When Lorena Gallo cut her husband’s penis off in 1993, what she claimed to have motivated the attack, marital sexual assault, had only just been legally recognized in all 50 states. Gallo’s defense was something called battered woman syndrome, a form of trauma experienced by women after prolonged periods of sexual or physical abuse, Web MD writes. For this reason, in legal settings, women who live with battered woman syndrome may not, therefore, be guilty of a crime committed against the perpetrator of their assault. Instead, they may have acted in self-defense.
To this day, battered woman syndrome is disputed, and battered woman defense remains controversial. On the night that Gallo admitted she mutilated her husband’s genitalia, among other instances of abuse over a long time period, she said her husband raped her, according to her court testimony, The New York Times reported in 1994. Since the verdict, among a theft conviction, John Bobbitt has faced a number of domestic violence accusations from a subsequent wife, all of which he denied, based on 2005 USA Today reports. However, he was found guilty of one of those assaults in 2003.
Read Related Also: Cause Of Death Confirmed For Toddler Found Dead In Alligator’s Mouth
In 1997, Gallo once again ran into legal trouble when she was charged with striking her mother, but she was found not guilty, according to Biography. Also in 1997, in one of the strangest and most controversial incidents caused by her infamy, Gallo, a native Ecuadorian, was invited to lunch with then Ecuadorian President Abdala Bucaram, according to CNN.
