MANILA – The Malacañang has clarified that President Rodrigo Duterte’s story about his sexual experience with a sleeping household helper was a “concocted story” meant as criticism against alleged sexual abuses committed by priests.
Presidential spokesperson Salvador Panelo said in a statement that President Duterte’s statement was just a dramatization of the fact that sexual abuse was inflicted on him and his fellow students when they were in high school.
“In his inimitable allegorical style of dramatizing the sexual abuse the President suffered when he was a minor, he has made up a laughable anecdote to dramatize the fact of sexual abuse that was inflicted on him and his fellow students in high school,” he said.
“He purposely added and spliced the story with vulgarity to characterize the behavior of the priest who insisted to hear more sins during their confessions when there were none,” he added.
Panelo has also slammed the critics, who he said have “lost the ability of discerning a reality from a rebuke on the hypocrisy of the priests who molested him and his classmates when they were high school students.”
“The President has evolved an unorthodox and mischievous method of exposing and criticizing the hypocritical practices of those men in religious cloak. While the telling of the concocted story triggers laughter on his audience, the message that the President intends to convey is not lost on his listeners,” he said.
In a speech in Kidapawan City, Cotabato on Saturday night, the President recalled his confession to a priest at the Ateneo high school where he revealed a sexual experience he had with a household helper who was asleep.
Women’s rights group Gabriela, in a statement, slammed the confession of President Duterte saying that the President’s words were “deeply disturbing,” calling the incident a “crime.”
“This statement about his crime as a young man is only the latest in his countless statements bragging about flagrantly committing crimes against women and the people,” Gabriela said./PN
