Amy Chozick

Twelve years ago, social scientists cracked the code on how to get Americans to vote. Before a special election in Michigan, 100,000 households received slightly different mailers: One reminded them that voting was their civic duty. Another applied gentle social pressure by including the voting history of everyone in that particular household (“Who votes is public information!” it reminded them). The final flyer — and by far the most powerful — revealed the voting history of the recipients’ neighbors.

“What if your neighbors knew whether you voted?” it asked, along with a warning that after the election, researchers would “publicize who does and does not vote.”

“It proved to be the most effective intervention ever uncovered by an order of magnitude,” said Todd Rogers, a professor of public policy at Harvard who specializes in education and voting behavior.

The findings had the power to transform political organizing, especially for Democratic candidates who rely on high voter turnout. There was just one problem.

“It made people crazy and super irritated and offended,” Rogers said. “The underlying psychology is that when people feel like they’re going to be held accountable, they’re more likely to do it, but they also get really mad about it.”

So political groups backed away from the idea. For the next decade, even as we abandoned our privacy with a swipe of the opt-in button and as apps that rely on social pressure proved effective in dieting, parenting and saving for retirement, political organizers largely ignored the power of peer pressure. Then came 2016 and the election of Donald Trump.

“Not only did progressives lose, they were surprised they lost,” said Sangeeth Peruri, founder and chief executive of VoterCircle, a platform that allows users to tap into their address books and easily identify and encourage (that is, nag) eligible voters. Users have the option to see whether their contacts voted in past elections and whether they are registered Republicans or Democrats.

“Losing is one thing, but being surprised you lost is a failing of the system,” Peruri said. His platform, one of the first, started in 2015. But others soon followed.

The shock of Trump’s election galvanized several developers who had worked on Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns. Steeped in Silicon Valley debates about privacy, they wondered if they’d been too timid about harnessing the enormous trove of publicly available voter data. After all, party affiliation and voting history had long been used internally by campaigns. Maybe political groups needed to stop caring about people’s feelings if it helped get them out to vote.

Mikey Dickerson, executive director of the New Data Project and a former Google engineer who was chief of the U.S. Digital Service in the Obama administration, had learned about the Michigan survey in 2008, but he didn’t come up with his VoteWithMe app until 2017. The app outs anyone who didn’t vote in previous elections. (Alyssa Milano and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, looks like you both sat out the 2014 midterms.)

It identifies friends in competitive districts (with a fire emoji) and provides handy text-message reminder templates (“You gonna vote?”). “We looked around and didn’t think it had ever been done before — putting voter-file data directly in front of you as the end user,” Dickerson said.

Many in the technology industry initially scoffed at his idea. (“VoteWithMe is a creepy new app that checks your contacts’ voting history,” one article declared.) But several hundred thousand users downloaded VoteWithMe before the midterms, and Dickerson, who plans to step back and hand the technology over to like-minded groups, said lots of similar apps are springing up ahead of 2020.

“I am worried about the foundations of the systems of government surviving and an administration that puts kids in cages and separates families,” he said. “I’m not going to feel bad that some of my friends, unaffected by any of this, have a mild amount of discomfort because some jerk — probably me — can see whether or not they voted.”

The weight of peer pressure has a particular pull on millennials. They represent more than 30 percent of eligible voters, about on a par with baby boomers, but have the lowest voter turnout of any age group. Only 49 percent of voters ages 18 to 35 voted in the 2016 presidential election, according to the Pew Research Center. Democratic pollsters predict that increasing turnout among millennials by 10 percentage points would all but guarantee they defeat Trump in 2020.

In an era when privacy feels like a nostalgic notion and our political leanings can be more or less gleaned from where we live, how we dress and what we watch, is there even such a thing as the sanctity of the voting booth? After several celebrities learned the hard way that most states don’t permit photos inside the voting booth, last year California legalized “ballot selfies” (thank you, Kim Kardashian). The day of the midterm elections, 1,000 people a minute were posting Instagram stories with “I Voted” stickers, according to the company.

Developers said these turnout apps aren’t intended to shame anyone. As Debra Cleaver, chief executive of the San Francisco-based Vote.org, a nonprofit group that works to increase voter participation, put it: “We call it social pressure or social validation. ‘Vote shaming’ sounds like it was coined by a reporter because it makes you want to click.” (Fair.)

They say their primary purpose is “relational organizing,” or tapping into your social network to tell contacts about a candidate or election (as opposed to the old-fashioned and less effective “operational organizing” that involves dispatching volunteers to cold-call strangers). In other words, coastal liberals can make a difference while fiddling with an app on their sofas (“I know you’re going to vote on Nov. 6, duh, but make sure to remind your friends!” one text template reads), rather than flying to Iowa to knock on strangers’ doors. “I haven’t knocked on a door since 2014,” Cleaver said.

Buffy Wicks, a community organizer and former Obama campaign aide who was recently elected to the California state Assembly, said it doesn’t have to be “an either/or.” She hosted 239 house parties at which she encouraged supporters to download VoterCircle, but she also knocked on 115,559 doors. More than 100,000 people voted for her.

The rush to design apps to increase voter turnout is part of a wider push in Silicon Valley — trying to shake the taint of peddling fake news and Russian propaganda — toward “civic tech,” or innovations designed in the public interest. “There’s obviously a PR aspect,” Cleaver said. “But there is no way relational organizing apps can undo the damage that Facebook and Twitter have done.”

Nevertheless, the apps are gaining traction. Revolution Messaging and Phone2Action and other liberal websites allow users to pressure their representatives, raise money and support candidates. Republicans have developed apps to, for instance, bolster the National Rifle Association or donate to Trump’s re-election.

