The forced smile that Sara Zimmerman Duterte Carpio wore in Hong Kong on the eve of the Nov. 9, 2026 hearing in which her defense panel would present her witnesses indicates that she has become an eccedentesiast, a neologism that gained currency after Florence King wrote about it her column for the National Review. It refers to someone who wears a bogus smile and shows her teeth in full splendor to hide the fears that haunt him or her and present a cognitive reappraisal of the grim reality she doesn’t want the public to know.
There is no reason for Sara to smile these days, not at her Hong Kong event described as having attracted a gaggle of geese, and certainly not at Senate, where her defense is supposed to present 25 witnesses to “destroy” the “manipulated, fabricated and false mountain of evidence” presented by the prosecution panel in her Senate trial. Sara’s minions can speak 25 hours a day to describe the injustice that their champion has been subjected to, despite the fact that the prosecution panel only relied on Sara’s SALNs, tax documents, Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) records, files from the procurement board, the Davao City government, records from 30 accounts in eight banks, and the bank transactions, foreign exchange remittances accumulated by the Anti-Money Laundering Council (AMLC.)
Moreover, when two of her purportedly exceptional witnesses backed out, with former University of St. la Salle school of law dean Atty. Ralph Sarmiento saying he won’t be a witness to either the defense or the prosecution since he wants to stay neutral and independent in his commentaries on constitutional issues. Gencorp and Metro City Chow Foods Corp. corporate counsel Suzette Balucanag-Punay also begged off, disclosing that she will undergo a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) session on Nov. 9. Legal observers noted that not all of the 25 witnesses, now reduced to 24, will actually be needed since the impeachment court had already junked three Articles of Impeachment (I, III and IV) and the trial would concentrate on Sara and her hubby Atty. Manases Carpio’s ill-gotten wealth. The impeachment court also decided not to consider Commission on Audit (COA) findings as regards the so-called Sara confidential fund (she invented it for the 2022 budget of her office), which some of the defense witnesses may have to debunk in her defense.
Some observers also suspect that Sarmiento might not have known that he would be presented as witness since the issue he tackled was the constitutionality of reducing the threshold for Sara’s conviction from 16 votes to 14 votes, with two senators incarcerated for plunder and another one in hiding to avoid being arrested and sent to The Hague as co-defendant in the trial of ex-president Rodrigo Duterte for crimes against humanity before the International Criminal Court (ICC.) Sen. Loren Legarda is forever ailing and has to be treated in France. Elle est malade? Oui, très malade. (She is sick? Yes, she’s very sick.)
There is also the lingering report about four accounting firms rejecting the overtures of the Sara camp for them to pitch in and try to repudiate the forensic analysis of all the financial records of Sara undertaken by Atty. Alexander Cabrera, who found out that the hidden wealth of Sara amounted to a low P871-million to a high of P1.5-billion. When Cabrera testified before the impeachment court, the defense panel could only engage in legal trapeze, resorting to technicalities to prevent him from testifying, only to be told curtly that their plea had no legal leg to stand on. Cabrera’s testimony hit the Sara camp like a thunderbolt and the supposedly seasoned defense got it on the chin. When caught red-handed in their locus delicti, the accused always resort to slander (in this case, through their megaphones, trolls or crones.)
So, on Nov. 9, 2026, the defense panel presented Davao City assessor Engr. Jaime Adalin to testify and confirm the properties owned by Sara Zimmerman Duterte Carpio, insisting that these assets were included in her SALNs. This testimony is strange since Adalin is incompetent to testify on Sara’s SALNs, not having written the SALNs, and certainly not privy to how the assets were acquired and how the money was invested to grow over time. Some legal minds argued in disbelief that Adalin should not have subpoenaed at all, with one commentator arguing that the episode was clearly a waste of time.
However, it indicates the weakness of the defense, which is now engaged in suing for time as it has failed to secure a battery of witnesses to demolish the forensic analysis of Cabrera. Sara is now in a cul-de-sac. No way out, with one false move leading to zugzwang. Just as Sara cannot adequately answer the serious questions about her ill-gotten wealth, her ties with Chinese entities and the unexplained remittances to Cale 88 Foods of her hubby and her complete ignorance about F*ck Silica, the proper diplomatic approach to Chinese revanchism in the South China Sea and the Panatag Shoal and being bereft of knowledge about the operations of the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC) that she once led as vice-chairwoman, her burning obsession with the presidency is going down in flames.
Sara’s crudeness, her lack of cognitive and linguistic skills to explain basic concepts to children, her failure to act with sincerity, honesty and decency all impeach her bid to zoom her way to Malacanang. It would be an embarrassment to the Filipino people for this nepo baby to even be acquitted by the Senate after a mountain of evidence showed she fiddled with people’s money, accumulated wealth even before getting married and took over Davao City as its first empress. The culture of impunity that Sara enjoyed in Davao City could no longer save her. The overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) in Hong Kong already delivered their verdict by protesting her visit, chanting “Magnanakaw si Sara.” Sara punched above her weight and the people are punching back. She has to have Plans A, B, C, D, E, F and G to counter that. Management by ignorance won’t hack it.#
