The criminal complaint filed against Davao City Rep. Paulo “Pulong” Duterte by businessman Kristone John Patria does not lose validity when Pulong simply tags it as something that happened “sometime ago.” Allegations of physical injuries and grave threats lodged by Patria are backed up by a video that shows in Duterte hitting Patria, apparently over a dispute about the pay of girls who were supposed to entertain Duterte and his drinking buddies.
Pulong Duterte did not deny that the incident happened but his ever-reliable defender, Saint Sara Zimmerman Duterte Carpio, immediately condemned the Marcos Jr. camp for spreading the video and disseminating copies of the criminal complaint against St. Paulo. This is an automatic, evidence-free retort that is akin to the lesson Donald Trump learned from the late and unlamented Roy Cohn, whose machinations during the trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg led to their conviction as Russian spies and their wrongful execution. “Do not admit anything,” he counseled his ward, Donald.
Sts. Sara and Paulo want to reduce the matter to “political harassment,” even as the latter admitted that the mauling happened after an extended drinking session, which ironically started from the businessman’s home. That it happened on Feb. 23, 2025, is not contested, but what they cannot understand is the widespread dissemination of the video showing Duteret headbutting Patria and threatening to stab him. This speaks volumes about the Dutertes. It proves that the Dutertes cannot countenance any adverse publicity against them, particularly an incident in their sultanate’s Obrero district.
For Sts. Sara and Paulo, shit happens, and they could not be blamed for being furious about some short changing by an ordinary creature in what is supposed to be a proletarian community. St. Sara could not understand why Malacanang should invest much in an incident so ordinary as Pulong bashing Patria, or St Sara mauling a court sheriff believed to be from the sala of a Judge Carpio, all because the poor sheriff was implementing a lawful order. In the same vein, people should therefore not condemn Rodrigo Duterte for unleashing his purported “war against drugs” and shed tears for the 30,000 Filipinos killed by uniformed hitmen and “untouchables” shipped to Luzon since “cleaning up society” is a principal for a President. As the streetcorner philosopher Duterte lectured, a President “ay kailangang marunong pumatay.”
Aside from subjecting Patria to a two-hour ordeal of suffering from slaps, punches, kicks and grave threats, Duterte “paid” Patria P1,000 for each blow, which makes the episode weird. There is no confirmation that the bar where the assault happened played The Village People’s “Macho Man” as musical backdrop to the attack. Critics dismissed the manhandling of Patria as conducted in “aid of legislation” to protect the GROs of Davao City. The last time Pulong complained about harassment and political persecution was when the P50-billion in projects for his Davao City district was scrapped. This time, he is not talking much, allowing Sara, also known as Duterte Jr., to do the honors.
So, St. Sara revved up her narrative-churning machinery, and they both came up with the queer argument that the Obrero incident was “yet another attempt to ‘cover’ the issues faced by the Marcos administration.” Just as the impeachment against her was hatched to “cover up” the “blank pages” of the proposed 2025 national budget, the Pulong assault was designed to cover up for the debacle of the P20 per kilo of rice that was supposed to be sold starting May 2 but which the Palace postponed to May 13. Sara’s impeachment came before the controversial allegation that the 2025 budget contained 10 blank pages. “Like I said, every time they (the administration) face a major issue for what they are doing, they will cover it with another issue attacking their political opponents,” St. Sara told her listeners in Zamboanga City.
St. Sara and her ilk have blamed Malacanang for the complaint, the Philippine National Police (PNP) for the viral circulation of the video and the Department of Justice (DOJ) for evaluating the Patria complaint. In short, her camp wants the incident to be swept away since the Dutertes can do no wrong, they have the monopoly of truth, and they are lily-white, unstained by decades of wasting confidential and intelligence funds (CIFs) in Davao City and paying thousands of Duterte cryptids with scores of millions of pesos in “reward money” and payoffs for informers and “intelligence” agents. St. Sara questions the veracity of the claimed bogus names as attested to by the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA), which looked into the acknowledgment receipts (Ars) submitted to the Commission on Audit (COA) by St. Sara’s staff. In short, she is questioning her own set of evidence, which illustrates just how irrational dutertization is.
The DOJ is unfazed by St. Sara’s rants and the strange performance by St. Pulong in a popular Obrero bar in Davao City. “An evaluation will be done, and if the evidence is sufficient, a preliminary investigation (PI) will be conducted,” State Prosecutor General Richard Fadullon of the DOJ’s National Prosecution Service (NPS.) Fadullon confirmed that Duterte is facing complaints for alleged violations of the Revised Penal Code (RPC), specifically, Article 265 on physical injuries and Article 282 on grave threats, after the case was submitted to the DOJ main office in Manila. It is time for the DOJ to show that the Dutertes or the Marcoses do not own the law. Just as the Villars, with their CrimeWater caper, aren’t exempt from being charged for the villarization of water districts.