All of these, plus the individual apps that the armada of Democratic candidates running for president will soon offer, are enough to give anyone app fatigue. That’s why, in the coming months, Peruri of VoterCircle plans to rebrand his platform as OutreachCircle, making it a liberal one-stop shop to plan house parties, call your representative, advocate for a cause, give money to a candidate … and, if you’re so inclined, snoop on your friends’ voting history.

The goal is to eventually build habits so that rather than just ranting on Twitter, people can use OutreachCircle to keep their communities engaged, essentially performing the function of an old-fashioned neighborhood precinct captain or PTA president. “Our influencers aren’t Katy Perry. It’s your church leader or your high school coach,” Peruri said.

The apps are limited by often incomplete voter data (not even Silicon Valley can make the Board of Elections efficient). But Naseem Makiya, chief executive of Outvote, an app that worked with MoveOn.org and Beto O’Rourke’s Senate campaign, said preliminary results show that a single text from a friend makes people roughly 10.2 percent more likely to vote. Other developers said peer-to-peer messaging led to a 2 to 3 percentage point increase in turnout in November — enough to swing races in tight districts.

Robin Wolaner, 64, a retired executive in San Francisco, used VoteWithMe to identify friends and family in competitive districts in Pennsylvania. “Frankly, most of my friends don’t need a reminder to go vote for Nancy Pelosi,” Wolaner said. As for vote shaming (sorry, I mean social validation), she tried to gingerly remind contacts that their voting history was public.

“In some cases I sent messages saying: ‘Can this be right? Did you really skip the last midterm election?'” Wolaner said. “My kids would tell you I am a natural born nag, so it sort of fit my personality.”

Natasha Baker, 30, a lawyer in Washington, said she used VoteWithMe to encourage distant friends and family in Indiana and Virginia to vote. “It’s kind of creepy, I have to admit,” she said. But, she added, “If you have a friend who you can see voted in every election, you don’t have to spend your afternoon on that.”

Then there is the voyeuristic urge to snoop. Dickerson was surprised to see that the VoteWithMe app was trending in the Apple store days after the midterm elections. “It doesn’t make a ton of sense — we’ve had no ads or promotions since voting,” Dickerson said.

But to behavioral scientists, the downloads made perfect sense. “We are intensely social creatures and need to situate ourselves inside the collective,” said Robert Cialdini, a professor emeritus of psychology and marketing at Arizona State University and the author of several books on peer influence.

He cited a study he did at a Holiday Inn in Tempe, Arizona. His team compared the usual cards requesting that guests reuse their towels to protect the environment with several alternatives: One added that most guests of the hotel had reused their towels; another said that most guests “who stayed in this room” had reused their towels.

The last spurred a compliance rate of 49 percent, the largest spike in towel recycling the hotel had ever seen. “We think we’re free-standing individuals,” Cialdini said. But we “believe that the choice of our peers will work well for us, too.”

Maybe that was why I felt compelled one Sunday afternoon to sit in a coffee shop with a friend and scroll through VoteWithMe with the giddy enthusiasm of a sample sale. I learned that one friend who lives in the West Village, owns a Beto T-shirt and has been known to insufferably quote the Pod Save America bros didn’t vote in the past midterm elections. (You know who you are.) My uncle in Texas who watches Fox News, however, was designated a “strong voter.”

There may, however, be a fundamental flaw in the theory driving the apps. As developers work to expand them from hundreds of thousands of downloads during the midterms to mainstream use by millions before the 2020 election, they could be leaving out the very voters Democrats most need to reach.

The tendency of people to mimic their social networks — what behavioral scientists call homophily — could backfire in this case. Politically engaged people who download voting apps, and the friends they nag, will probably show up at the polls in greater numbers. But the opposite could be true for those in poor and disenfranchised communities where voting isn’t the norm.

Rogers, the Harvard public policy professor, pointed to a 2015 study that observed social pressure on students by making an SAT prep session sign-up sheet public. Students in the AP class signed up in greater numbers when they knew their friends would see the list. Sign-ups in the remedial class, however, where studying wasn’t as socially accepted, decreased. “The increased transparency could have unintended consequences,” Rogers said, “if you look at your network and see no one votes.”

Cleaver of Vote.org said she worried that this was a blind spot typical of Silicon Valley, an industry dominated by male engineers who are generally from privileged backgrounds. “Everyone wants the solution to increasing voter turnout to be an app, but turnout is low in this country because of decades of racism, sexism and voter suppression,” she said.

Cleaver, a self-described “tech person” who is backed by the startup accelerator Y Combinator, urged me to write about anything other than these apps. She proposed an article about the perils of voter registration still being tied to the Department of Motor Vehicles when a growing number of young people don’t have driver’s licenses. Or what about the problem with mail-in ballots that require a signature when young people don’t know cursive? Don’t even get her started on new voters being required to print forms. (“I mean, who owns a printer?”)

She said that the tech industry, once hailed as a savior, is undergoing an identity crisis for good reason. “The logical conclusion of technology is that it all goes terribly awry,” she said. For the 2020 election, her group, Vote.org, plans to spend millions of dollars on billboards.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/22/sunday-review/2020-election-voting-apps.html" id="8fe89fff-afe0-362d-aecb-8c532b03efa6">The New York Times</a>.

(Sunday Review) ; (News Analysis)

Can Peer Pressure Defeat Trump?

Fifteen minutes away was the gravel-strewn field where she disposed of the detached penis out the driver’s side window. So, why did she throw it away? I asked. “I tried to drive the car, obviously, but I had this thing in my hand so I couldn’t drive so I got rid of it.” Obviously.

Further down the road, is the nail salon where she worked and fled to that night. “I’m not a vindictive person because I told them where it was,” Lorena Gallo, as she is now known, said. By “them” she means the police who, sometime after 4:30 a.m., went digging through the overgrown roadside grass for the missing member. They found it, put it on ice in a Big Bite hot dog box from a nearby 7-Eleven and rushed it to the hospital where in a 9 1/2-hour feat of surgery it was reattached and restored to (almost) full function.

