Fernando Sanchez Drago

Fernando Sánchez Dragó (2 October 1936 – 10 April 2023) was a Spanish writer and television host. A member of the Communist Party of Spain in his youth, he was imprisoned because of his opposition to Francoist Spain, and was in exile for several years. Later, he participated in organizations associated with the political Right such as the Manifesto Against the Death of the Spirit and the Earth in 2002, but described himself as an individualist libertarian anarchist. Author of more than 45 books, Dragó was the protagonist of a notorious controversy over his 2010 book with playwright Albert Boadella. The book, Dios los crea... y ellos hablar de sexo, drogas, España, corrupción [EN: God raises them... and they talk about sex, drugs, Spain, corruption...], boasted of Dragó having had sexual relations with two thirteen-year-old "lolitas" in Tokyo, 1967. Dragó boasted of not being able to be judged, because the crime had expired.

Fernando Sanchez Drago and Sex with 13-Year-Old "Lolitas"

On page 164, he wrote:

In Tokyo, one day, I came across some lolitas, but they weren't just any lolitas, but rather those that dress like sluts, with painted lips, lipstick, mascara, heels, miniskirts... They must have been about thirteen years old. I went up with them and the sluts started taking turns. While one went to the bathroom, the other one got down with me. [...] The criminals were them, not me.

"There is nothing like smooth skin, bud-like breasts, a pink pussy," he says. On page 159, before describing the encounter in Tokyo, the playwright Albert Boadella tells him that he likes women in their fifties. "Women, from 50 onwards, begin to have an irresistible attraction, they acquire a slow but intense erotic solidity," says Boadella. But Dragó answers him: "That is a point of dissent between us. I like those of 15."

The controversy around these statements was enormous, such that the union sections of Unión General de Trabajadores, Comisiones Obreras, and Confederación General del Trabajo in Telemadrid, where Dragó presented the program Las noches blancas, demanded his dismissal. The author responded that the anecdote was a provocative embellishment, and that the people alluded to were really older young women, with whom he never established relations.

Despite the scandal, Dragó was defended by the then president of the Community of Madrid, Esperanza Aguirre, and would be the subject of a manifesto in his defense written by his co-author Boadella, the renowned philosophers Fernando Savater and Gustavo Bueno, the writers Luis Racionero, writers such as María Dueñas, Montero Glez, Luis Alberto de Cuenca, Benjamín Prado and Juan Bonilla, and the Oscar-winning filmmaker José Luis Garci, among others.

Esperanza Aguirre argued that "The history of literature is full of stories of absolutely reprehensible acts. García Márquez, Henry Miller, Gil de Biedma... What's wrong, do we have to burn the books at the stake? Do we have to burn the authors?" In the Manifesto, the signatories defended freedom of expression against what they saw as modern-day book burning:

It is incomprehensible that such hatred should be unleashed against a writer for having referred , in an otherwise literary manner, to a fact unequivocally protected by law: having maintained some hint of sexual relations with minors who are over a certain age and who act with their full consent.