Sara Duterte hopes Apollo Quiboloy’s cases will be resolved soon
Vice President Sara Duterte (left) calls a mere “trial by publicity” the investigation into the alleged sex offender and televangelist Apollo Quiboloy. | PHOTOS: Official Facebook page of Inday Sara Duterte and official X account of Apollo Quiboloy
MANILA, Philippines — Vice President Sara Duterte said she hopes the criminal charges faced by Kingdom of Jesus Christ founder Apollo Quiboloy will be resolved as soon as possible.
In an ambush interview in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, on Thursday, Duterte said she visited Quiboloy at Pasig City Jail before flying to The Hague, Netherlands, to see her father, former President Rodrigo Duterte, who is currently detained at the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) detention facility.
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Quiboloy is detained at the Pasig City Jail Male Dormitory on charges of child abuse and human trafficking filed before the Quezon City and Pasig City courts, respectively. He was hospitalized in January and treated for community-acquired pneumonia.
“I’m happy I had time back then to visit before leaving, and now I’m checking in on him,” Vice President Duterte.
“I hope he’s in good health and doesn’t get sick again. From what I understand, the doctor said he can no longer afford to get pneumonia. And I also hope his case gets resolved as soon as possible,” said Duterte.
READ: Quiboloy back in Pasig jail after hospitalization due to pneumonia
Election results
The vice president said they also discussed the results of the recently concluded 2025 midterm elections, as well as matters concerning her father.
“We talked about the election results and how the count was done,” she said.
Quiboloy recently called for a manual recount of senatorial votes, with his lawyer citing alleged “numerous reports of overvoting anomalies, inconsistencies in ballot readings, and other electoral irregularities.”
The detained pastor, who ran for senator under the Duterte-backed party Partido Demokratiko Pilipino (PDP), ranked 31st in the senatorial race with 5,577,526 votes.
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Before the ambush interview, Vice President Duterte also claimed during her speech at the 127th Independence Day celebration in Kuala Lumpur that there was fraud in the 2025 senatorial elections, saying that three more of their PDP candidates had actually “won.”
She named former PDP senatorial candidates Jayvee Hinlo, Jimmy Bondoc, and Richard Mata, who accompanied her at the event.
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However, she did not immediately provide evidence to support her claim.
Commission on Elections Chairperson George Garcia, meanwhile, declined to comment on Vice President Duterte’s remark, saying, “An expression of opinion by anyone in a democracy is free and therefore should be highly respected.”
Duterte’s ICC case
The Vice President also said that during her visit to the Pasig City Jail, she asked Quiboloy what message he had for her father.
“The message he had for [former] President Rodrigo Duterte, I sent to the ICC detention unit,” she added.
In March 2025, former President Duterte was arrested and turned over to the ICC to face allegations of crimes against humanity in connection with his administration’s bloody war on drugs.
According to human rights groups, the death toll from his drug war campaign is estimated to have reached 30,000 individuals./mcm
