“You never have to keep quiet,” advises Lorena Bobbitt

Ecuadornews:

No one thought of the dignity of Lorena Bobbitt. When what happened happened, the police investigations, the races, the calls at night to locate the best surgeon focused on saving “the dignity of a man”, John Wayne Bobbitt, who was experiencing in his own flesh the “greatest fear of any man “: that his virile member was severed. The quotation marks belong to the police officers who on the night of June 23, 1993 went out to look for the penis “lost in action” (new police appointment) that Lorena Bobbitt cut in a state of “temporary mental disturbance” after years of enduring violations within marriage. After the castration, she threw the member through the window of the car in which she was fleeing her house in Virginia.

That happened 25 years ago and today, Lorena Gallo, a 48-year-old Ecuadorian by birth, believes that at last, in the times of #MeToo, history has rehabilitated her. The society and the media made in the 90 so many jokes, “they were so cruel,” that Lorena feels a certain reluctance to be interviewed. She does not want to talk about the past.

Now Amazon releases a documentary, Lorena, about what happened. “There’s everything,” she explains over the phone. When asked why she tells her story now, and responds that before “nobody ever offered me a project of the height, quality and respect like the one created by Jordan Peele for Amazon. They always proposed the wrong story, the sensationalist, and the one that spoke only of torn organs “.

She confesses that she has suffered some bad experience in the last days of promotion and that not all the press has treated her well: the morbid sells and the word penis next to the adjective cut triggers the audience.

“In Lorraine there is talk of stigmatization, of covert violence within marriage, of the abuses I suffered and that society lived as a joke,” she explains. The greatest exponent of that may be reflected by the award-winning Gay Talese, who covered the trial for the respected magazine The New Yorker and before the cameras questioned whether it was not an oxymoron to talk about rape within marriage.

She is no longer the black-haired woman who fell in love with a blue-eyed blond marine. Now she has a mission: “End the stigma of violence, that women, besides being raped, are not blamed for it or not heard, I want you to know that they are not alone, that they have a voice, that you never have to be silent”.

In one of the final scenes of the documentary she is seen sitting in front of a table covered with letters. They are from John, who kept on stalking her. There are some still unopened. In some he says that she will always be the love of his life and in others he raises ideas as deranged as having a son to tell him exclusively to a medium and to pay them a fortune. In one of the heap, she confesses: “Do you remember when you told me once that I did not know how to treat women? Well, you were right. “

Your mission to support women

Former manicurist, Gallo lives today dedicated to its foundation, Lorena’s Red Wagon, through which she raises money to help women in shelters that have suffered sexist violence. For the Foundation uses the name of Bobbitt, “because something good had to be taken out of all this pain, and that name has weight in this cause”.

She remarried, has a 13-year-old daughter and knows that education against violence, of any kind, begins at home. “I want her to be a free human being, without fear.” (I)

Source: https://www.expreso.ec/mundo/lorenabobbit-mujeres-medios-metoo-documentales-LD2647278