WELCOME TO THE #METOO PHILIPPINES SERIES hosted by Cecilia Manguerra Brainard and her publishing house PALH. The writer Nikko Miguel Garcia explains the background of how this #MeToo Philippines Series came about. Please click on this link.
The #METOO PHILIPPINES SERIES has the purpose of educating and raising consciousness about sexual harassment and abuse and injustice in the Philippines. All articles and photos are copyrighted by the individual authors. All rights reserved. Cecilia Brainard and PALH have permission from the authors to use their materials.
To start our #MeToo Philippines Series here is Mariquit E. Soriano with her personal essay by
"Who Does She Think She Is?"
BIO: MARIQUIT E. SORIANO had the best of both her career as a First Grade Civil Service qualified government employee and a private sector middle management executive.
After a brief stay in the United States, she returned to pick up from where she left in the practice of marketing and communications. She got hired in two advertising and public relations agencies and oversaw accounts in the fields of telecommunications, sports, and IT, to name a few.
She equally highlights her 12-year employment in Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) global organizations where she was a frequent awardee as Customer/Technical Service Representative.
Currently the Proprietor of KitSunshine Real Estate Services, engaged in real estate buy and sell, and lease, she enjoys the challenges of real estate project selling and brokerage.
She has four children one of whom is deceased, and three grandchildren.
***
WHO DOES SHE THINK SHE IS?
by MARIQUIT E. SORIANO
Copyright 2026 by Mariquit E. Soriano, all rights reserved.
MANY YEARS AFTER the harrowing experience that I had in a telecom company, I feel the pain of being shortchanged by our Philippine justice system, betrayed by media friends, ridiculed. “Who does she think she is?”’
As a mother of four growing children, I aspired for professionalism and be compensated for work, oftentimes extending beyond and on top of what was required of me. I was in marketing and corporate communications, weaseled my way through conglomerates, and advertising and public relations agencies. In the telecom company, the position was for a Vice-President, whittled down to Director for Marketing and Communications, because, it was clearly pointed out I'm not worthy enough. My predecessor was a daughter of its Vice Chairman. "Beth took the position with her," snickered the recruiting officer.
I contemplated on "titles.” A Chief Operating Officer of a 12-man public relations agency or Director for Marketing and Communications of a telecom company, at which time its business division alone had a complement of about fifty.
I was vetted two more steps up. An expat whom I pleasantly remembered for his typical situational questions, easy even as you read between the lines, and nothing out of the ordinary until he dropped a curved ball. "If you had extra money, what would you spend with it?" In this vetting process, the last was the Senior Executive Vice President (SEVP) and head of the business division who shook my hand, and congratulated me. After sharing some information about my children, he dished out an invitation, "tell your son to work here." My second son was then a student at College of St. Benilde.
I brought home the good news. Ecstatically!
That the offer was twice as much as my last job in a public relations agency, my sons and daughters were assured of gas money when they used the family car, after all I was to have a company assigned vehicle and could use part of my representation allowance for official out-of-town trips. It meant more weekends watching movies together, and a fuller cart from the grocery. And a representation allowance of 30% of my gross pay.
My first day of work began with meeting a majority of the business division’s heads including another woman who headed customer service, the rest were men recruited from other telecom companies.
It wasn’t difficult to blend in, I could understand telecom terms since one of our accounts in an advertising agency where I was connected, was a telecom company, their bread and butter account.
In a strategic planning session, my team and I were able to present a full page of strategies and an action plan for the year. Highlighted by my direct supervisor in the planning session, many of the division’s marketing efforts were dependent on the budget that top management allotted to the division, its soundness and effectiveness were my utmost concern. Blending in also entailed attending after office hours functions, including birthdays of top management and middle management of which I belonged. Some were celebratory cocktails to mark sales performance.
There were occasions that my department took charge of reserving in a hotel or function room. I had to be there, though given a choice, I would have skipped. In the beginning, I found these occasions fortuitous to bond with my fellow executives, until I felt odd that the SEVP would regale the ladies into using their family’s penthouse when they get married. More than that, how uncomfortable it was that he looked down to my breast area when addressing me. In this particular event my dress was a tailored red mini, low cut on the breast, I wore a flimsy blouse to hide any hint of cleavage.
Much later, the SEVP’s title “Roving Eyes” was affirmed, and it meant more than looking through a woman’s flimsy blouse.
His moves got bolder and bolder. From dropping his hands repeatedly onto my lap such that I was compelled to leave him seated all to himself while I sought to dance with others in a sales conference.
In conversations with him in the presence of other women, he was charlatan about his conquests, “You know that friend of yours, Emma, was my girlfriend.” And yet I was expected to stand up, serve him food from the kitchen, when his security guards could have done it.
