As Lorena Bobbitt is the first to acknowledge, hers is an ordinary life. Married with a college-age daughter, together the family enjoy simple pleasures like film nights or walks in the sunshine.
'So far, so good,' she says. 'I can't complain, we are happy.'Certainly, today, 55-year-old Lorena would live in relative anonymity were it not for one startlingly notable thing.
'The whole world knows I cut his penis off,' as she herself puts it. 'There's no way to candy-coat it; that's what happened.'
The penis in question belonged to her then-husband John Wayne Bobbitt, a former marine two years her senior to whom Lorena had been married for four years when, on a Wednesday evening in June 1993, she sliced it off with a butcher's knife.
Lorena and John Wayne Bobbitt at their 1989 wedding. Lorena claims that domestic violence and sexual abuse soon followed but he has always denied the allegations
Lorena pictured arriving at the court house in Manassas, Virginia, in 1994 for the first day of her trial on charges of malicious wounding
She then drove from the family home in Manassas in northern Virginia and threw the severed member into a field, where it was later retrieved by police and infamously preserved on ice in a hot dog box before, via the extraordinary skill of surgeons, being reunited with its owner following nine hours of surgery.
The case sent shockwaves around the world and even now, 31 years after the event, the Bobbitt name remains fixed in the public imagination (not to mention the Oxford English Dictionary, where it is defined as a byword for having something vital removed).
Yet as a compelling new ITV documentary reveals, contrary to public assumption, the case was far from an isolated one. It was one of many around the world.
Speaking to perpetrators as well as psychologists and a British male victim, the programme explores what drives someone to commit such an act and why individual cases continue to exert such fascination.
Lorena believes she has some idea, saying that even today the world at large 'misses the essence of what this whole story was about', often assuming it is the act of an unhinged 'psychopath'.
'There was no element of revenge in my case,' she insists. 'I didn't want anyone to suffer. That's not who I am, so it's not why I did it. It's about what put me in that position.'
Certainly, by anyone's reckoning, Lorena's was a love story that went sour. She was just 17 when she arrived in the US from her native Venezuela and was working in a nail salon when she met the handsome and charming John Wayne.
It was not long before he proposed with a ring he had found at the bottom of a swimming pool.Following their wedding in 1989, what Lorena calls the 'red flags' came quickly, with the relationship quickly mired in domestic violence and sexual abuse (John Wayne has always denied these allegations).
Lorena today. She claims: 'The whole world knows I cut his penis off. There's no way to candy-coat it; that's what happened'
A compelling new ITV documentary called I Cut Off His Penis: The Truth Behind The Headlines, will air on ITV1 and ITVX at 9pm tonight
'The escalation of abuse was not only physical - there were bruises on my arms, on my legs, shoulders, on my face - and it escalated to the point that I was raped,' she claims.
'Trapped' and 'scared', Lorena felt that she nonetheless had no option but to stay. 'There's no way out,' she says. 'He told me: 'No matter where you go I'm always going to find you.' How can you leave like that?'
Even so, Lorena admits she has no idea why the incident that would come to define her finally happened. 'It could have happened Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday... any day of the week,' she says. 'It just happened to be that day: June 23, 1993.'
She claimed that she had fallen asleep after a long day at work when she woke to find John on top of her. 'I was half asleep, half awake, I was like: 'What's going on here?' That's all I remember,' she says. 'I know that I went to get a glass of water, I don't remember seeing the knife; I don't remember any of that.
'The next thing I do remember was that I was driving in the car and I had the penis in one hand, and the knife in the other hand.
'I couldn't drive straight, I have no idea how I got into the car,' she recalls. 'I got scared and I threw it out of the window, his organ. I was not in my right frame of mind. There was no way I could plan this; I mean who would plan this?'
Four months after John Wayne's surgery which reunited him with his penis (he famously went on to be a porn star), a jury found him not guilty of rape, and a few months later his now-estranged wife was acquitted of 'malicious wounding' on the basis of temporary insanity. She was ordered to spend 45 days in a mental hospital.
The trials were a global media circus, with food and drink stalls set up outside court and vendors selling branded t-shirts.
While the Bobbitt surname remains notorious for something that was seen as a unique crime,
bokep chindo in fact, as Jacqueline Helfgott, a professor in the Department of Criminal Justice at Seattle University, explains bluntly: 'Men and women have cut off penises since the dawn of time.'
What's more, on occasions countries see 'outbreaks', she explains: 'If you look historically there's lots of examples of penis cutting around the world. And there have been waves of what's happened in countries like Vietnam, Kenya - so in a community where you have one, you see patterns of a series of women. A whole wave of that could be a contagion effect.'
Thailand was among the countries that experienced this in the 1970s, with what Dr Apirag Chuangsuwanich from Siriraj Hospital in Bangkok calls 'an epidemic of
amputations' with approximately 100 cases of 'penicide' nationwide.
'We started receiving such patients one after the other,' he reflects. 'I believe it led to copycat incidents. In some cases the wife had tried to destroy the severed part by flushing it down the toilet or throwing it to animals to eat.'
So prolific were the occurrences that the Ministry of Public Health began sending out information leaflets explaining how to preserve severed organs (one tip was to use hand pressure to stop excessive bleeding). Latterly though, the cases have dwindled to almost nothing. And while the majority of penile amputations are committed by partners, it isn't always the case.
Four months after John's surgery which reunited him with his penis (he famously went on to be a porn star), a jury found him not guilty of rape
The documentary examines the troubling case of a New Yorker called Brigitte Harris, who cut off her father's penis following years of sexual abuse as a child. In poignant interview footage Brigitte, now 43, recalls how, after her mum walked out on her when she was just two years old, she and her older sister were raised by their father Eric. Within a year, he had started physically and sexually abusing her.
'I thought I was being punished, that I was the bad person, it was my fault that I was the bad guy,' she recalls. 'I couldn't understand sex, rape, sexual abuse, any of these terms, I was a child.' At one point Eric took his daughters back to his native Liberia, where he continued to abuse Brigitte, until she managed to borrow enough money to buy a flight to New York when she was 17.
She worked hard to rebuild her life, becoming a courier driver and a security guard at JFK Airport until, in her mid-20s, she learned that Eric had returned to the US.
When she visited her sister, to find her five-year-old niece sitting on her father's lap, something inside her snapped.