John Wayne Bobbitt remembers trying to stay calm the moment he realized his then-wife Lorena Bobbitt cut off his penis with a kitchen knife in 1993.
That year, on the morning of June 23, Bobbitt said his wife sliced off his appendage and fled their Manassas, Virginia, apartment with it.
Bobbitt recalled the incident for the ABC News “20/20” special titled “The Bobbitts: Love Hurts,” which is slated to air on Jan. 4. A preview snippet of the show was released Thursday.
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“It was a nightmare,” Bobbitt said. “I cleared my thoughts, applied pressure. I went to wake my friend up to tell him to get me to the hospital,” he continued.
Bobbitt said his friend was yelling and “going crazy” when he saw all the blood but was able to drive him to nearby Prince William Hospital in about 10 minutes.
Doctors initially asked to see Bobbitt's wrists to see if the blood was coming from a cut there.
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“The emergency room physician comes in and looks at John’s hands and wrists and says, ‘There’s no cut there,’ and, of course, John knew there was no cut there,” Dr. David Berman, the man’s plastic surgeon, told “20/20.” “And he [the doctor] goes, ‘Where’s all the blood coming from?’ and John points down below.”
Bobbitt said the doctor’s “jaw dropped” when he saw the reason why there was so much blood.
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Lorena Bobbitt, who has since remarried, infamously flung her husband’s appendage out of a car window after she fled their apartment. Officials recovered it and surgeons successfully reattached his penis.
“It’s normal now,” Bobbitt said. ‘I don’t want to mess with it… it’s been through the wringer.”
Lorena has spoken out about that night in previous interviews, as well. She said in court that John regularly abused her, both physically and sexually -- claims that he has denied. She said the slashing incident was set off over him returning home drunk and raping her.
Lorena Bobbitt was charged with malicious wounding and was found not guilty “by reason of temporary insanity” in a highly-publicized trial. She spent five weeks at a mental hospital. John Bobbitt was charged with “marital sexual assault and found not guilty in a separate trial,” ABC News reported. The pair divorced in 1995.