Sara Duterte’s decision to describe her Senate impeachment as a violent ordeal drew pointed criticism from one of the prosecutors trying to remove her from office, who argued the vice president was leaning on theatrics instead of confronting the case against her.
“Why is the script always bloody? This is an impeachment trial, not an action movie,” Akbayan Rep. Chel Diokno wrote on X, pressing whether Duterte intended to engage with the evidence laid out by the prosecution.
His remark followed the vice president’s brief comments to reporters as she reached the Senate on Tuesday. “In this bloodbath and bludgeoning, I will be bloodied but unbowed,” Duterte said, according to GMA News Online, before declining to take questions or elaborate. The line echoes William Ernest Henley’s poem “Invictus,” known for its refusal to yield under hardship.
Duterte did not sit in for the afternoon session. Her spokesman, Atty. Michael Poa, told reporters she came to the chamber only to confer with her legal team in a holding room and had other commitments, including overseeing the Office of the Vice President’s preparations for an approaching tropical cyclone. Poa rejected any suggestion the vice president was dodging the proceedings, saying her lawyers’ presence proved otherwise and that she would appear if her counsel advised it.
The framing Duterte used is not new. Inquirer reported that she first invited a “bloodbath” back in May 2025, when she said she wanted the trial to move forward — a stance that critics later held against her after she stayed away from most of the House proceedings in 2025 and again this year.
Diokno is no newcomer to this arena. Decades before joining the current prosecution panel, he served as a private prosecutor and team leader during the 2000–2001 impeachment of then-President Joseph Estrada, and afterward acted as general counsel for the Senate Blue Ribbon Committee.
The trial itself opened Monday, July 6, 2026, with senators voting 12–8 to install Francis Escudero as presiding officer after a contentious debate over the rules. The House impeached Duterte in May on charges spanning graft, bribery, betrayal of public trust, and an alleged plot against President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., all of which she denies. Removing her would require the votes of two-thirds of the 24-member Senate — a conviction that would also permanently bar her from public office, closing off a 2028 presidential run in which she currently leads the field.
