SARA DUTERTE HAS FACED QUESTIONS BEFORE. WILL THE SENATE BE ANY DIFFERENT?

[An MCT Opinion]

A defense witness could not remember a trip to China. Senator Robin Padilla then asked the prosecution why the trip was even an issue. He said he had been to China too, with the former president, and he could not remember the places either. He said he had to ask his own staff where he went.

That was this week, in the impeachment court. The vice president was not the one in the witness chair.

I kept thinking about that empty chair. If Sara Duterte ever sits there, I do not think we will meet a new person. I think we will meet the one the House already met. Will she also fall back on “I cannot remember”?

My read is simple, and I am willing to be wrong in public. She will come in as an offended prima donna, and as someone quick to lose her temper. That is the pattern I have watched. The forgetting, if it shows up, will be the new trick. The offense and the temper are already old.

HOW SHE RESPONDED IN THE HOUSE

On August 27, 2024, she sat in the appropriations hearing for the Office of the Vice President’s ₱2.037-billion budget and told the room she would skip the question-and-answer defense. The answers would only repeat. The House could decide the budget without her defending it.

Stella Quimbo said no. Seventeen members were listed to interpellate. Sara then spoke without waiting to be recognized. She wanted a snide comment of her own after France Castro’s. She asked that the chair of the finance committee preside instead of Quimbo. Quimbo told her she was a resource person. Firing the presiding officer was not within her power. Sara said it was a request, not a motion. The answer was the same.

Then it got personal. Sara asked why a person convicted of child abuse was still sitting in the House, referring to Castro, whose conviction was under appeal. Castro later compared her to a squid releasing ink. Sara then asked why she was being crucified for stating what she called a fact, while Castro could say “pusit.”

She did not come back for the next hearing. France Castro called it a boycott. A courtesy motion to stop the hearing out of respect for her absence was voted down.

On September 18 she showed up at the good government inquiry and would not take the oath. She would not even rise. She said she was a resource person, not a witness, so the oath did not apply.

The lawmakers did not question her after that refusal. She still spoke. She called the inquiry a well-funded, coordinated political attack aimed at 2028, and said the point was to build an impeachment case. Then she told them they could skin her, burn her, and throw the ashes to the wind, and they would still find her unbowed.

It is the belief that a hard question is an insult, and that the chair’s rules are optional when the person in the chair is her. Ordinary employees swear. She asked why she should. Ordinary resource persons wait to be recognized. She talked through the presiding officer, then tried to replace her. Ordinary officials who skip a budget hearing lose the argument. She treated the skip as a position, and the humiliation as proof that she could not be bent.

Then November.

Zuleika Lopez, her chief of staff, was cited in contempt on November 20, 2024, after the House said she had interfered with the inquiry. Sara stayed in the Batasan past visiting hours, in her brother’s office, trying to stop the transfer out of House detention.

On November 25 she finally took the oath, after Joel Chua said she would not be recognized without it. Lopez was by then in hospital under the House’s detention order. Sara said she had no ally in that room. Wala kaming kakampi dito. She fought the detention. She told reporters she expected contempt, and terrorizing, and that she would not let it pass.

Two days earlier, on November 23, she had said during an online briefing that she had instructed someone to kill President Marcos, the First Lady, and Martin Romualdez if she were killed, and not to stop until they were dead. She said it was no joke.

On October 18, she had already spoken about imagining cutting off Marcos’s head and recalled threatening to dig up Ferdinand Marcos Sr.’s remains and throw them into the West Philippine Sea.

I am not interested in pretending those were figures of speech that accidentally escaped. She said them into her own microphone. Prosecutors later played the November clip in the Senate. An NBI witness called the threat absolute even with the “if they kill me” wrapper. Her side has spent the months since shrinking it. Expression. Context. Play the whole video, not the clip. Deny the case.

She blows up when she feels hunted, or slighted, or cornered in front of people she thinks are beneath the argument. Then the lawyers arrive to say the blowup was a right.

In those House exchanges, she refused to answer rather than say she could not remember.

She did not say she could not recall the confidential funds. She said the question was the wrong question, the wrong year, the wrong forum, the wrong oath, the wrong people. When she wanted out, she left. When her people were locked up, she came back angry, not confused.

So the amnesia, if that is the word, is not the old Sara. It is the room around her now.

THE WITNESSES AND THEIR MEMORIES

This November, Jaime Adalin, the Davao assessor her defense put up, could not give a straight answer on a China trip in January 2026. He smirked. He called it irrelevant. He remembered after contempt was hanging over the hearing.

Panfilo Lacson said the court was close to being made a mockery. Terry Ridon said the issue was not China. The issue was whether the witness looked honest. Ridon has been calling the memory lapses “My Amnesia Girl,” and he has named more than one defense witness.

Were any of those witnesses told to say they could not remember? Michael Poa says the defense did not coach its witnesses and sees no need to change strategy. Fine. I was not in the prep room. I have no proof that anyone gave that instruction. I can still question the answers the court was given.

HOW THE SENATOR-JUDGES RESPONDED

On the morning of November 12, before proceedings resumed, Francis Escudero told the court to exercise restraint.

The day before, Suzette Balucanag-Punay, counsel for Gencorp, had testified that Sara received about ₱2.14 million in “return of capital” from 2022 to 2025.

