📷: Assistant national statistician Marizza Grande
by Diego Morra
After Sara Zimmerman Duterte Carpio flubbed her acting debut at the Quezon City Hall of Justice on Saturday, Sept. 5, 2026, her defense lawyers at the Senate impeachment were gobsmacked as private prosecutor Mae Divinagracia pounced on the names of two-year-old kids signing on acknowledgment receipts for amounts totaling P1-million, ostensibly from the confidential funds (CF) that only three people—Sara herself and Cols. Raymund Dante Lachica and Dennis Nolasco—distributed to 2,669 informers, spooks, snitches or renegades.
Divinagracia pointed out that not only babies in the woods received huge amounts from Sara, Raymund and Dennis since even the dead were generously gifted by these Santa Clauses. The testimony of assistant national statistician Marizza Grande unleashed a tsunami of disgust, astonishment and condemnation of Sara and her cohorts for producing acknowledgment receipts (ARs) signed by three dead people—Emilio Sagan, who died in 2015, Fernando Salig, whose death certificate was issued in 2011 yet, along with Rodolfo Traya, who perished many years ago. Grande also disclosed that Mary Grace Piattos has nothing on PSA files even as the brand is ubiquitous in supermarkets selling junk food.
Sara’s defense claimed that the names were aliases (which now compels them to prove that the recipients were not dead) but whoever conceived of using the names of Sagan, Salig and Traya must have been frequent visitors to cemeteries or were moonlighting as undertakers, like those in the US engaged in the identity theft racket. As the graphologists of the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) also disclosed, the signatures of the 2,669 recipients were done by only a few people, meaning the signatures were forged to satisfy the requirements of the Commission on Audit (COA.) Indeed, the strokes, slants, use of tittles and other quirks were similar, the graphologists testified, indicating that an assembled task force did the job quickly.
There must have been more than a billion to one chance for the 1,685 OVP and DepEd informers to be genuine human beings since they had no records of birth, marriage and death in the Philippine Statistics Authority’s files. One startling revelation was that Marlin Sunga, who died at 2-years-old in 1965, signed an AR and received a huge sum as Sara’s informer. The ghost of Little Marlin must have become a Duterte fanatic that she roamed Davao City and joined the Sara AR signing task force. Moreover, three minors still toting pacifiers, were more than fortunate to be selected as winners in the Sara rewards extravaganza. Beatrice Cuenca, born on Jan. 2022, signed an AR on Mar. 14, 2023, while Mikey de los Reyes, born Jan. 13, 2020, signed an AR on Mar, 27, 2023. All told, 25 recipients were minors who had strategic information on the New People’s Army (NPA) that Sara helped “thwart” 125 rebel incursions and protect the country from “terrorist” threats.
The PSA revelations should, at the outset, makes the job for Sara’s defense panel cut out for them. Apart from objecting intermittently, her lawyers have been reduced to pettifoggery, and the direct evidence of Sara’s minions falsely grabbing credit for youth leadership summits sponsored by the Philippine Army since 2002 as related by military officers already shattered the Duterte excuses. It was a sting operation, pure and simple, that no amount of legal codswallop could debunk it, as what private prosecutor Mae Divinagracia said. She called a spade a spade, or better yet a backhoe. The defense was reduced to being pooterish, concentrating on the trivial and not firing all cylinders to smother on the substance of the testimonies.
Thus far, the witnesses, from the hostile to the friendly, have tagged Sara as the champion of management by compartmentalization, the only one who knows where the proceeds of the CF went, along with Lachica and Nolasco, who were ordered to dispatch the cash despite their being non-bonded special disbursing officers (SDOs) and thus barred from handling the people’s money. Gina Acosta had nothing to do with the funds like DepEd’s Edward Fajarda, while the DepEd chief of staff, Atty. Michael Poa, doesn’t know anything, nothing about ARs, nothing about the rewards, reducing him to being a mere pencil pusher looking into the DepEd abyss. But he knows everything about mollifying Sara by asking that the COA send her an audit query when the commission had already sent an audit observation memorandum (AOM) detailing all the disallowances.
Since Poa sports a degree in literature, it is perhaps time to remind him about a phrase written by Sir Walter Scott: “Oh what a tangled web we weave//When first we practice to deceive.” The process of deception started long before Sara set foot at the OVP. By lying, acting dishonestly and committing both with impunity, Sara has shown her contempt for moral and ethical standards, and worsened her situation in the rabbit hole of her own making. Writing for Science News Today on June 22, 2025, Muhammad Tubin noted that “functional MRI (fMRI) scans and EEG readings have shown that lying activates multiple brain regions, including the prefrontal cortex, anterior cingulate cortex, and parietal lobes. The prefrontal cortex is the executive center—the brain’s CEO. It handles planning, decision-making, and impulse control. To construct a believable lie, this region must suppress the truth and generate an alternative scenario. The anterior cingulate cortex, meanwhile, manages conflict detection. It lights up when our internal moral compass clashes with dishonest behavior.”
Psychologist Robert Feldman found that people lie in about one in every five interactions lasting more than 10 minutes, most of which are small exaggerations or omissions. Nonetheless, one study showed that only a small percentage of people tell the majority of lies, with just 5% of participants responsible for nearly 50% of all lies. They are prolific liars, more manipulative, less empathetic, and more comfortable with risk, which is similar to Dr. Nuelle Duterte’s characterization of her cousin Sara. But after her bad performance on Saturday, Sara climbed a rung higher on the totem pole of liars by her pathological lying, also known as pseudologia fantastica. Pathological liars do it compulsively, even without any motive and often without clear motive, Tubin wrote. “Their fabrications are elaborate, dramatic, and sometimes fantastical. For pathological liars, the boundary between reality and fiction blurs. In some cases, they believe their own lies. In others, they lie knowing the truth, but unable to stop.” Sara has every right to defend herself from the truth, as what one wag wrote about Israel’s trying to debunk its genocide in Gaza. #
