Rodrigo Duterte and his children, tough image and all, have tried to stop Antonio Trillanes and his evidence-based exposés of the Duterte family corruption. “Tried to stop” is a feeble description. The attempts were all an onslaught to destroy Trillanes. All to no avail.
First, there was the presidential attempt of Rodrigo, said to have been implemented by his Special Assistant to the President Bong Go, for a Trillanes assassination. Safehouses for the assassins were already prepared. The plan was to smash the vehicle of Trillanes using a 20-wheeler container truck. What happened? The assassin backed out and instead spilled the beans on the Dutertes.
Duterte believed he had the cards against Trillanes when he was president. For one, he used the power of executive action. In September 2018, he issued an executive order revoking the amnesty granted to Trillanes in 2011 by former president Benigno Aquino III for Trillanes’s role in the 2003 Oakwood mutiny and the 2007 Manila Peninsula siege.
Duterte alleged that Trillanes failed to officially apply for amnesty or admit his guilt, ordering his arrest. Trillanes the Duterte critic did not resist arrest. He then posted bail.
In a twist of fate, it was the judiciary that put Duterte to shame. On March 1, 2021, the Court of Appeals dismissed the Duterte-instigated charges. Trillanes remained a free man and a free critic. Then in April 2024, the Supreme Court voided Duterte’s revocation of Trillanes’s amnesty. Aray!
On weaponizing the law against Trillanes, the Dutertes have been at it since December 2017. Then Davao City vice mayor Paolo Duterte and Manases Carpio filed a P6.6M damage suit against Trillanes in a Davao City court. This was the time when Trillanes had publicly implicated both men in a ₱6.4-billion illegal shabu shipment smuggled from China through the Bureau of Customs.
What triggered it? It was accountability. Trillanes had asked the Senate Blue Ribbon Committee to invite Duterte and Carpio to its probe on the Customs shipment after a fixer implicated them.
In September 2018, Paolo Duterte followed up with another criminal libel suit, accusing Trillanes of engaging in “black propaganda.” In his new complaint filed at the Davao City Prosecutor’s Office, Paolo said that Trillanes “maligned, destroyed and killed his good name and reputation, locally, nationally and internationally.”
“This is especially so as I am the eldest son of our sitting president.”
The Davao City Court, of course submissive to the Dutertes, then issued an overkill of four arrest warrants against Trillanes who then posted bail for them.
But in April 2026, the libel cases were transferred to a Mandaluyong City court where there will be no Duterte influence.
Paolo and his brother in-law failed to banish Trillanes to long-term incarceration and silence. Instead, the more popularly held public perception is that Trillanes is the object of political harassment by the Dutertes. Rabid Duterte trolls calling him trililing, asong ulol, sundalong kanin have failed to dent his credibility as a warrior against Duterte tyranny.
Manases Carpio was not far behind in the legal assaults against Trillanes. Just this year, in May 2026, he filed an 11-page criminal perjury complaint against Trillanes. The complaint stemmed from a Trillanes allegation that the Duterte family received illicit funds from China. This was a subject in the Sara Duterte impeachment trial this week.
As of this writing, the court has not yet acted on the Carpio complaint.
A parade of various Duterte surrogates filed all the imaginable cases under the books against Trillanes: Volunteers Against Crime and Corruption (inciting to sedition, graft, even coup d’etat; Nov. 2017), Jacinto Paras (grave threat complaint, June 2018), Philippine National Police Criminal Investigation and Detection Group (inciting to sedition, cyber libel, libel, obstruction of justice; July 2019) over the so-called Bikoy video.
Trillanes was also charged of kidnapping together with Jesuit priest Fr. Albert Alejo in August 2019 by the PNP CIDG. The allegation was that they had hid a Davao City based woman in a religious convent in Manila when the woman volunteered to be a witness against Rodrigo Duterte in the International Criminal Court.
With all these legal blitz, notice one glaring absence: they have never filed a case of corruption against Trillanes.
Trillanes is the Rodrigo Duterte family’s pet peeve, No. 1 nemesis, ancestral foe, favorite bogeyman. But that is as far as they can get. Why that is so may only mean two things. The evidence Trillanes presents are true and credible. Or the Duterte image of unpolished strength is merely that – unpolished.
The views in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of VERA Files.