My employment in the telecom company was the shortest of all my private sector engagements. I stayed for 18 months, the rippling effects of the cases I filed drained me of emotions, and for years, angst and hatred blinded me, to the deepest labyrinths of the recesses of my mind.
On that fateful evening, we arrived at the EVP’s birthday celebration at his Quezon City residence, where at least thirty company employees were already immersed in the festivities. The SEVP came late; he briefly went to the living room to greet the celebrant, taking him no more than three minutes to exchange pleasantries with others. I was seated on the sofa nearest the main door, all hail and ready to go home with my fellow executive.
For some reason which I had never been able to completely fathom, the SEVP dashed to where I was seated, started to massage my left hand in the guise of looking at my ring. I took off my ring and shoved it to him. My mind reeling, “You animal, just stop it already!”
Still, he persisted and underneath my buttocks, I felt his hands caressing my left thigh reaching out to my privates. Not yet content, he groped into my blouse all the way up to the back of my bra down to my buttocks.
Following attempts to recover my ring, hoping our VP for Human Resources could help, proved futile -- the first day of work after that unsettling evening, I sat down with my direct boss to express my disgust about the incident, and stressed it will not happen again. He was at the party, got firsthand view of what happened. He feigned innocence but I could tell he sensed something foreboding. “Tell me what exactly happened?”
The Anti-Sexual Harassment Law in the Philippines, embodied in Republic Act 7877 was enacted in 1995. When I left the telecom company in year 2000, it was newly promulgated. I first got hold of a copy from the late lawyer activist Haydee Yorac best noted for government positions in the Commission on Elections and the Presidential Commission on Good Government. She encouraged me to draft an affidavit in preparation for filing the case. In the course of our discussion, she pointed out that my direct supervisor had called to ask for an appointment. Further, she disclosed that they may be related from her Negros lineage.
I must say, women lawyers who claimed to be fighters and experts on gender sensitive issues, may not be as they present themselves to be. One, whom I consulted had dealings with the SEVP’s clan, and would only take on my case if I agreed to reposition it. Perhaps not the criminal aspect, they got to her too.
Exhausted and infuriated by rejections, while meantime my savings were quickly depleting, I humbled myself to seek assistance from a distant relative Henry Gozon’s law firm. I brought up that I was offered a retirement package. No, he vehemently disagreed, firmly insisting that accepting it would only validate the message they wanted to convey: that I was old and useless.
Two lawyers from Gozon’s law firm were assigned to me. One to handle the criminal aspect –he filed for sexual harassment and acts of lasciviousness. The lady lawyer assisted me in filing a labor case with the National Labor Relations Court.
My story broke in the papers on August 8, 2002 with a screaming headline “…BROD ACCUSED OF SEXUAL ABUSE,” bannered by the Inquirer on the first page.
People recognized me everywhere, they cheered me on. I gave exclusive rights to “The Probe Team,” a weekly documentary program on TV with the GMA Network then, hosted by Che Lazaro. They called to feature me with Olga who suffered in the hands of her direct supervisor in a Government-Owned and Controlled Corporation (GOCC).
On August 13, 2002 columnist Conrad de Quiros (deceased) wrote in defiance to the telecom company’s side of my unfortunate story as “untruthful, absurd and impossible from a 49-year old grandmother.”
He postured, the SEVP’s remarks “reflects the mentality of a classic harasser. They ooze with all the macho stereotypes about women. One of them is that women lose their attractiveness as they grow old, men do not. Men remain, decrepit or not, as desirable as ever, particularly when they have money and power.”
I rallied and marched alongside women’s groups, namely: Gabriela, Teresa Makabayan and Lolas Kampanyeras; these rallies were covered by media. These women’s groups advanced the causes of women’s rights, gender equality, national liberation and social justice.
It wasn’t until 2003 that I saw my cases moving in Quezon City Courts. First dismissed by a fiscal, my lawyer appealed, and between Sexual Harassment and Acts of Lasciviousness, it was the latter that prospered and got filed in Court.
A media friend from the Inquirer whose help I sought called to say that she finally got hold of the chief fiscal, who agreed to release my case. In the afternoon of that same day, the chief called me with instructions to pick up a copy of his decision. On a Saturday, I was to look for someone --- on a Saturday when only a handful of people could see I was being handed a hard copy of his decision. No media, no interested parties. I held back tears but did not forget to pray even more for what was up after a long awaited, and protracted outcome of my case. Finally then after about a year in the fiscal’s office, I can be able to file my case in the proper Court.
Lala Rimando, in her article published by Filipinas Magazine in March 2005, wrote: “Soriano has become the poster lady for abused women in the workplace. In the first quarter of 2004 alone, the national police department dealt with 33 sexual harassment complaints and 466 cases of acts of lasciviousness. However, only a few of these prospered in the courts.”