These are the details everyone knows. It’s the actual story, Lorena said — the one about a young immigrant who endured years of domestic violence, was raped by her husband that night, had nowhere to go and finally snapped — that she wanted to talk to me about.

“They always just focused on it ...” — as in her husband’s detached and reattached and then, a couple years later, surgically kind-of enlarged penis. That was all the media, before now, wanted to talk about. “And it’s like they all missed or didn’t care why I did what I did,” she said.

Lorena is correct, of course, that most people forget that before she was tried for what she did, John was charged with marital sexual assault. (He was acquitted.) And, she is correct that people forget that a jury found her not guilty by reason of temporary insanity.

We forget about the string of witnesses at her trial who testified that they had seen bruises on her arms and neck and that she had called 911 repeatedly and that John had bragged to friends about forcing his wife to have sex. In the years since the trial, he was arrested several times and served jail time for violence against two different women.

“This is about a victim and a survivor, and this is about what’s happening in our world today,” Lorena told me.

That is the story she tells in “Lorena,” a four-part, Jordan Peele-produced documentary that will debut on Amazon Prime Video on Feb. 15. And that is why she took a break from her work at her nonprofit, Lorena’s Red Wagon, that helps survivors of domestic violence, to show me where it all went down.

It has been 26 years since Lorena Bobbitt, a 24-year-old wounded bird of a woman with dark, wiry hair and sad, penetrating eyes became enshrined in the annals of popular culture. Today, even though she has physically transformed — now the picture of an upwardly mobile 49-year-old suburban mom with wispy blond hair — she has the same, sad, dark, orb-like eyes. And even though she goes by her maiden name and the media moved on (thank you, Tonya Harding), people meet Lorena in Manassas, and it doesn’t take long for them to make the connection that she is that Lorena in Manassas.

For a woman who has been a punch line for most of her adult life, Lorena “Bobbitt” Gallo is a surprisingly sincere person. That afternoon we grabbed coffee near the courthouse where in 1994 the world’s media had descended to cover the Bobbitt trial, and where inside Lorena, originally from Ecuador, trembled as she told a jury about how her husband, a former Marine, had repeatedly assaulted her.

In 1994, after she served a brief, mandated stint in a mental hospital, Lorena went back to her life as a manicurist. The nail salon, after all, had been Lorena’s refuge before and after the trial. She would talk to clients and learn that they, too, had been victims of domestic abuse. “That’s when I realized what happened to me could’ve happened to any woman in a desperate situation,” Lorena said.

She later did hair and sold real estate. She attended her Catholic church regularly and went to community college, where she met David Bellinger. The two were study partners and friends for years before they became romantically involved. The couple now have a 13-year-old daughter.

John went on to star in pornographic films (“John Wayne Bobbitt: Uncut” and “John Wayne Bobbitt’s Frankenpenis”). He became a fixture on “The Howard Stern Show.” Lorena did some press, but mostly resisted offers to turn their castration saga into a film or TV series. She turned down $1 million to pose for Playboy.

The filmmakers who approached her over the years never wanted to focus on the abuse, the story she really wanted to talk about. Even though the “War of the Bobbitts,” as People magazine called it, happened two years after Anita Hill inserted sexual harassment into the conversation and “Thelma &amp; Louise” turned a housewife and a waitress into renegade icons of female revenge, most people never really thought of Lorena in those terms.

Then, in 1994, O.J. Simpson was arrested and later acquitted in the murder of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend, Ron Goldman. That same year Congress passed the Violence Against Women Act. “The national dialogue that started with Anita Hill, Lorena Bobbitt, O.J. Simpson, finally created a national discourse that gave us some traction on legislation,” said Katie Ray-Jones, chief executive of the National Domestic Violence Hotline.

That was the version of the story that Joshua Rofé, a documentarian who had made “Lost for Life,” about juveniles serving life sentences in prison, wanted to tell. He explained that to Lorena when he reached out to her in December 2016, after reading about her work with domestic violence victims in HuffPost. They talked for nearly a year before Lorena decided the climate was finally right to tell her side.

It just so happened that at the same time, a wave of movies, documentaries and podcasts (“I, Tonya,” “The Clinton Affair,” “Slow Burn”) had shined new light on other women engulfed in scandals in the 1990s. “We were vilified by the media, vilified, and that is so sad. It happens to women,” Lorena said. Maybe, she figured, her story could finally get equal billing to John’s penis.

Not long after Peele won an Oscar for “Get Out,” Rofé casually brought up his fixation with reassessing Lorena Bobbitt. Peele devoured ESPN’s “O.J.: Made in America” and saw the makings of something similar in Rofé's project. “I loved the way that used 25 years of hindsight to look at this case that we thought we all knew, and I thought this spoke to gender dynamics in the way ‘O.J.’ peeled back the layers of racial dynamics,” Peele said.

The documentary mostly unfolds in 1993, the dawn of Court TV and a proliferation of gossipy daytime talk shows. “There is a third character to this story besides Lorena and John, and that is us, society, and what we did with the information we had available to us,” Peele said.

“Lorena” ends with the number for the National Domestic Violence Hotline, but the narrative itself doesn’t take a side. It relies on news footage and interviews with Lorena. John is extensively interviewed, too, from his home in North Las Vegas. He has maintained that he planned to divorce Lorena and that after he denied her sex that night, in a vengeful rage, she cut off his penis while he slept.

John said he hadn’t seen “Lorena,” but he said the filmmakers had set him up to make him look bad. “She was never abused; she was always the abuser, and she cut off my penis because I was going to leave her,” he said.

Back in the car, as Lorena pointed out the hospital where John had his surgery and where, just down the hall, she underwent a rape kit, I asked her if she regretted what she did. “How can you regret something you didn’t mean to do?” she said.

