10 Most Bizarre Ways To Become Famous

The incident that made John Wayne Bobbitt’s name occurred sometime during the night on June 23rd 1993. His wife Lorena got out of bed, went to the kitchen and returned with a knife, which she used to cut off John’s penis at the base as he slept.

*we hereby pause for a genital intermission while all the guys reading this shiver with uncontrollable horror for a moment*

Back again? Good good. The ladies are on the next paragraph now, boys. Time to catch up.

Lorena left the apartment with the appendage in question (because a forced penectomy is pretty much the biggest mic drop you can give a marriage) and drove off, throwing Little John Wayne out of the window. She thought better of it when she realised the magnitude of the thing she’d done and called 911 - incredibly, they found the missing piece and managed to successfully reattach it in an operation that lasted nearly ten hours.

The legal horrors surrounding what I’ve decided to call The Night Of The Eunuch took well over a year to resolve, with accusations of serious, constant spousal abuse and rape offered as a pretty damn reasonable justification for the spontaneous maiming. A year or so later, the two were divorced, which kind of seems like an anticlimax after all that. Cage match, surely?

In the year or so following the notoriety that his dramatic snippage occasioned, Bobbitt tried to monetise the most traumatic moment of his life by forming a band called The Severed Parts, with little success. That’s when he turned to porn, as these godawful people tend to do so often, starring in two adult movies, one of which was called Frankenpenis. The less said about that, or indeed anything else Bobbitt-related, the better.