Jessica Michibata arrested for possession of MMDA in Tokyo hotel
The travails of the Michibata family are set to continue, it seems.
After Angelica Michibata’s husband was arrested for extortion, her career and reputation were left in tatters (not least because her involvement in the crime was also suggested). She later divorced her husband and made a comeback with a nude photo book in her mid-thirties.
The latest scandal to hit the glamorous Argentine-Japanese model family affects the most famous of the sisters, Jessica.
According to police announcement on March 20, the 38-year-old Jessica Michibata (one-time wife of F1 driver Jenson Button) was arrested earlier this month at a hotel in Tokyo for alleged possession of MMDA.
Commonly known as ecstasy, MMDA is a popular recreational drug taken by clubbers in other countries, but is heavily stigmatized (and illegal) in Japan. Police evidently named and shamed her as a way of publicizing the repercussions of involvement with the drug.
The media coverage of the Michibata case has inevitably veered into the wildly sensational territory, with some reporting saying she was arrested for possession of a “sex drug.”
Michibata was originally more of a lingerie model in the 2000s before breaking out into more mainstream fashion modeling and general celebrity, attracting a large fandom among women for her tips on beauty. Though she has been in the public eye less of late as she has got a little older and focused on raising a family, she is still famous and, as such, this is a massive scandal that she might struggle to recover from (and will gall many fans, no doubt, because MMDA use would see to contradict Michibata’s promotion of wellness, Chinese medicine, and a healthy-seeming lifestyle).
After years of other scandals, it was drugs that finally spelled the end of Erika Sawajiri’s career. Michibata might be able to claim the drugs were not hers (she has denied the alleged possession as well, according to media reports). This is probably the only feasible path to recovery for her (it worked for Yukipoyo, but she wasn’t actually arrested).
The details of the case are still hazy but it seems that Jessica Michibata was in the hotel room with her foreign boyfriend. The drugs arrived at the high-end hotel in Roppongi and that’s when the police pounced (the package was already caught by customs and authorities just followed the trail to catch the culprits). The drugs were, however, addressed to the foreign lover, so Michibata might have just been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The model, whose legal name is Jessica Celeste González Almada, was married to Jenson button for a year in the mid-2010s after what seemed like an eternity of an on-again, off-again relationship. She then gave birth to a child in 2017. The father was never made public, though it’s rumored to be Hollywood producer Ken Kao, with whom she was pictured in public at the time.
