The verbal sparring between Malacañang and Sen. Imee Marcos escalated this week over a single loaded word, with Palace press officer Claire Castro turning the senator’s own jab back on her during a Wednesday briefing.
At issue was a clip circulating on the senator’s social media account, in which a group whose faces stayed off-camera teased the existence of an “ICC” inside Malacañang. The punchline arrived quickly: the letters stood not for the international tribunal but for “Impaktang Clai.” The footage stopped short, though, before the full meaning behind the acronym was laid out.
Castro made clear she understood exactly what was being implied. “If they’re the ones who used that word, then they know what it means. They know what the word ‘impakta’ describes,” she told reporters.
Then came the retort that framed the whole exchange: “It takes one to know one,” she said.
By her own account, sharp personal attacks are not her habit. Castro said she rarely resorts to that register and does not typically go after people with ad hominem lines, adding that those bothered by her pushback on disinformation have taken to casting every anti-fake-news voice as an “impakta,” or an evil woman.
The people responsible for producing, appearing in, and directing the video, she argued, were the ones the label actually suited. She was willing to let them keep it. “And they shouldn’t worry—the crown belongs to them, to Senator Imee and her group. We have no intention of taking it away from them,” Castro said.
She pressed the point with a comparison drawn in her own disfavor, sarcastically. “I am not even close to Senator Imee when it comes to that kind of description. They are already at the maximum level,” she said.
The clash fits a pattern that has hardened over recent weeks. Back on July 1, Castro accused the senator of stoking hatred among Filipinos and ignoring the administration’s efforts, a rebuke prompted by Sen. Marcos’ assertion that farmers and fisherfolk had been left uncared for.
The estrangement between the two most prominent Marcoses runs deeper than any single briefing. By Castro’s telling, the president and his sister have not been on speaking terms for roughly three years, and the senator has dropped out of family gatherings altogether. The rupture tracks with the collapse of the UniTeam partnership that once bound President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. to Vice President Sara Duterte—a fracture visible even on the campaign trail, where the president introduced candidates at a Cavite sortie in March 2025 without a word about his sister.
