by Diego Morra
Sara Zimmerman Duterte Carpio’s performance at the Quezon City Hall of Justice on Sept. 5, 2026 is a clear exhibition of her inscrutable persona, which can swing from being paranoid to being unequivocally pronoid. She refused to enter the court, raising her fear that when the door is closed for her P120,000 bail for each count of grave threats to be processed, the devils would pounce on her. Sara then disclosed that her mother and children were “harassed” while she was on her way to the court.
To protect herself from her imagined tormentors, she then asked journalists to accompany her, apart from her bodyguards from her 473-member security unit, and flood the building with warm bodies to protect her from ghostly assassins. Her behavior on that day seriously merits an assessment since it appears that she swings from paranoia to pronoia. By thinking that the entire repressive state apparatus (RSA) wants her dead, her thought process appears to be laced with anxiety and fear, which leads to delusion and irrationality.
The feeling that the world conspires to persecute her is evident in Sara’s refusal to recognize that the courts, the police and the press would be fair to her. Her call for her 32-million digitalized voters to come to her succor from the demons hounding her makes her a strong candidate for clinical assessment. Paranoia contemplates bloodshed in Sara’s mind. In the company of her shills and cultist zealots, Sara swings to pronoia, the strange feeling which tells her that the people around her are conspiring to do her good, the direct opposite of paranoia, and equips her with the belief that she can hold them in thrall, command them and use them for whatever purpose she deems fit.
The pronoid in Sara keeps the Duterte backers ever hopeful that in one or two weeks their messiah would be released and that she would march to Malacanang to claim her throne. Yet, pronoia can also produce toxic positivity, reality is censored and negatives are deleted, thus reinforcing dogmatism. In Sara’s case, her pampered sycophants provide her with rose-colored glasses, ill-focused optics or tapa ojos. Pronoia is Sara’s magical mystery tour.
Something must be terribly rotten, not in Denmark, but in the bench in Quezon City, particularly at Branch 98 of the QC Regional Trial Court (RTC), as well as the police, as they all plotted to use a holograph to produce an assassin ready to guarantee that Sara will kick the bucket. What, indeed, is inhabiting Sara’s head? She has no faith in the courts, but why did she go the QC justice building at all? She should have proclaimed to high heavens her innocence and condemned the travesty of justice being committed against her and, get a copy of the arrest warrant, shred it and simply refuse to post bail before the sala of Presiding Judge Maria Angelica P. de Ramos.
Curiously, Judge de Ramos happens to be a sorority sister of Sara, being a member of San Beda’s Sororitas Reginae Juris. If Sara can’t trust her senior sorority sister to be fair, she can ask the judge to recuse. She can simply declare herself to be a sovereign citizen beyond the pale of Philippine law, or an official immune from everything. Sara can always reserve the right to defend herself from the truth or, like Hamlet, wage a bloody plot to avenge the death of his father Hamlet Sr. (Digong is alive and well and detained in The Hague), which is now watered down to defend a political dynasty in search of “worthy” members.
Worse, she wanted to be protected by journalists, many of whom she had assailed for being paid hacks, and expressed a completely weird rumor that she will be assassinated once she enters a judge’s sala. Who the hell would believe Sara’s yarn that was obviously crafted by “reputation” managers and crisis PR operators? Not the jaded scribes who have covered the OVP, not police reporters and certainly not columnists who have been bewildered by her antics. Did she gain sympathy for her pathetic show in Quezon City? What the Filipino people witnessed is a proven non-performer biting off more than she could chew. She could not strut like a peacock in Quezon City without howling about her fabricated victimhood in search of some sympathetic patsies.
For flubbing the handling of P612.5-million in confidential funds (CF) and being exposed as having falsely spent P15.54-million for the eight youth summits and 53 other activities hosted by the Philippine Army (PA), Sara can’t wiggle her way out of the dock. She could no longer debunk allegations that her offices manufactured thousands of informers, stool pigeons and snitches to siphon off millions of reward money. Gina Acosta, Lemuel Ortonio and Atty, Michael Wesley Poa all confirmed that the funds were disbursed illegally by unbonded military officers at Sara’s behest, and that only Sara and these officers knew where the money went. Acknowledgment receipts (ARs), invoices and other documents for COA audit and assessment disappeared or could not be verified, again confirming the infidelity in the custody of documents at both OVP and DepEd. To ease the pressure, Sara suddenly remembered being the target of harassment since 2023, the year when she launched the campaign to repudiate the leadership of Ferdinand Marcos Jr. and demand that he quit due to his incompetence, indolence and willy-nilly leadership. There is a Latin phrase for this—caveat actor—or let the doer beware.#