But I didn’t just mean did she regret committing the act. I meant, did she regret making John Wayne Bobbitt a household name? Did she regret giving him a modicum of fame and a small but steady lifelong income? “I don’t think I have anything to do with whatever he chooses to do with his life, you know, after the incident,” she said.

“The incident” — that is what Lorena calls the shocking crime that still makes many men grasp their crotch and assume she must be serving a life sentence. Before she agreed to put “the incident” back into the public’s imagination, Lorena talked to Peele, who explained to her that there would, inevitably, be comedy in this retelling.

“Lorena,” Peele told me, fits with his larger mission to make films that give voices to marginalized people, but it’s impossible not to acknowledge that the story has the dark, tragicomic underpinnings of a Coen brothers’ movie. “I’d be lying to you if I said there’s not humor in this story,” Peele said. He asked Lorena if she was OK with that. She told him she was.

“I was the subject of so many jokes in the ‘90s, and to me it was just cruel,” she said. But a couple decades later, Lorena understands that the reason she has a platform is because of the detached penis. “I’ll put myself through the jokes and everything as long as I can shine a light on domestic violence and sexual assault and marital rape,” she said.

It occurred to me that there would be no documentary, no Bobbitt jokes or permanent place in popular culture, had John severed some vital piece of Lorena. “They laugh,” she said several times during our afternoon together. “They always laugh.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/30/arts/television/lorena-bobbitt-documentary-jordan-peele.html" id="aa037774-45e5-30bd-aace-f51cca2f4b54">The New York Times</a>.

MANASSAS, Va. — Lorena is very matter-of-fact about the whole thing. There, she said as she drove us around in her Kia on a recent afternoon, was the hospital where surgeons reattached John Wayne Bobbitt’s penis after she cut it off with a kitchen knife as he slept on the night of June 23, 1993.

Lorena Bobbitt, in a New Light

Fifteen minutes away, near Maplewood Drive, was the gravel-strewn field where she disposed of the detached penis out the driver's side window. So, why did she throw it away? I asked. “I tried to drive the car, obviously, but I had this thing in my hand so I couldn’t drive so I got rid of it.” Obviously.

Further down the road, is the nail salon where she worked and fled to that night. “I’m not a vindictive person because I told them where it was,” Lorena Gallo, as she is now known, said. By “them” she means the police who, sometime after 4:30 a.m., clutched their loins and went digging through the overgrown roadside grass for the missing member. They found it, put it on ice in a Big Bite hot dog box from a nearby 7-Eleven and rushed it to the hospital where in a 9 1/2-hour feat of urological and plastic surgery it was reattached and restored to (almost) full function.

These are the details everyone knows and the ones Lorena recites with the stoicism of the waiter at the Tortino Mare Italian restaurant who hours earlier had relayed the specials for us. It’s the actual story, she said — the one about a young immigrant who endured years of domestic violence, was raped by her husband that night, had nowhere to go and finally snapped — that she wanted to talk to me about.

“They always just focused on it ...” — as in her husband’s detached and reattached and then, a couple years later, surgically kind-of enlarged penis. That was all the media, before now, before the Women’s March and the #MeToo movement, when we were all less evolved as humans, wanted to talk about. “And it’s like they all missed or didn’t care why I did what I did,” she said.

Lorena is correct, of course, that most people forget that before she was tried for what she did, John was charged with marital sexual assault. (He was acquitted.) At the time, marital rape only recently had been made a crime in all 50 states and was nearly impossible to prove in Virginia. Many in the media, including Ladies’ Home Journal and Gay Talese on assignment for The New Yorker, questioned whether it was an oxymoron. (“Wife Rape? Who Really Gets Screwed?” an earlier column in Penthouse read.) Al Franken, as character Stuart Smalley on “Saturday Night Live,” implored Lorena to apologize to John’s penis.

And, she is correct that people forget that a jury found her not guilty by reason of temporary insanity. We forget about the string of witnesses at her trial who testified that they had seen bruises on her arms and neck and that she had called 911 repeatedly and that John had bragged to friends about forcing his wife to have sex. In the years since the trial, he was arrested several times and served jail time for violence against two different women. (He denied the allegations.)

That is the story she tells in “Lorena,” a four-part, Jordan Peele-produced documentary that will debut on Amazon Prime Video on Feb. 15. And that is why she took a break from volunteering with her daughter’s volleyball team and her work at her nonprofit, Lorena’s Red Wagon, that helps survivors of domestic violence, to have lunch and show me around this bedroom community outside Washington, where it all went down.

It has been 26 years since Lorena Bobbitt, a 24-year-old wounded bird of a woman with dark, wiry hair and sad, penetrating eyes became so enshrined in the annals of popular culture that she makes a cameo in both a Philip Roth novel and Eminem lyrics. Today, Lorena is shy, a petite 117 pounds in a black blazer, tasteful black stilettos, diamond hoop earrings and a Louis Vuitton handbag. (She told me her weight because she had weighed 95 pounds in 1993, when John said she had assaulted him.) Even though she has physically transformed, now the picture of an upwardly mobile 49-year-old suburban mom with wispy blond hair, she has the same, sad, dark, orb-like eyes.

And even though she goes by her maiden name and, shortly after the trial, the media moved on (thank you, Tonya Harding), people meet Lorena in Manassas, and it doesn’t take long for them to make the connection that she is that Lorena in Manassas. “I live here. This is my home. Why should he have the last laugh?” she said when I asked why she didn’t move away.

That afternoon we grabbed a coffee at Jirani Coffeehouse, near the courthouse where in 1994 the world’s media had descended to cover the Bobbitt trial, where vendors sold “Love Hurts” T-shirts and penis-shaped candy, and where inside Lorena, originally from Ecuador, trembled as she told a jury about how her husband, a former Marine, had repeatedly assaulted her.

