Political analyst and columnist Antonio P. Contreras has demanded that Senator-Judge Pia Cayetano face censure and an ethics referral over an edited video she posted targeting House prosecutor Chel Diokno during the impeachment trial of Vice President Sara Duterte, arguing that her conduct crossed the line into disinformation.
In a Facebook post on Sunday, July 26, 2026, Contreras said what Cayetano did was not simple editing. He wrote that she posted a spliced video of the courtroom exchange between her brother, Senator-Judge Alan Peter Cayetano, and Diokno, stripped of essential context, making it appear that Diokno had failed to answer the question put to him. Cutting a video to distort its meaning and mislead the public, he said, amounts to disinformation.
Contreras argued the matter carried added weight because Cayetano is a lawyer who frequently invokes her profession, and above all a senator-judge sworn to render impartial justice. Instead, he said, she used her platform to mock and discredit a prosecutor appearing before the very court where she sits as judge. He cited Section 38 of the Code of Professional Responsibility and Accountability, which bars lawyers from knowingly or maliciously disseminating false or unverified statements or engaging in any act of disinformation.
The columnist acknowledged that the Senate cannot disbar Cayetano, as only the Supreme Court holds that power, but said the chamber should censure her and refer the matter to its Ethics Committee, alongside an administrative complaint. If it were proven that she knowingly or maliciously used the spliced video to deceive the public, he said, she should be disbarred. A senator-judge who spreads disinformation, he added, has no moral authority to judge anyone else’s fitness for public office.
The post stems from a video Cayetano uploaded directly to her official Facebook page on July 24, carrying the captions “Nagbabakasakali lang” and “Walang mga ebidensiya pero nag-aakusa na,” with a laughing sound effect appended to the end and Diokno’s response cut short. The footage came from a trial exchange over the prosecution’s bid to subpoena Duterte’s bank records, during which Alan Peter Cayetano and Pia Cayetano pressed Diokno on whether the request amounted to a fishing expedition.
Diokno rebutted the video on Saturday, July 26, releasing the full portion of his remarks and maintaining that the request could not be a fishing expedition because it rested on probable cause drawn from Anti-Money Laundering Council records. Akbayan Party-list and prosecution spokesman Rep. Zia Alonto Adiong separately accused the Cayetano siblings of circulating a manipulated clip, with Adiong contending the post ran afoul of Senate impeachment rules. Contreras’s intervention adds a prominent commentator’s voice to those calls, escalating them into an explicit demand for disciplinary action.
