Sotto files cyberlibel suit vs blogger

Senator Vicente “Tito” Sotto III. (File photo by RICHARD A. REYES / Philippine Daily Inquirer)

Senate Majority Leader Vicente Sotto III is suing the person said to be behind a blog site where he was called a “plagiarist” and a “rapist” while condemning him for not signing a Senate resolution urging a stop to drug killings.

Sotto told reporters on Tuesday that he filed a cyberlibel complaint the previous day against a certain Cocoy Dayao with the National Bureau of Investigation, but that he was not seeking damages.

Sotto said the NBI had identified Dayao as the person behind the blog #SilentNoMore-PH.

The blog site, silentnomoreph.com, became controversial last September when it bashed Sotto and six other senators belonging to the majority bloc for not signing a minority-initiated resolution urging a stop to the killing of drug suspects, particularly minors.

The blog is currently inactive. An identical Facebook page, which has more than 422,000 followers, is critical of President Rodrigo Duterte’s administration and its allies.

Sotto said Dayao was the first person against whom he would file a cyberlibel case resulting from that September blog post. He did not say who the others would be.

“It’s about his attacks against me which are libelous,” Sotto said.

He said Dayao left the country a day after he delivered a privilege speech condemning the blog identifying him among the seven “Malacañang Dogs in the Senate.” The six others were Senate President Aquilino Pimentel III, Richard Gordon, Cynthia Villar, Miguel Zubiri, Gregorio Honasan and Manny Pacquiao.

Dayao, whose real name is Eduardo Angelo Dayao, was invited to a Senate inquiry into Sotto’s privilege speech last Oct. 4, but he did not show up.

Sotto said that Dayao “invented” the allegation that he and the six other senators did not sign the resolution. He said the minority senators deliberately did not let them sign it.

Sen. Francis Pangilinan, president of the opposition Liberal Party, said there was “no intention to single out any senator.”

He apologized for his “failure to go the extra mile and have the resolution signed by the other senators.”

After their social media bashing, the entire 17-member majority came out with its own resolution calling for an end to drug killings in the country to show that they were “not heartless.”