These days, the attention Lorena gets in this town is mostly positive. A woman who recognized her from a Zumba class ran up to us. “Lorena, right? My father-in-law has the biggest crush on you!” she said.

She smiled politely and posed for the photo. Because even though she didn’t want John, who continued to show up at her nail salon after the trial and still writes her love letters, to control her life, she knows that she cannot run from that phallic last name, not when you are Lorena in Manassas. “I know I am still Lorena Bobbitt,” she said. “That name you know, it’s very important here.”

For a woman who has been a punch line for most of her adult life, Lorena “Bobbitt” Gallo is a surprisingly sincere person. That is the first thing I noticed about her when we met. She hugged me hello, coming up to my neck in heels, and I was struck at how warm and maternal she was. We talked about being moms and our naturally curly hair. I asked when she decided to go blonde. It wasn’t long after the trial when a man she worked with at a salon offered to give her highlights. She wasn’t trying to disguise herself or anything, she said, “It’s like ‘oh, your roots are showing,’ so little by little I became blonder ... .” And just like that, a straight iron and some hair dye and the scared young woman splashed on the cover of tabloids morphed into the sophisticated advocate who now sat across from me.

Only later did I realize that we had had the kind of easy conversation of manicurist and client. The nail salon, after all, had been Lorena’s refuge before and after the trial. She would talk to clients and learn that they, too, had been victims of domestic abuse. “That’s when I realized what happened to me could’ve happened to any woman in a desperate situation,” Lorena said. She hopes to open her own shelter. “When I was abused, I went to the salon and I didn’t have the key and had to sleep in my car outside,” she said.

In 1994, after she served a brief, mandated stint in a mental hospital, Lorena went back to her life as a manicurist. She later did hair and sold real estate. She attended her Catholic church regularly and went to community college, where she met David Bellinger. The two were study partners and friends for years before they became romantically involved. She never dated anyone else, she said, because, well, how can you date, really, when you are that Lorena? The couple now have a 13-year-old daughter and live on a tidy street in a cream-colored brick house.

“When I finished with the trial, in the beginning, geez, I couldn’t even go to the grocery store because people would say, ‘Oh my God, You know what, I know you.’ I just wanted to put my groceries down and go home,” Lorena said in still accented English. “I just wanted to take care of myself and my family. You know, just to integrate myself into normalcy and a normal life.”

John went on to star in pornographic films (“John Wayne Bobbitt: Uncut” and “John Wayne Bobbitt’s Frankenpenis”). He became a fixture on “The Howard Stern Show.” “I don’t even buy that he was raping her,” Stern said on one segment with John. “She’s not that great looking.” Lorena did some press, but mostly resisted offers to turn their castration saga into a film or TV series. She turned down $1 million to pose for Playboy. “A million dollars is a million dollars,” she said. “It would’ve been amazing. But I wasn’t raised that way.”

Men, speaking from Charlie Rose's table and Geraldo Rivera’s armchairs, made Lorena seem like an unsatisfied, unhinged wife who had dealt a ghastly blow in the gender wars. And while many women defended Lorena and wondered what John must have done to drive her to it, some feminists argued that she had hurt the cause, making the sisterhood look deranged. “It was like, ‘Oh yeah, so now a lot of women are going to do this,' ” remembered Katha Pollitt, who wrote about the trial for The Nation. “I do not remember Lorena Bobbitt, feminist hero.”

Domestic violence activists tried to refocus the conversation. “Nobody cared about anything except John and his surgery and his ‘loss,' ” said Kim A. Gandy, a former president of the National Organization for Women. “We did a lot of interviews and the approach was often something like ‘Well, that’s what you feminists wanted all along.' ”

So, even though most portrayals of Lorena made her seem like, in her words, “this crazy, jealous lady,” the Bobbitt trial did play a part in the laws changing.

That was the version of the story that Joshua Rofé, a documentarian who had made “Lost for Life,” about juveniles serving life sentences in prison, wanted to tell. He explained that to Lorena when he reached out to her in December 2016, after reading about her work with domestic violence victims in HuffPost. They talked for nearly a year before Lorena, motivated by her outrage about the election of Donald Trump and, months later, the #MeToo movement, decided the climate was finally right to tell her side.

It just so happened that at the same time, a wave of movies, documentaries and podcasts (“I, Tonya,” “The Clinton Affair,” “Slow Burn”) had shined new light on other women engulfed in scandals in the 1990s. Lorena identified with Harding and Monica Lewinsky. “We were vilified by the media, vilified, and that is so sad. It happens to women,” she said. Maybe, she figured, her story could finally get equal billing to John’s penis.

Rofé said that before his talks with Lorena, he’d thought about the Bobbitt case (“the original clickbait,” he called it) like most people did. “I grew up being told it was common knowledge that some crazy white lady cut her husband’s penis off in a fit of vengeance,” he said. “It was this red-hot thing that everybody got wrong.”

Not long after Peele won an Oscar for “Get Out,” Rofé casually brought up his fixation with reassessing Lorena Bobbitt. Peele devoured ESPN’s “O.J.: Made in America” and saw the makings of something similar in Rofé's project. “I loved the way that used 25 years of hindsight to look at this case that we thought we all knew, and I thought this spoke to gender dynamics in the way ‘O.J.’ peeled back the layers of racial dynamics,” Peele said in a phone interview.

The documentary mostly unfolds in 1993, the dawn of Court TV and a proliferation of gossipy daytime talk shows. In Rofé and Peele’s hands, the 24-hour news cycle becomes a voracious, multiheaded monster that eventually engulfs everything. “There is a third character to this story besides Lorena and John, and that is us, society, and what we did with the information we had available to us,” Peele said.

“Lorena” ends with the number for the National Domestic Violence Hotline, but the narrative itself doesn’t take a side. It relies on news footage and interviews with Lorena, sitting in her living room. John is extensively interviewed, too, from a lounger in his home in North Las Vegas. He has maintained that he planned to divorce Lorena and that after he denied her sex that night, in a vengeful rage, she cut off his penis while he slept.

