“They caught me with what I was consuming”

The figure of Jimmy Giménez-Arnau, who died at the age of 80, has dominated the headlines of the day. His career across so many television sets has marked the schedules of the programmes. Anecdotes and events have glossed his memory. One of the events, his arrest for alleged cocaine trafficking.

The arrest took place in 1994, outside Telecinco where Jimmy worked. The Narcotics Section of the Judicial Police Brigade of Madrid arrested him for an alleged crime of cocaine trafficking, according to a report published by The Country.

Shortly afterwards, the writer himself recounted how he experienced that arrest: “They caught me with what I was consuming.” That episode left its mark on him. It cost him his professional life and led him to isolate himself in a chosen retreat that helped him write his book. Jealousywhich is “a gem” of a book, Beatriz Cortázar has pointed out in And now Sonsoles. He was not bitter. He wrote every day and his writing was part of his DNA,” he stressed.

This was not the only problem he had with the law. According to the same newspaper, in 1987 he was sentenced to one year in prison and 1.1 million pesetas in compensation for assaulting a former partner, Jorge Bascones, in a fight that had taken place four years earlier.