if he had heard anything; they had mainly seemed interested in his impressions of the Bobbitt couple, and, since he traveled so much, Dibblee could only say that he knew little about his next-door neighbors. He would greet Lorena from time to time on the staircase they shared, or in the parking lot, and he would sometimes see John Bobbitt at the pool, swimming, sunbathing, or trying to flirt with some of the young female bathers, including on one occasion Dibblee's own girlfriend, who responded to Bobbitt with immediate indifference.

Taking the witness stand at Lorena's trial, Dibblee explained to one of the defense attorneys, James Lowe, that he had flown in from Paris on the evening of June 22 and was fatigued as he arrived at his apartment and had soon gone to bed. His girlfriend, Lorna, was already asleep.