Rant #2,681: The First Cut Is the Deepest

June 23 is a day of infamy for two not very nice people who had their 15 minutes of fame on this day … or maybe their couple of inches of fame, depending on how you slice it.
 
On June 23, 1993, Lorena Bobbitt had had enough of her marriage to John Bobbitt, and the alleged abuse reached a point where not only did she want out of the marriage, she wanted to make sure that her husband knew why she wanted out of the marriage.
 
So that night, as he slept, she took out a knife, and to his horror, chopped off his … well … lower extremity.
 
She discarded it, and made sure he would never find it again.
 
This case set off a firestorm of talk that actually lasted way longer than 15 minutes, and for a few years, the two new media personalities were ubiquitous on every form of media that was available back then, and they literally became the butt of jokes related to the incident.
 
Just to make a long story short about the legalities of the case, John was acquitted of rape and other sexual charges against this wife, while Lorena was found not guilty of her actions due to insanity, which basically blinded her to what she was doing, giving her an irresistible urge to dismember her husband. She served some type in a Virginia mental hospital, and then was released.
 
But of course, the story did not end there, making it certainly one of the most exploitive stories in history.
 
The two did not divorce until 1995, which kept them in the news for two years beyond the actual incident.
 
And after they were divorced, John kept in the news, related to the aftermath of his dismembering.
 
Although his wife discarded the lower extremity hoping that it would never be found, it actually and incredibly was found, and John had it surgically reattached to his body in a series of procedures that had begun earlier in this episode.
 
The procedures cost thousands of dollars, which he didn’t have, so he launched several endeavors to try to pay his bills.
 
He tried rock and roll, forming a band called The Severed Parts, but when that venture failed, he proved to the world just how well his surgery actually went by appearing in an adult movie, where … well … I think you can figure it out.
 
But although he was acquitted of raping his wife, in the intervening years, he was arrested several times for assaulting others, and the last time that he made the news was in 2014, when he was in an auto accident and broke his neck.
 
I can find no further word about him, but from what I have read, he isn’t in the best of shape.
 
Lorena attempted to keep a low profile after she left the mental hospital, but like her ex-husband, she made news again when she assaulted her mother, a charge she eventually was acquitted of.
 
Currently, she is in a long-term relationship and has a young child.
 
Incredibly, the duo appeared together on “The Insider” TV show in 2009, and it was revealed that John still loved his ex-wife, to whom he apologized to on air, and that he still sent her Valentine’s Day cards and flowers each year to show his love to her.
 
And last year, to further exploit the legacy of this incident, Lifetime aired a made for TV movie of which Lorena was executive producer and narrator.
 
This story was really a cut above the rest, and its exploitive value may have only been topped by the O.J. Simpson trial and possibly the “Long Island Lolita” situation.
 
Can you imagine if this happened today, what with the Internet and social media having a chance to swirl around it?
 
But even without those things to catapult it into some other world of chatter, the case still held its own in the annals of yellow journalism.
 
I mean, who couldn’t be entranced by not only a story about sex, but a story pitting a wife against a husband where the wife actually did what many women could only dream of doing to someone they believed sexually abused and attacked them?
 
It is almost funny—or maybe serendipitous—that the actual trial came out a wash, with neither party being convicted of anything. Lorena had to serve some time in a mental institution, and John got whatever he may have deserved by the act itself, but there were no convictions at that trial, so I guess you can say that they both got what they deserved, with neither one of these heinous people getting what they wanted.
 
So there you have it.
 
What is just another day on the calendar for most of us is a day that completely changed the lives of two people who didn’t deserve the notoriety that they received, but became media darlings because of the very nature of what got them that notoriety.
 
I guess the moral to the story is to do what you can to say in one piece—
 
Both figuratively and literally.