MANILA, Philippines - You can't have a more epic act of injustice than the jailing of Alex "Lex" Adonis. The news came out last Monday on the Philippine Daily Inquirer's front page, but having written my columns for the week early on so I could get a badly needed rest on the holiest of weeks, I couldn't unburden myself on it posthaste. I'm doing so now because to not do so would be a sin of omission deserving of the fires of hell.
Adonis is not guilty of lying, cheating or stealing. He is not guilty of raping, pillaging or murdering. He is guilty of doing his job as a journalist, in the course of which he got hit with a libel case. Libel, of course, is also a form of lying. But Adonis' lying is at most arguable and at least unmotivated by malice. He lost his case because he lost his lawyer who was arguing his case in court. He lost his lawyer because he lost his income with which to pay him. He then lost heart, if not interest, in his case, bahala na happened to him. But how he could have lost his freedom notwithstanding, well, it is a sign of the times: This is a country that has lost all moral anchor. No, this is a country that has plainly lost its mind.
Adonis was a broadcaster of Bombo Radyo. He is the one who aired the story about Prospero Nograles running around naked after being found in bed and chased by the husband of the woman he was with. Nograles took violent exception to the story, denying it vehemently, and he filed a libel case against Adonis. Nograles won the case and Adonis was sentenced to four and a half years in prison. The latter is there right now, in a jail in Davao City, preparatory to being shipped off to the Davao Penal Colony, home of the dregs of the earth.
We don't know that the story about Nograles is true. We do know that Adonis, as indeed his radio station, has stuck by it. We do know as well that Adonis did not know Nograles from Adam, in their pristine states or not, and had no personal grudge against him. That is a basic ingredient for libel to stick, the presence of malice. By rights, the court should have dropped the case into the sewer the moment it befouled its space. Of course, some might argue that sex stories about public officials by and of themselves are salacious, if not malicious. But if so, then it is a crime only against taste and not by the Penal Code.
My own complaint about Adonis' story is that he did us a disservice by thrusting upon us a not very pleasant image. I have a vivid imagination and do not find the mental construct of that prosperous gentleman flailing about in public in the state God made him, or cursed him in, agreeable. I certainly would not want to hear it on radio while having breakfast.
But Adonis isn't just one to dwell on the sexual escapades of public officials, real or imagined, he is one to expose the immoral unscrupulousness of officials, public and private, and has in fact helped send not a few of them to the Davao Penal Colony. He can be forgiven for not relishing the prospect of meeting them in the same place he is to be bundled to. "What do you think will happen to me when I come face-to-face with them?" I personally will hold Nograles and the judge who made that decision morally, if not legally, responsible if any harm should come to Adonis.
Adonis lost his lawyer in 2005 because he left Bombo Radyo, which was providing that lawyer, to look for a job that paid better. He could barely make both ends meet for himself and his two daughters after being reassigned from Davao to Cagayan de Oro. He rented a small room and drew credit from a local canteen, which he promptly filled with more debit than credit.
That alone says worlds about him. Having broken bread, or drank beer, with journalists outside Metro Manila, I know a thing or two about local journalism. In radio, in particular, many broadcasters are not paid. At least not by the station, they draw their pay elsewhere. Mainly from the people they do PR for, praising them to high heavens and damning their enemies to hell. For which pains they enjoy much wealth and power. That Adonis was bravely, if vainly, trying to keep his family's head above water must say he does not belong to that category.
Bombo Radyo itself says he was one of the best anchors it had.
Adonis has no business being in jail. It is a monumental injustice that he is. It's time, in fact, for that damnable thing called libel to be decriminalized, its inclusion in the Penal Code being a dirty finger thrust in the face of press freedom. Nowhere so than in this country, where the wrong people are sent to jail for the wrong reasons. To accuse someone of libel, as I've said again and again, is to accuse him of lying. The public officials of this government are the least qualified to make that accusation. For them to say that other people are lying is for Dracula to say other people are bloodsuckers.
Indeed, that prosperous Nograles should send the starving Adonis to jail is obscene. All Adonis did was to say Nograles was caught in bed with someone who was not the latter's wife and chased around in his birthday clothes by the woman's irate husband. Whether that is true or not is at least arguable.
What Nograles has done is to be caught in political bed with someone who is not this country's president, and give the irate citizens to chase their tails round and round. That is not just arguable, that is patent. Lest we forget, he was the one, along with the other Prospero and the two Bicolanos, who led the massacre of the impeachment bid against Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo in Congress.
Who is telling the truth and who is lying? At least when Adonis sees people who are caught with their pants down, he calls them naked. When Nograles sees people parading in all their naked gloria, he calls them "Emperor."
More Inquirer columns
Previous columns:
Salvation ? 4/05/07
Death ? 4/04/07
Hello, Ma?am ? 4/03/07
Mirrors? 4/02/07
Where there?s smoke? 3/29/07
Presumption ? 3/28/07
