De Lima blasts Paolo Duterte’s ‘homophobic’ lawyer for maligning LGBT community

Senator Leila de Lima on Friday blasted the lawyer of Davao City Vice Mayor Paolo Duterte for being a "homophobe" for insinuating Sen. Antonio Trillanes IV was gay when the latter insisted to see if Duterte bore a tattoo on his back.

De Lima said casting doubt on Trillanes' sexuality to "deflect" the issue on Duterte's alleged smuggling links was a "dirty job" carried out by lawyer Rainier Madrid on behalf of his client.

"After the hearing, Polong Duterte’s lawyer did his dirty job for him by offering to trade Polong’s cooperation with an admission by Senator Trillanes that he is gay," she said in a note she wrote while in detention.

"It’s amazing how shady people and their lawyers deflect pertinent and important questions by flippantly maligning the members of the LGBT community, by implying that there is anything shameful about being gay," De Lima added. 

In an interview after a Senate inquiry on the P6.4-billion shabu smuggling mess, Madrid slammed Trillanes for asking his client to expose his back and show a supposed tattoo that will prove his membership in a transnational criminal syndicate.

“I thought it will be explosive? Where are they?...You only presented the body. The body of ano — is he gay? If he’s gay, probably, if he said that to me, ‘I want to see yours,’ then I would have probably showed it myself,” said Madrid.

Madrid's remark did not sit well with De Lima. "Oh, 2017, I thought you would be a year of progress – but here we are, still at the mercy of misogynists and homophobes," the senator said.

Sought for comment, Trillanes echoed De Lima's statement that Duterte's lawyer seemed to be trying to pull the public's attention away from the "main issue."

"I won't allow that lawyer, whatever his name is, to divert the public's focus. The main issue is Paolo Duterte, the son of a President who is the architect of the bloody War on Drugs, is a member of the Triad drug syndicate and is involved in the smuggling of shabu into the country," the senator said. — MDM/KVD, GMA News