THE Supreme Court has ordered the dismissal of the charges of rape and acts of lasciviousness filed against ABS-CBN television host and actor Ferdinand “Vhong” Navarro by model Deniece Cornejo.
In a 42-page decision penned by Associate Justice Henri Jean Paul Inting, the SC’s Third Division reversed and set aside the July 21, 2022 decision and September 20, 2022 resolution of the Court of Appeals directing the Department of Justice (DOJ) to prosecute Navarro for rape by sexual intercourse under Article 266-A of the Revised Penal Code (RPC), as amended by Republic Act No. 8353 and for acts of lasciviousness.
The CA decision reversed and set aside the April 30, 2018 and July 14, 2020 resolutions of the DOJ, which dismissed the complaint filed by Cornejo in 2014 against Navarro owing to inconsistencies in her affidavits.
The CA held that the DOJ should have allowed the trial court to decide on the merit of Cornejo’s claim and Navarro’s counterclaim.
In granting Navarro’s petition, the SC ruled that the CA gravely erred in ordering the DOJ to resurrect the rape case against Navarro despite the inconsistencies in the complaints filed by Cornejo.
“To suggest that a prosecutor tum a blind eye to such glaring and manifest inconsistencies — under the premise that the evaluation thereof would already touch on the complainant’s credibility to be solely assessed in a full-blown trial — would be to compel the prosecutor to satisfy himself or herself to mere allegations in a complaint, and abdicate his or her bounden duty to screen cases for trial, thus passing the buck to the trial courts,” the SC said.
The SC held that the inconsistencies in Cornejo’s allegations “are not trivial, minor or inconsequential.”
“Indeed, no amount of skillful or artful deportment, manner of speaking, or portrayal in a subsequent court proceeding could supplant Cornejo’s manifestly inconsistent and highly deficient, doubtful, and unclear accounts of her supposed harrowing experience in the hands of Navarro,” the SC said.
“Otherwise, she would be allowed to deliberately change, or worse concoct and fabricate, theories in order to rectify the weakness of her accusations as pointed out by the prosecutors in the dismissal of her previous complaints,” it added.
On her first complaint against Navarro, Cornejo said he pinned her down, touched her private parts but when he was about to rape her, her friends arrived at her condominium unit in Taguig City on January 22, 2014.
Cornejo filed a second complaint dated February 27, 2014 against Navarro, accusing him of rape as she denied Navarro’s allegation that she consented to perform oral sex on him on January 17, 2014.
A third complaint was filed by Cornejo wherein she provided the DOJ more details of the January 17, 2014 and January 22, 2014 incidents.
Image credits: NBI via Facebook