Cormac McCarthy’s ex-wife arrested in bizarre assault

Jennifer McCarthy, a former wife of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Cormac McCarthy, was arrested in a bizarre assault case in Santa Fe, N.M., last week. She was arrested on suspicion of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and released on $5,000 bail.

According to arrest records, McCarthy and her current boyfriend, whose name has been redacted, were arguing about space aliens Saturday morning. The boyfriend alleges that McCarthy went into her bedroom alone and came out wearing lingerie, with “a silver hand gun in her vagina.”

The boyfriend says she made sexual actions with the gun, then removed it and pointed it at him, saying: “Who is crazy, you or me?” According to his account, he took the gun from her and threw it in the toilet; after she attempted to retrieve it, he took the gun again and put it in a trash can outside. The police were then called.

“I observed a silver Smith and Wesson outside in the outside trash can,” a Santa Fe police officer writes in his report of the incident. “I retrieved the handgun and put it in my unit in a safe location. Jennifer was arrested and transported. ... Jennifer was booked on aggravated assault on a household member.”

Arrest records show that McCarthy told a different story. She said the two had argued and that she did have a gun but that it had been missing for some time.

The Smoking Gun, which first reported the story, reached out to the former Mrs. Cormac McCarthy for comment but received no response.

Cormac McCarthy and Jennifer McCarthy divorced in 2006. In early 1998, Cormac McCarthy, 64, wed the 32-year-old Jennifer Winkley. The two have a son together who is said to be the inspiration for Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “The Road.”

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