Fifteen years on the name Lorena Bobbitt still makes grown men squirm. But how does a woman who cut off her husband’s penis start anew, or find a man? She talks to Helena de Bertodano about that fateful night and her life after the scandal

Lorena Gallo - formerly Bobbitt - says that she only realised she had cut off her husband’s penis when she found it in her hand as she was driving away from their home. ‘I suddenly realised I was holding his member,’ she says in a tone of surprise. ‘I threw it out of the window just as I was passing a 7-Eleven.’

It is 15 years since that steamy night on 23 June 1993 when 24-year-old Bobbitt committed a crime so medieval and extraordinary that she made international headlines. As I wait for her at a restaurant near her home in Virginia, where we have agreed to meet, I wonder if I will even recognise her. The pictures I have seen of her date from the court case and show a grim-faced, frizzy-haired brunette. Instead I am greeted by a bubbly blonde who is so slim and tiny that she looks like she would have trouble swatting a fly. Behind her is a huge man, her boyfriend, Dave Bellinger, who, she says, will be sitting in on the interview. ‘As moral support,’ she explains in a soft voice, which bears traces of her Latin American roots.

Bellinger, who towers over both of us at 6ft 3in and is almost as broad as he is tall, glares at me and I do not dare argue. In fact, I feel a little out of my depth. It is one thing to interview actors and authors, quite another to interview someone who is famous only because she sliced off her husband’s penis. Besides, she has made it clear that she does not want to dwell on ‘the incident’. What else are we going to talk about? The weather?

We start haltingly, talking about property. Both Lorena and Bellinger work for a local estate agent and are very glum about the current market. Then we drift on to politics. Bellinger reckons it is a good thing Obama has chosen ‘bin Laden’ as a running mate: I assume he means Joe Biden. Next we study the menu: Lorena decides on a small cappuccino - ‘I can’t have a large one otherwise I’ll get shaky’ - and a wild-mushroom omelette. Bellinger orders almost everything else on the menu.

Lorena, now 39 and using her maiden name, Gallo (which translates as ‘cockerel’), is wearing a royal-blue shirt with matching royal-blue eyeliner, a black pencil skirt and wedge sandals. She wears a gold heart on a chain and has small, expressive hands - perfectly manicured (she still works part-time as a manicurist, the profession she had at the time of ‘the incident’). She has agreed to an interview to promote her new foundation, Lorena’s Red Wagon, which supports women in shelters, particularly those who have been victims of domestic violence. ‘My dream is to set up a shelter of my own one day,’ she says. At the moment she is busy organising a casino night to raise funds for the women. ‘When I talk to them I feel like I’m reliving my

On that basis, she is prepared to talk about her own experience of domestic abuse. As the daughter of a dental technician, growing up first in Ecuador, then Venezuela, she had a happy childhood, ‘although we were poor’. She came to America at the age of 18 ‘for a better life, because I see [sic] how my parents struggled. I wanted to live my American dream.’ And has she? ‘I’ve started. At first everything crumbled around me. I met the wrong person. I wish I’d had a crystal ball and could see the future.