In a phone interview, John, who was in New York preparing to tape “The Dr. Oz Show,” said he hadn’t seen “Lorena,” but he said the filmmakers had set him up to make him look bad. “She was never abused; she was always the abuser, and she cut off my penis because I was going to leave her,” he said.

I asked John about the additional charges that the film covers, including a harrowing interview with one of his ex-girlfriends who said he tied her to the bed in his Niagara Falls, New York, apartment and for several days repeatedly raped her. He was convicted and spent time in jail.

“It’s all made up, and I’m tired of it,” John said. “I was with a lot of women, a lot of women and none of them ever complained, except Lorena —” He paused. “And Joanna.” After we discussed the allegations, he proposed we keep talking over dinner at the Empire Hotel where he was staying. I declined.

Back in the car, as Lorena pointed out the hospital where John had his surgery and where, just down the hall, she underwent a rape kit, I asked her if she regretted what she did. “How can you regret something you didn’t mean to do?” she said. She explained, again, what she told the jury in 1994. John came home drunk. He raped her. She went to the kitchen to get a glass of water, spotted the kitchen knife and was overcome from years of abuse. She doesn’t remember anything after that. “To me, regret is ‘Oh, I bought a black car instead of a red car’ when you don’t choose right,” Lorena said. “I wasn’t in my conscious mind.”

But I didn’t just mean did she regret committing the act. I meant, did she regret making John Wayne Bobbitt a household name? Did she regret giving him a modicum of fame and a small but steady lifelong income? But Lorena doesn’t think about things like that. Again, she told me, there are only choices. The black or the red car. “He can choose. It’s his life. Basically, I don’t think I have anything to do with whatever he chooses to do with his life, you know, after the incident,” she said.

“Lorena,” Peele told me, fits with his larger mission to make films that give voices to marginalized people, but it’s impossible not to acknowledge that the story has the dark, tragicomic underpinnings of a Coen brothers’ movie. The first episode, after all, follows small town policemen digging around a field for a missing penis. “I’d be lying to you if I said there’s not humor in this story,” Peele said. He asked Lorena if she was OK with that. She told him she was.

“I was the subject of so many jokes in the ‘90s and to me it was just cruel,” she said. “They didn’t understand. Why would they laugh about my suffering?” But a couple decades later, after a lot of therapy, Lorena gets it now. She understands that the reason she has a platform is because of the detached penis, because of the hot dog box and Frankenpenis and that unforgettable last name. “I’ll put myself through the jokes and everything as long as I can shine a light on domestic violence and sexual assault and marital rape,” she said.

At one point, we drove along in silence. I looked over at Lorena, her hands gripping the steering wheel at 10 and 2. She stared straight ahead at the road, the same road she had been on that night in 1993, a night that even though she didn’t want it to, has defined her life. It occurred to me that there would be no documentary, no Bobbitt jokes or permanent place in popular culture, had John severed some vital piece of Lorena.

“They laugh,” she said several times during our afternoon together. “They always laugh.”

Last month, when Julián Castro filed the requisite paperwork to run for president, he had to add an accent over the a in Julián by hand. The Federal Election Commission apparently hadn’t planned for a candidate with a Spanish name.

It’s one of the many ways his candidacy as the only (so far) Latino in the Democratic 2020 field will make the country contemplate its future. Castro knows that he is the longest of long shots, but he is nothing if not a product of his hometown, San Antonio — an often underestimated, predominantly Hispanic, American microcosm.

In recent years, some commentators on the right have expressed fear about what a “majority minority” country would look like. The answer is that it would most likely look a lot like San Antonio, where 64 percent of the city’s 1.4 million residents are Hispanic and unemployment is below the national average.

After serving as mayor of San Antonio from 2009 to 2014, Castro, 44, became the secretary of housing and urban development under Barack Obama. But his strongest selling point as an antidote to President Donald Trump and his immigrant bashing might be his runty, but wildly successful, experiment of a hometown.

“At this time when the nation feels so polarized, I saw exactly the opposite in my community,” Castro told me. “A place where people of different backgrounds generally got along very well together.”

San Antonio, 150 miles north of the Mexican border and 80 miles south of Austin, is a petri dish of the country’s future. It’s a place where wage growth has surpassed the national average, housing is 13 percent cheaper than the national average and those who earn the median household income of $56,774 can get a single-family home, access to a good public education and tickets to the occasional Spurs game.

The low cost of living and the healthy economy, bolstered by jobs in tech and cybersecurity, have made San Antonio the fastest-growing city in the country for the past several years, and given it the nation’s second-fastest-growing population of millennials, according to the Brookings Institution. The number of residents is expected to double in the next 20 years, with 66 people added daily, according to census data.

Julián and his twin brother, Joaquin, who is a Democratic congressman representing the 20th District of Texas, graduated from San Antonio’s public schools several years before I did. Tales of the overachieving twins were local folklore. Their images are painted on the walls of the Pico de Gallo Tex-Mex restaurant and in a mural at Mi Tierra Cafe y Panaderia, along with that of the slain Tejano singer Selena.

We share the same scrappy underdog attitude that comes with being from San Antonio, a working-class city flanked by military bases and overshadowed by Austin, its ritzier and (in my unpopular opinion) insufferable neighbor. The seventh-largest city in the country by population, San Antonio sprawls across 465 square miles of craggy terrain of mesquite trees and cactuses, giving it an unpretentious, small-town feel.

New Yorkers mostly know it as being the home of the Alamo. Sometimes they’ll say to me, “Oh, isn’t there a river there?” To which, I usually joke that, yes, as a matter of fact, it is the Venice of Texas. (It is nothing like Venice.) Even when the Spurs racked up national NBA championships, the coastal sports media dismissed them as boring. (Luckily, another local hero, coach Gregg Popovich, is around to belittle said national media.)

