Senator Leila de Lima appears to have overplayed the gender card when she admitted having an affair with her driver-bodyguard, Ronnie Dayan. Now she can only hope that the entire defense she built on persecution and blanket denial doesn’t crumble with this critical and self-serving admission of womanly frailty.
Dayan, of course, is the longtime driver-bodyguard of the embattled senator. According to various witnesses in and out of jail, the missing Dayan served as the “bagman” for De Lima, receiving huge sums from Bilibid-based drug lords on her behalf in order to allegedly fund her run for the Senate.
In a television interview aired Monday night, De Lima finally admitted having an intimate relationship with Dayan lasting several years. She said the “frailties of a woman” made her carry on with her employee and subordinate.
As De Lima’s pursuer (in the legal sense, naturally), Justice Secretary Vitaliano Aguirre, correctly pointed out, the senator has not presented “an iota” of evidence to rebut the many charges hurled against her, which formed the basis for at least four formal complaints lodged mostly before Aguirre’s department. As far as her relationship with Dayan is concerned, De Lima has repeatedly brushed aside reports that he was her lover, saying Aguirre has no business looking into her private life.
Until now. And taken together with reports that the senator will soon be subpoenaed in connection with the charges leveled against her, the admission could finally mean that De Lima is cracking under the pressure of the accusations.
Of course, I’m not talking about how De Lima’s latest revelation can be used in court; that’s up to the lawyers and judges involved in these cases to decide. I’m merely pointing out that the senator’s “deny-to-death” strategy seems to be coming apart —and that her declarations of gender victimhood may have led her to a possible admission that could hurt her down the road.
Indeed, De Lima as always framed her battle with Aguirre and President Rodrigo Duterte as a gender war. At various times, the senator has claimed that the macho men now in government are unfairly victimizing her, a lone woman, or waved the militant feminist flag in a no-retreat, no-surrender stance against her supposedly chauvinistic tormentors.
But it does seem that De Lima has gone overboard with her new “frailties defense.” And when she deployed it in her long-running battle of the sexes with Duterte and Aguirre, she did nothing to win sympathy for herself from campaigners for gender equality.
A friend and colleague in journalism, the lawyer Dana Batnag, described it best in a Facebook post: “Because I’m a woman, and one who believes that statements that demean women shouldn’t be allowed to pass unnoticed, I’ll have to call out Senator De Lima for blaming her decision to have a relationship with her driver on the ‘frailties of a woman,’” Batnag wrote.
“I didn’t like it when the president whistled at a reporter during a press conference; I also don’t like it when a female legislator uses the gender card to defend herself,” Batnag added. “She could have just said, ‘frailties of a human being.’”
The women’s-rights party-list group Gabriela, in a related post, slammed De Lima, as well. On its own Facebook page, this is what the militant feminist organization had to say:
“So-called ‘frailties of women,’ [or] even [of] men or any gender for that matter, can never be cited as a defense for crimes, be it adultery, abuse of authority by a public official or drug trafficking. [They] should not be used, especially by one who holds a position of power like Senator Leila de Lima, as an excuse from criminal accountability or to paint herself as a victim.”
I can only guess that De Lima was moved to make her admission of frailty because the interview was conducted by a “friendly” known to be sympathetic to her and antagonistic towards Duterte. But if De Lima had sought to win over the citizenry by admitting her relationship with her driver, I think she failed in an epic way.
No matter how hard she tries, De Lima cannot claim to be the frail victim in her relationship with her subordinate, simply because she was the one who was in the position of power. And carrying on with her very public display of victimhood is how she intends to defend herself in court, I can’t see how she’s going to beat the rap.
It’s a very frail defense. From a supposedly very strong, willful and determined woman.
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It’s about time the Anti-Money Laundering Council is called out for its sins of commission and omission, as President Duterte (himself a victim of the “weaponized” AMLC during the previous administration) has done. I’m convinced that any serious investigation of the agency will show that it allowed itself to be used in the service of Noynoy Aquino’s campaign against his political enemies—and is probably still working now to protect that defunct regime.
Duterte was only the last victim of AMLC: During Noynoy’s term, the agency was used against the late Chief Justice Renato Corona, businessman Roberto Ongpin and Vice President Jejomar Binay. Like Duterte, who never got any clearance from AMLC when Senator Antonio Trillanes claimed that he kept P200 million in one Ortigas-area bank, all of these personalities had been targeted for political assassination with the help of fake or real bank statements that only the agency has access to.
