In Jeane Napoles' Shoes

Across Jeane's Universe Tumblr

I could just imagine the life Jeane Napoles breathes at the moment:

A queen bee who lost her clout and prestige over her wealthy subjects.

A social outcast who is no longer invited to the parties she used to grace.

A nobody who can't even go out and hang out at Starbucks without eyes derisively looking at her.

The world has turned against Jeane, and living a sheltered life has not prepared her for such nasty blow.

I somehow understand her plight. Not because of the arguments written on Rappler the other day, but because the sympathy was drawn from the same vein of experience my family had many, many years ago.

We used to run a business that some prudes said "exploit" the women. That, I cannot deny. Back then, we would invoke the spirit of free expression, and that the women whose various stages of undress needed the skin exposure to promote their careers.   

While we didn't spend taxpayers' money like the Napoles matriarch "allegedly" did, we were agents of corruption. Not only we were poisoning the minds of horny pre-teens, good-for-nothing husbands found the audacity to cheat their wives because of the stories and images we churned every day.

We were able to reach the pinnacle of power, with my dad saying the business would go on long after he's gone. Politicians came for a visit, to speak with my father to help them advance their political careers. This emboldened him to attack his enemies with impunity. He would write opinion pieces that destroy names without checking the facts. 

He used to get away with it, so he pressed on.

Unfortunately, Karma was able to catch up and one day, law enforcers appeared to take everything in our office - computers, printing machines and even rolls of paper they didn't spare. We were left with nothing, with my father being pursued as a fugitive. Other tabloids took the opportunity to pin us down. We were headlines for several days until the story faded away.

When the dust settled, our fortunes have changed.

I can stomach Jeane Napoles' tasteless display of wealth; her desire to remain the pack leader of her snooty and moneyed friends, and her love for luxury brands many of us can't even pronounce properly. But to call her names, and put her alongside her disgraced mother, is in my opinion, unfair. For sure, like many kids of corrupt parents, she has no idea where her family's wealth comes from. She merely accepts what her mother tells her and that she never bothered to find out.

It is only when it blows into a national scandal that these children are forced to pay, becoming a collateral in a way, because of what their parents wrongly did in the first place.