John Bobbitt Speaks Out on Night Wife Lorena Cut Off His Penis (Exclusive)

In 1993, John Wayne Bobbitt made headlines after his wife, Lorena, cut off his penis with a kitchen knife.

Thirty years later, in an exclusive interview with PEOPLE, Bobbitt says that he “understands” why his then-wife took such drastic measures, and is revealing what his first thought was after the severing.

“Freddy Krueger and Jason were really big back then,” John, now 58, says, referring to the Friday the 13th series involving the fictional characters. “So immediately, I thought Freddy Krueger did it. I was just one of his victims in deep sleep.”

The night of June 23, 1993, the former Marine and a friend returned to the Bobbitts’ apartment after a long evening out. Around 3 a.m., Lorena maintained that John came into their bedroom drunk and forcibly raped her, which he denies and was acquitted of at trial. As John slept, Lorena went into the kitchen for a glass of water. She then grabbed a knife, took it into the bedroom and sliced off her husband’s penis. 

“I was extremely tired, but immediately I thought, ‘Holy s—, it’s gone and I’m bleeding,’ ” he recalls. “You’re waking up into a nightmare.”

Immediately following the incident, Lorena fled the apartment with John’s severed penis in hand and threw it out the car window. The severed appendage was later recovered by the police and surgically reattached to John’s body following a nine-hour operation, per ABC News. 

Lorena, now 55, was charged with malicious wounding, a felony offense, but was found not guilty by reason of temporary insanity following a two-week trial in early 1994. She spent 45 days in a mental hospital.

The incident occurred as the couple’s four-year marriage was already on thin ice. In that four-year timeline, John had moved out several times and even impregnated a woman when he and Lorena were separated. Over the course of their marriage, the local police responded to half a dozen complaints of domestic violence at the Bobbitts’ home, per ABC News, but charges against both John and Lorena were eventually dropped.

During the trial, Lorena claimed her then-husband sexually assaulted her, beat her and used “Marine-type tortures” to force her into submission. Witnesses also testified that they had seen bruises on her body and that John had previously made comments about enjoying forced sex, per the Los Angeles Times.

John, however, denies ever being abusive toward Lorena.

He claims that, as a couple, they “didn’t have time to [themselves] to work on communicating.”

“That was a problem,” he tells PEOPLE, insisting that his wife was giving him the “silent treatment” for two months before the attack, calling it “emotional abuse.”

All these years later, John says he still has issues with the way the incident was handled.

“I was a victim of [Lorena’s] abuse, especially that night. She almost killed me,” he claims. 

The two haven’t spoken in years, but John claims he still “secretly” speaks to her mother on Facebook Messenger.

Still, John claims that when it came to his marriage and him personally, the public has been fed a “false narrative of the blame shifting and gaslighting.” To corroborate his claims, he alleges that Lorena was embezzling money from her employer, which the Los Angeles Times reported in 1993. In speaking to ABC’s 20/20 in 1993, Lorena’s attorney, James Lowe, said Lorena had taken the money to make mortgage payments in an attempt to save their home, according to the Washington Post.

“I didn’t try hard enough,” John says now of his marriage. “I wasn’t there for her when she was doing wrong, bad things and I didn’t know how to handle it.”

Lorena, he alleges, suffered “deep-seated emotional pain” from “rejection, abandonment, infidelity and neglect.”

Asked point-blank if he forgives her, he replies, “I understand why she did it. I broke her heart. Her heart broke, devastated.”

While his name was thrust into the spotlight in 1993, he again made headlines decades later after being diagnosed with toxic peripheral polyneuropathy, a condition linked to his time at Camp Lejeune, a notorious military base in North Carolina, where the water was severely contaminated in the 1980s.

John claims that the condition caused him to develop both nerve damage and osteomyelitis, a bone infection that leads to ulcers and requires skin grafts. In 2023, he had all his toes amputated, which he says left him unable to work at his job as a truck driver. He now wears prosthetic shoes and uses walking aids, such as a cane and scooter.

He believes the polluted water he drank for six months at Camp Lejeune also affected his marriage.

“I think it interfered with cognitive function,” he says. “I mean, we already had a problem with communicating because of the communication barrier. I couldn’t speak Spanish, and she couldn’t speak English that well.”

John and Lorena divorced in 1995. He married and divorced two more times.

Lorena, who now goes by her maiden name of Gallo, resides in Virginia with her daughter and partner of over 20 years and volunteers at an organization dedicated to helping survivors of domestic violence.

Lorena has also been involved in several of the projects that tell her side of the story, including Amazon Prime Video’s 2019 docuseries, Lorena, which was produced by Jordan Peele.

That same year, she told TIME that it felt like the world cared more about a body part than the alleged abuse she suffered behind closed doors.

“They were more concerned about his penis instead of domestic violence. They really missed the whole concept of domestic violence and abuse against women,” she said. “This is a very important issue that’s going on and you’re basically more concerned about the man who lost his penis.”

“It’s not like I woke up in the morning and said, ‘By the way, I’m going to cut my husband’s penis off.’ There was a history. It was not my intention to do that,” she continued.

Lorena did not respond to PEOPLE’s numerous requests for comment.