Mr. Awesome

We are innocent. This was a setup. Over the last five months, PGMN completed immense, comprehensive, painful research on the breathtaking national corruption of Martin Romualdez while he was Speaker of the House. What we have is devastating. The episode was filmed several weeks ago. It has been fully edited — it is 90 minutes-long, packed with hard evidence, and ready for release. That is why this is happening. There was no extortion. There were ZERO threats from us. That’s all bullshit. The “evidence” provided showed one side of the story. We committed NO CRIME: AND WE CAN PROVE IT. Romualdez did this to silence us — why? Because the timing of the release of our exposé would leave him in a desperate situation, particularly with his vast current troubles with the Ombudsman hanging over his head, as President Marcos signals that he’s clearly listening to what the whole country wants, and is at last willing to hold accountable the man widely believed to have sabotaged the first three years of his administration. Days before our arrest, we had been privately warned multiple times by powerful close friends who were aware of the situation that there is legitimate concern for our physical safety in that any or all of us could be hurt or killed by hitmen. In light of this, even before the arrest, I gave specific/explicit instructions that if anything — literally ANYTHING, be it fatal or injurious — happens to any of us in any capacity, our legal teams and trusted allies are to fully publish the 90-minute exposé on every major social media platform for everyone in the Philippines to see. We at PGMN have always taken profound and sincere pride in going after the bad guys. Yesterday we made the difficult choice to go after the worst of them all. And now we are where we are. If this is the price to pay to do what’s right, then so be it. I want my five-year-old and two-year-old sons to look back at these decisions when they’re older and see the kind of man their dad was. Dear Martin, You know what you did to the country. We know what you did to the country. Soon, hopefully, everyone will too. - Franco Mabanta

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