Escudero himself had pressed her on how that amount compared with a documented ₱46,875 contribution to an earlier company, Davao Bounty Foods Corporation.

Punay could not explain the much larger total or identify further investments that would account for it. His warning the next morning did not interrupt her cross-examination.

Padilla’s move came later, and it was not the same move. Adalin had struggled to recall the trip, then confirmed details after senators confronted him with travel records. Padilla asked why the trip was an issue at all. “Problema po ba ’yun kung di mo matandaan kung saan ka nagpunta sa China?” He offered his own bad memory as proof that the question was unfair.

Ridon had to say again that the issue was not the destination. It was the witness.

THE SHOES AND THE DINNER

At the November 12 hearing, prosecutors pressed defense witnesses on Manases Carpio’s spending abroad.

A Nike purchase in Kuala Lumpur, ₱256,882.50. A dinner at Ginza Inakaya in Tokyo, ₱205,007.29.

Pia Cayetano said she could not hide her disdain for the idea that treating young athletes was wrong. Joel Villanueva said he had bought Nike shoes for 30 Senate players, and told the court to move on. Padilla blew up at the modest-life theory, downplayed the shoe receipt, and said he spends hundreds of thousands to help people too.

Escudero’s reminder at the start of that day’s proceedings was that an unsatisfactory answer is not inherently contemptible, and that his own patience had worn thin the day before. Paolo Panelo, speaking for Sara outside, backed the presiding officer.

Chadrin Parian said he saw Carpio pay for the team’s shoes and took a photograph. Anel Antero said the Tokyo dinner was a group expense that Carpio initially paid, with an agreement that the others would reimburse him.

Those were the witnesses’ accounts for the court to test. Question is, will they?

Anyway, the senators’ comments sounded to me like arguments for the defense. They made me feel that the spending was a sensitive subject they did not want pressed. Their own examples of generosity did not verify the payments before the court.

Padilla has also gone to the Supreme Court with Bong Go to challenge the ruling that lowered how many votes are needed to convict, while other allied senators are not in the hall.

Ronald dela Rosa has an ICC warrant and has not been sitting. Rodante Marcoleta and Jinggoy Estrada have been detained on separate plunder cases. The bloc is not complete. Go’s public line, on what I can actually pin down, is that he wants a fair fight. The part of the bloc that stayed is doing real work anyway. Padilla is doing it from the chair.

IF SHE TAKES THE STAND

Watch what that means if she is the witness.

She may not have to survive the ugly question alone. A senator-judge can ask why the question matters. He can say he forgets trips too. He can call a receipt petty and tell the court to get back to the “real” issue. Her lawyers only have to keep her from helping the other side while that rescue arrives.

Panelo tells the country the prosecution already had its chance and failed. Poa and Panelo are not even always in the same story. Poa had to correct Panelo in public when the voting-rule fight turned into a claim that Poa had agreed the whole thing was clownery.

I do not need them to be a smooth machine. I need to notice the division of labor. One talks to the court. One talks to us. My read is that putting her in the chair is not their first choice.

Tranquil Salvador III already said her testimony may depend on how the other witnesses answer questions. So the stand is not a fantasy. I see it as an option they are saving.

If they call her, this is what I expect.

The direct examination will be short. She will be walked to a safe paragraph. My husband handled it. The banks have the papers. I will not discuss strategy. The prosecution already spoke.

On the money, she will forget in pieces. Not her name. Not her office. The date, the signature, the cash, the purpose. The witnesses have shown the court that this can be done for a while, and Padilla has shown her that a senator-judge may call it human. That part is borrowed. The part that is hers is what happens when the question feels like an insult.

On the old confidential-fund questions, she will reach for the wall she already built in the hearing on the 2025 budget. Pending case. National security. Not the topic. Only Article II remains. Her lawyers could object to questions outside that charge, and the court would have to rule. I expect her to sound offended that anyone asked.

If the court allows a question about the kill video, I expect her to say expression, condition, fear. She will want the long tape, not the clip. If they play the clip and make her sit still, that is when the November 2024 voice can walk back in. The one that does not joke. The one that talks about people dying.

In the House, the break came when she could not control the chair, and when her person was in detention. The unbowed line was already the script for that. In the Senate, the break will come if someone tells her to answer, or puts her husband, or her father, or her dignity on the table and will not move on. The shoe fight this week was a dress rehearsal for that insult, and friendly judges already treated the insult as the scandal.

Afterward, Panelo will clean the clip. Poa will point at documents. None of that fixes a specific answer once it is in the record. It only teaches the rest of us which clip to share.

WHERE I COULD BE WRONG

I could be wrong in so many ways, and I have no problem with that. But my position has not changed: if the evidence proves the remaining impeachment charge against her, she should be convicted.

If she sits down and answers the transaction, names the paper, and does not put the presiding officer on trial, then the House analogy fails. If she does not take the question as a personal offense, my reading fails with it. If the senator-judges who rescued a bad memory turn around and question her the way Lacson questioned Adalin, then the protection half of this prediction fails too.

And if she never takes the stand, this prediction cannot be tested. A verdict without her testimony tells me her lawyers won or lost their first strategy. It does not tell me she became a careful witness. She has not testified in this trial.

That is why I think I know the person who will stand up if they finally call her name. Someone whose temper has already been on the record. The Senate would just be the room where leaving is harder, and where some of the judges may help her stay angry without having to remember.