Sometime in December 2004, my mother called. At which time, I had been staying in a much smaller townhouse in Old Balara, Quezon City. My children, except for my second son, had left for the United States to seek gainful employment and make a life there. I also had to battle an eviction case from my former residence.
I did not subscribe to any newspaper, and relied primarily on TV for news updates. She relayed that the SEVP had passed and expressed concern about what would happen to my cases. I didn’t take the news too well – I was in hysterics, repeatedly exclaiming “Oh God, oh God!” My mother must have seen an obituary in a broadsheet while I had to cut a few corners in my household budget. Having a daily broadsheet delivered to me was one.
A few months prior to my Mother’s announcement, I had won the labor case filed with the National Labor Relations Court (NLRC) that had been escalated to the Court of Appeals by Atty. Edwin. It ruled in my favor, overturning NLRC’s decision. Atty. Edwin coaxed me to already file a Memorandum for Execution of the Court of Appeals’ decision awarding me back pay, attorney’s fees, and damages–-estimated to be about P8,000,000.
At the last hearing Atty. Edwin and I attended at a Quezon City court sometime in 2005, we were presented a death certificate, that of the SEVP’s, stating cause of death as major organ failure.
As it was said hundred times over to my face “the death of the accused ends all criminal prosecution because a dead person cannot be tried, defended, or punished.”
Even before his death, I had been advised to seek redress in a civil case for damages apart from the NLRC labor case with the Court of Appeals. Upon the SEVP’s death, that was on the brink of being overturned again.
People who had learned of the SEVP’s passing and my pending cases, rebuked me “sana pinagbigyan mo nalang” as if that was the nicest expression of sympathy and most comforting way for me to grieve.
Reflecting on some aspects of the labor case to demonstrate how their lawyer was determined to oppress me even more, my last pay did not include the pro-rated 13th month pay. I claimed a check for a little more than 98 thousand pesos and anxiously signed the quit claim and hurried home. In their lawyer’s argument, the pro-rated 13th month pay was to be given if I had stayed with the company. Pursuant to Presidential Decree No. 851, pro-rated 13th month pay is calculated based on the total months worked within the calendar year prior to separation.
The medico-legal report that my lawyer submitted to the NLRC was ignored, yet their lawyer capitalized on it in their press statements.
Months after the abuses, upon leaving the telecom company, I could not drive as I would wander off and get lost, oftentimes crying and pounding on the steering wheel. In taking my daughters to UP Manila, passing the hotel owned by the clan brought back the disturbing scene when the SEVP dropped his hands to my thighs -- repeatedly. I could not go to their mall near the EDSA Shrine, nor to any establishment owned by the clan.
While awaiting the decisions in my cases, I attempted to seek employment. However, I would find myself trembling during job interviews, particularly when asked about the length of my tenure at the telecom company.
In 2008, with barely any money to my name except for the ₱2,000 my Mother had given me, I ventured to apply for a position at a BPO company. I successfully passed the final interview and was already in my second week of training when the HR department summoned me to inquire about my case and why I had not disclosed it to the recruitment personnel. I told them that a simple Google search of my name would reveal the details of the case; concealing it had never crossed my mind. Soon after leaving the telecom company, I was plagued by frequent nightmares. One, in particular, remains vivid in my memory to this day: two men making their way along a snow-covered path. Of the two, the taller man suddenly fell to his knees, his torso collapsing onto the ground.
There were groups and individuals who helped seek an amicable settlement for me. In a letter to the patriarch of the clan from an influential member of the Senate, the good Senator (now deceased) urged the patriarch to “take positive steps to address the issue of sexual harassment in the workplace and give justice to Ms. Soriano and other employees who may be similarly situated.”
“Who does she think she is?” he retorted—a sentiment echoed by the SEVP when friends attempted to intercede on my behalf to secure an amicable settlement.
In the course of healing, I had accepted invitations to talk about sexual harassment in the workplace. I joined Gabriela in universities, on television shows, and at forums that meant to highlight sexual harassment occurring in work places. I must have referred at least five women to Atty. Edwin for this type of abuse.
Our Philippine justice system trivializes the Anti-Sexual Harassment Law because of its lack of understanding what victims go through, and corporations in the whole gamut of why the law exists for their inadequacy of fulfilling the law’s implementing rules and regulations. And as deeply rooted, and ingrained in our justice system as the under the table concept of “which side your bread is buttered on."
I have moved forward, having journeyed around the sun many times since then, and have long since laid those cases to rest, leaving them to the worms six feet beneath the earth.
~end~
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Tags: #babaeako #MeTooMovement
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