“We’re not Houston or Dallas, we don’t boast,” said Leticia Van de Putte, a San Antonio native and former state senator who ran for lieutenant governor of Texas in 2014. “We never give ourselves the ‘atta boys’ or ‘atta girls,’ it’s not in our nature.”

If you spend enough time in San Antonio, it’s hard not to run into one of the Castro brothers. (“Half the time they think I’m my brother,” Julián Castro said). When we were both back home, Castro and I usually caught up over tacos, so, just before Christmas, when he was in New York, I met him at La Esquina, a taqueria in midtown.

“Not as good as Texas, but not bad,” Castro said, a cautious politician’s verdict on the $4.99 barbacoa tacos that we both knew would have been fluffier and cost 99 cents in San Antonio.

We spent the first few minutes catching up on local gossip — a mutual friend; The San Antonio Express-News holding a grudge because he didn’t give it an exclusive about his plans to run. (“They put my story in the Metro section!”)

When asked by reporters why he was running, given that he hardly registers in the national polls, Castro talked about his hometown. “I said, ‘Go to my neighborhood that I grew up in — nobody was the front-runner there,'” he recalled. Castro will base his campaign in San Antonio, starting with a kickoff rally next Saturday.

Until recently, San Antonio was reliably red, but like much of the Southwest, it has been transformed into a battleground by its young and Latino population, bad news for Republicans fearing an increasingly purple Texas. In the midterms, every major statewide candidate, including Sen. Ted Cruz and his Democratic opponent, Beto O’Rourke, poured resources into winning San Antonio.

“Julián’s rising to the national stage is really symbolic of San Antonio’s trajectory” — and, by extension, the country’s, said Jenna Saucedo-Herrera, president and chief executive of the San Antonio Economic Development Foundation.

Part of Castro’s candidacy will be educating voters about what it means to be an acculturated Mexican-American, identifying not with Mexico or “los gringos,” but as a uniquely American, comfortably hyphenated blend of the two.

After writing in the accent on his FEC paperwork, Castro talked briefly with local reporters in the little yellow living room of his house on San Antonio’s Northwest Side. The political press jumped on the painting of the Virgin of Guadalupe that hung behind Castro — a sign he would be appealing to Latino voters! — but Castro just calls that his living room.

It infuriates Castro that Republicans knock him for not speaking fluent Spanish. “There’s a stinging irony in that these people were saying you weren’t good enough before because you didn’t speak English well enough, and today, somehow you’re not good enough because you don’t speak Spanish well enough?” he said.

In 1922, Castro’s maternal grandmother emigrated from Coahuila, Mexico, to Eagle Pass, Texas, and worked as a maid. Like many children of immigrants, his mother, Rosie Castro, a civil rights activist and single mom, raised her own children to speak English.

For all its growth, San Antonio remains starkly divided by income. Castro’s wife, Erica Lira Castro, works in the Harlingen Consolidated Independent School District on the city’s South Side, where 1 in 5 people live below the poverty line and where she grew up.

Castro went from Jefferson High School, with a 95 percent Hispanic student body, to degrees from Stanford and Harvard Law. But we both are sometimes snubbed back home for not having attended Alamo Heights High School, the public school on the city’s wealthier side of town. It’s become this running joke.

In December, I asked Castro if he thought the joke would stick, now that he is preparing to run for president, and ready to make the case that San Antonio should be this country’s future. He has accomplished so much already, we both laughed, without Alamo Heights.

“Oh, well,” he said. “Imagine what I could’ve been.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/05/sunday-review/julian-castro-2020-president.html" id="ebcf5944-1e3e-34b0-af11-24f7a750bf24">The New York Times</a>.

(News Analysis) ;  (Sunday Review)

Is America's Political Future in San Antonio?

But in the swirl of reporting and speculation about the 45th president, nothing has held viewers on the edge of their seats quite like the special counsel, Robert Mueller, and his investigation into possible ties between Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russian agents.

The storyline had it all: Cold War-era intrigue, allegations of shadowy meetings in Moscow and a cast of recurring characters that included an aide in a $15,000 ostrich skin jacket (Paul D. Manafort) and another who has a tattoo of Richard Nixon on his back (Roger Stone).

Mueller’s complete report has not yet been released, but on Sunday, Attorney General William Barr made public a four-page letter to Congress reporting that the 22-month inquiry did not have sufficient evidence to conclude that Trump and his associates “conspired or coordinated with the Russian government” before the 2016 election. The news blindsided many liberals — particularly those with an ambient knowledge of Rachel Maddow’s nightly monologues on MSNBC.

Who could blame them? The news media’s coverage of the investigation, particularly on cable TV, caused millions of Americans who disapprove of Trump to put their faith in Mueller. There were even prayer candles, key chains and paintings made in the likeness of the silent 74-year-old Marine veteran, and his fans believed his looming report would bring, in the words of the “Bachelor” creator Mike Fleiss, “the most dramatic finale of a presidency ever!”

When that didn’t happen, Trump and his allies placed blame on the news media for its ravenous coverage. “I think Democrats and the liberal media owe the president and they owe the American people an apology,” the White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, said on NBC News’ Today.

Rich Lowry, the editor of the conservative National Review, wrote on Twitter, “The 3 biggest losers from the Mueller report in order — the media, the media, the media.”

It was a bipartisan ripping. Matt Taibbi, a Rolling Stone writer whose book on the 2016 election is titled “Insane Clown President,” is not exactly a fan of Trump. And yet he called the apparent lack of new charges resulting from the special counsel’s investigation “a death blow for the reputation of the American news media.” He compared it to the erroneous reporting on weapons of mass destruction in the run-up to the Iraq War.

