While the recent controversy regarding a certain “Rene” — who went on record to confess he had been paid by Senator Risa Hontiveros to bear false witness against Pastor Apollo C. Quiboloy and former President Rodrigo Duterte — may have come as a shock to many, I was hardly surprised.

Risa Hontiveros has a checkered history of witness tampering. I speak, not from hearsay or conjecture, but from personal experience.

The first time was in 2017, at the height of the brouhaha surrounding the police killing of Kian de los Santos. While the perpetrators have since been convicted and sent to jail, nonetheless, while the investigation was ongoing, Hontiveros — whom I did not know had a childhood fantasy of playing detective — interfered and decided to spirit away three minors whom she thought might be witnesses to the crime.

The father of one of them, distraught upon learning that Hontiveros had taken his son from their house while he was on a provincial trip, approached the Volunteers Against Crime and Corruption (VACC), then headed by Dante Jimenez, who lost no time in assigning me (as VACC chief legal counsel) and former congressman Jing Paras (one of our volunteer lawyers) to assist the father.

We went to the police, helped the father make a statement, and the next day proceeded to the Senate — police officers in tow — to confront Hontiveros about the complaint. She refused to see us, her staff saying she wasn’t in, although the Senate security on her floor confidentially told us otherwise. After learning she had hidden the children in a church, Paras formally filed kidnapping charges against her.

Again, in 2021, while the frenzy raged over the Senate investigation into Pharmally, a witness surfaced to say that Hontiveros, through a staff member (who astoundingly was a member of the bar), had bribed him with money and an electric scooter to testify against the Pharmally executives, including one Krizelle Mago. That man executed a sworn statement and recorded videos to that effect, which I still have. Charges before the Ombudsman were also filed against Hontiveros.

It is thus clear that Senator Hontiveros, in her vain attempt to position herself as a graft buster — bogus as this may be ­— does not have any moral compunction to suborn perjury in order to secure false witnesses against those whom she has targeted for political assassination. In baseball, with at least three strikes against her, she should be out, as Harry Roque correctly contends.

Hers were not only biased witnesses, but “buy us” witnesses, due to the mercenary motives of their testimonies. Verily, Risa’s continued stay in the Senate is an abomination.