On 12 March 1992, Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, partners in the multimillion-dollar television Praise the Lord (PTL) evangelism empire before he went to prison for fleecing his flock, notified the public they were divorcing. Tammy Faye had decided to divorce her husband after thirty-one years of marriage. He got the news at the Federal Medical Center in Rochester, Minnesota, where he was serving an eighteenyear sentence.

On 23 June 1993, in Manassas, Virginia, John Wayne Bobbitt reported to police that his wife, Lorena, had amputated his penis while he slept and threw it away while driving from the couple's home. It was later recovered, put on ice, and taken to the hospital where the appendage was reattached. Bobbitt was later acquitted of marital sexual assault; Lorena was acquitted of malicious wounding by reason of insanity.

In 1998, Chuck Burris was sworn in as the first African...