Hogan Gidley, a White House spokesman, said that, by his count, The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN and MSNBC had published a combined 8,500 stories on the Russia probe. He specifically pointed to CNN and chyrons that would include the phrase “amid Russia investigation,” no matter what the topic.

“It’s so painfully obvious they wanted it to be true so badly, and the last two years of their lives and two years of their news coverage has been an entire waste,” Gidley said.

Jeff Zucker, president of CNN, said he was “entirely comfortable” with the network’s coverage.

“We are not investigators. We are journalists, and our role is to report the facts as we know them, which is exactly what we did,” Zucker said in an email. “A sitting president’s own Justice Department investigated his campaign for collusion with a hostile nation. That’s not enormous because the media says so. That’s enormous because it’s unprecedented.”

Bill Grueskin, a professor at the Columbia School of Journalism, said there seemed to be some confusion about the role of journalists. “Mueller and Barr need to prove beyond a reasonable doubt — do we file charges or don’t we?” he said. “Journalists don’t have that standard.”

In other words, Pulitzer Prize-winning reports of alleged wrongdoing do not need to provide evidence of criminality in order to be factual, newsworthy and relevant to readers.

“The special counsel investigation documented, as we reported, extensive Russian interference in the 2016 election and widespread deceit on the part of certain advisers to the president about Russian contacts and other matters,” said Martin Baron, executive editor of The Washington Post. “Our job is to bring facts to light. Others make determinations about prosecutable criminal offenses.”

Dean Baquet, the executive editor of The Times, echoed that sentiment. “We wrote a lot about Russia, and I have no regrets,” he said. “It’s not our job to determine whether or not there was illegality.”

But in the nearly two years of the Russia investigation, there have been several high-profile mea culpas.

ABC News apologized and parted ways with its chief investigative correspondent, Brian Ross, after an errant report that Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser, had been directed by Trump to make contact with Russian officials during the 2016 campaign. Three seasoned investigative journalists at CNN resigned after the network retracted a report that a close Trump aide had ties to a Russian investment firm. Mueller publicly rebuked a BuzzFeed News account that Trump had instructed his longtime lawyer Michael Cohen to lie in his testimony to Congress. (BuzzFeed News stood by its reporting.)

“It’s pretty clear that a lot of people in the media, particularly on cable news, got ahead of their skis on this,” said Michael Isikoff, a co-author of “Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin’s War on America and the Election of Donald Trump.”

Ben Smith, the editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed News, defended coverage of the Russian investigation, including the decision to publish a dossier put together by British intelligence officer Christopher Steele full of tantalizing (and unsubstantiated) reports about Russian efforts to blackmail Trump.

“It’s pretty hard to imagine a scenario in which people were aware of its existence but not allowed to see it,” Smith said of the dossier.

The editor also expressed concern that journalism was so often churned — and reduced — through the filter of partisan punditry.

“I think it’s a moment when the public conversation favors partisans who are totally convinced in the rightness of what they’re saying and doesn’t favor reporters who are cautious about what they know and are trying to get things right,” Smith said.

That may be true, but in the current ecosystem of political news, when shoe-leather reporters moonlight as cable news analysts, it can be hard for typical viewers to distinguish the pundits from the press.

Even if more damning findings come out in the full report, Trump has already cast the narrative that he is absolved and that the “fake news” media is to be blamed, said Kevin Madden, a Republican strategist and former adviser to Mitt Romney.

“You see the president’s most vocal supporters, they’re touting the headlines that the president was exonerated and vindicated and where are the apologies from the media?” he said.

Those apologies aren’t likely to come, as long as the same people who have been trying to erode trust in factual reporting are now ones demanding a reckoning.

“We will hold every fake news media liar member accountable,” Sean Hannity wrote Sunday on Twitter.

Fleiss, the producer, who knew Trump in his “Apprentice” years, said cable news had taken a page from the president’s reality TV playbook in teasing every development in the Russia investigation as if it were the final blow.

“He’s a master exaggerator, been doing it his entire life,” Fleiss said. “The rookies tried to keep up and got burned.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="7cb4384d-0ae9-4151-809c-8fa43c06c499" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/25/business/media/mueller-report-media.html">The New York Times</a>.

After Mueller report, news media leaders defend their work

There have been tipping points and bombshells, walls closing in and turning points. And there have been so, so many declarations of “The beginning of the end!” that comedian John Oliver had a recurring “We got him!” segment on his late-night HBO show, complete with a jubilant marching band and sequined majorettes celebrating President Donald Trump’s downfall.

Politics

Local

World

News

Celebrities

Music

Movies

Entertainment

Sports 

Fashion

Beauty & Health

Relationships & Weddings

Food & Travel

Lifestyle

Domestic

International 

Business

Explore categories

Checkout our authors for the latest content across entertainment, sports, business and more. Be first to receive exclusive updates with your free subscription straight to your phone | Pulselive Kenya

Authors | Pulselive Kenya

| Pulselive Kenya

Read the latest news across entertainment, sports, business and more. Be first to receive exclusive updates with your free subscription straight to your phone | Pulselive Kenya

Breaking News & Top Stories | Pulselive Kenya

Pulse Kenya is the most followed news and entertainment platform in Kenya. It informs and engages young Kenyans around the clock and provides updates by the hour.

Pulselive Kenya

Search for the latest content across entertainment, sports, business and more. Be first to receive exclusive updates with your free subscription straight to your phone | Pulselive Kenya

Search Results | Pulselive Kenya

Watch the latest videos across entertainment, sports, business and more. Be first to receive exclusive updates with your free subscription straight to your phone| Pulselive Kenya

Amy Chozick

Articles written by the author

Can Peer Pressure Defeat Trump?

Lorena Bobbitt, in a New Light

Lorena Bobbitt, in a New Light

Is America's Political Future in San Antonio?

After Mueller report, news media leaders defend their work