[Pastilan] The elephant in Sara Duterte’s room

It took three laborious days of impeachment proceedings for opposing lawyers to reach an agreement on a proposition that required no forensic ingenuity whatsoever. It took three long days for them to agree on something everyone already knew happened in the unholy hours of November 23, 2024.

Fact: Vice President Sara Duterte ran amok during a hastily convened Zoom meeting with reporters and influencers, spewing invectives and admitting that she had instructed a hitman to assassinate her 2022 running mate, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.; his wife, First Lady Liza Araneta-Marcos; and his cousin, then-House speaker Martin Romualdez, should she herself be killed.

This is the thing about courts and lawyers. They dance around the obvious, spending grueling hours establishing what every Tom, Dick, and Harry already knows. That, however, is the price — and the virtue — of due process. It is tedious precisely because it is meant to leave as little room as possible for doubt. 

It is also a luxury that Duterte’s father Rodrigo denied the thousands of “Tokhang” victims — the innocent, the guilty, and those who simply happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Yet it is a luxury now fully extended to the biggest Duterte nepo baby of them all.

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Sara Duterte threats vs Marcos justified, defense says. Are they really?

The fact now established is disarmingly simple. The nearly three-hour Zoom meeting, which began at 12:32 am on November 23, 2024, culminated in a death threat — whether one prefers to decorate it with the adjective “conditional” or not — directed at the President, the First Lady, and the Leyte representative. Sara Duterte uttered the following words:

• “‘Wag kang mag-alala sa security ko kasi may kinausap na ako na tao. Sinabi ko sa kanya, ‘pag pinatay ako, patayin mo si BBM, si Liza Araneta, at si Martin Romualdez. No joke. No joke.” (Don’t worry about my security because I’ve already spoken to someone. I told him that if I get killed, he should kill BBM, Liza Araneta, and Martin Romualdez. I’m not joking. I’m not joking.)
• “Nagbilin na ako, ma’am. ‘Pag namatay ako, ‘wag ka tumigil hanggang hindi mo mapapatay sila. And then he said yes.” (I’ve already made arrangements, ma’am. I told him, “If I die, don’t stop until you’ve killed them.” He said yes.”)

For a time on the third day of the trial, defense lawyer Carlo Narvasa tried to carry out the thankless task of discrediting the first witness. He challenged credentials, questioned documents, and cast doubt upon the authenticity of the video recordings. Had he succeeded, the defense would never have needed to concede that the Vice President said precisely what the world heard her say. They might have escaped into the comforting refuge of denial.

The effort collapsed. 

Denied the luxury of disputing reality, the defense retreated to Plan B, adopting the oldest refuge available to those confronted by inconvenient facts: concede that it happened but, to borrow Rappler reporter Jairo Bolledo’s word, “humanize” the beast that is Sara Duterte.

And so Narvasa stepped aside, licking his wounds, while another defense lawyer, Mark Vinluan, attempted to deodorize the death threat and make it look and sound palatable, and even smell respectable.

“She and her family were threatened, and while her response was unconventional, it was justified,” he said. “What triggered her response was a question about ‘Operation Romanov,’ which is the plot to eliminate VP Sara and her entire family.”

Notice the careful choice of words. The defense won’t call it what it plainly was — a death threat. Instead, it is recast as an “unconventional” response, then elevated to a “justified” one. Euphemism has always been the last refuge of the indefensible.

But since when did threatening to kill, or behead, another human being, the President or otherwise, become merely unconventional? Since when did soliciting murder become a justifiable response to feeling threatened? 

Everything, it turned out, rests on the supposed existence of “Operation Romanov” — an alleged plot to wipe the entire Duterte family off the face of the earth. 

But by making this claim the cornerstone of its defense, Duterte’s legal team may have just assumed a burden heavier than any it has confronted in the first three days of the impeachment trial. It must now prove that “Operation Romanov” is an actual conspiracy and not merely the offspring of political paranoia.

That, unlike the events of November 23, 2024, is something that has yet to be established as fact. And that should make for very interesting viewing. 

Elephant in the room

There is an elephant in the room — one that many, including the prosecutors, may be reluctant to touch, perhaps because it sits at the uncomfortable intersection of private pain and public accountability.

In 2016, when she was still mayor of Davao City, Sara Duterte publicly spoke about an ordeal involving an unnamed assailant. She raised it to make the point that, as a survivor of abuse herself, she was not offended by her father’s rape joke about an Australian missionary who was raped and murdered by inmates in Davao.

In no way am I interested in finding out who the abuser is, whether he was a joker or not, whether he has a long history of abusing other women, including maids, or whether he was ever prosecuted or placed behind bars or buried in a shallow grave on Samal Island. That is a matter for Sara Duterte and the proper authorities. What concerns me is whether that experience helps explain her “unconventional” responses, her reactions, and the way she perceives conflict and threats.

Trauma, we are told, can leave deep psychological scars, fuel rage, distrust, emotional volatility, hypervigilance, paranoia, and even intrusive violent thoughts. These are traits the world has seen in her public behavior.

Survivors of abuse, I should say, deserve compassion, support, and proper treatment. But in Sara Duterte’s case, there is a difficult question that cannot be avoided because she is not merely a private citizen who once recounted a painful chapter of her life. The fact is, she is the country’s second-highest official and someone who has openly set her sights on the presidency.

When personal experiences intersect with public conduct, especially when it involves violence, violent language and threats, they need to become part of the public conversation.

But if her alleged ordeal has nothing to do with her outbursts and the “unconventional” things we have seen her do and heard her say, then another uncomfortable possibility emerges: that she may have simply inherited her family’s disturbing comfort with violent rhetoric. 

If that is the case, then we are no longer examining the scars of experience but the fingerprints of upbringing — the values taught, the conduct excused, and the habits of mind passed in the home from one generation to the next. The tragedy, if this is the case, is that these private inheritances are no longer confined to a family as they now shape the public life of an entire nation, whose people are left to bear the consequences.

Yet if Sara’s ordeal happened as she has said it did, it may help explain the anger, hostility, and violent language that have become woven into her public persona.

Trauma, however, is not a passport from accountability. Neither does it absolve a public official of responsibility for words spoken, threats made, or actions taken. And if her 2016 claim of being a survivor of abuse was just used merely as a political instrument, that would raise equally troubling questions about her judgment and character.

The question is not whether trauma or upbringing can explain a person’s behavior. They may. Rather, the real question is whether they can ever excuse it — and whether Sara Duterte is mentally and psychologically fit to hold the immense responsibility of public office. Pastilan. – Rappler.com