The dim-witted car mechanic charged with swiping actress Kirsten Dunst’s stuff during a film shoot at the SoHo Grand Hotel three years ago is insisting he had permission to be there because he was with the drug dealer who’d been invited to the shoot’s penthouse greenroom, he claimed this morning.
In a surprise new twist to an old celebrity burglary, the lawyer for James Jimenez insisted he’ll be cleared because there were drugs — he didn’t elaborate on kind or quantity — in the greenroom being shared by Dunst and British actor Simon Pegg, her co-star in “How to Lose Friends and Alienate People.”
“There is a very good explanation as to why my client was there,” defense lawyer Robert Parker told jurors in opening statements.
“There were drugs in the room of Kirsten Dunst and Simon Pegg,” he revealed, giving no details as to who the drugs belonged to.
“He obviously had permission to be there,” the lawyer said of his client.
Jimenez’s co-defendant in the burglary — in which Dunst lost a Balenciaga handbag holding $2,000 in spending cash for the shoot — was Jarrod Beinerman, who pled to the burglary in ’08 and is serving a federal heroin peddling sentence.
“Beinerman is a major New York drug dealer,” the lawyer told jurors.
Prosecutor Patricia Stolfi did not address the drug issue in her own openings.
Jimenez’s “Drug Dealers to the Stars” defense appears to have supplanted the defense under a previous lawyer that won him a burglary mistrial last fall: That Jimenez, who had academic difficulties as a youth, was simply too dumb to realize that Bienerman was casing and robbing the hotel as they prowled restricted areas for an hour.
Dunst is expected to testify early next week.
Last time around, there were no details revealed of any drugs being left in the $3,500-a-night penthouse suite where the bags and electronics of Dunst, Pegg and Dunst’s assistant went missing.
But Jimenez’s previous lawyer had tried unsuccessfully last year to enter into evidence Dunst’s rehab records, arguing he could thus impeach her ability to remember events.
And as she hair-flipped and giggled through her testimony last September, the lawyer, Daniel Hubert did ask her, “Were you partying?” before the theft.
“No!” she had answered sharply.