And the Public Says

It's unfortunate twice over, in this business where everybody has a thing or two to say in what you should or shouldn't do.

Everybody's got an opinion-and everybody wants to express it. Current reality contests like "Pinoy Big Brother", "Philippine Idol", "Rock Star: Supernova", and the upcoming "Pinoy Dream Academy" provide us with venues to dish them out-enough to leave us with the feeling that at least some of our opinions do matter. The thing is, all our judgments really do. As much as our SMS-expressed opinions can be star-makers, our whispered opinions are the building blocks of trial by publicity.

I've been privy to a smorgasbord of opinions-both mine and others'-these days. The weather has rendered going out unappealing, so I've been camping in my bedroom, my eyes glued to the television or my nose buried in a book. The only time I did go out was last Saturday, to observe a graduate school classmate's thesis proposal defense at the university and what I came home with was more of an, er, entertainment nature. While my classmate was explaining to his panelists and adviser the nature of his poetry collection-he's working on poems on terrorism and terror-I happened to glance upon the front page of Ricky Lo's The Philippine Star article headlined, "Ogie to file for annulment!"

Now, like everybody and his uncle, I've been hearing rumors about the disintegration of his fairytale marriage to former beauty queen Michelle Van Eimeren even before she left the country to live in Australia with their two daughters years back. And, like everybody and his uncle who read the article or caught whiff of the news, I thought, "Confirmation at last!" Of course, we (and our uncles) know by now that the singer-songwriter has since denied the article's allegations. While that may just stave off some more rumors on the real score between "Manolo en Michelle" for a while, it has inspired a lot of people to mouth off on Regine Velasquez.

I think I had just started college when Regine was suddenly controversial for having gone between Ariel Rivera and Gelli de Belen, who were only boyfriend and girlfriend then. Ariel and Gelli have since reunited and are now married with kids, and Regine and Gelli have since publicly kissed and made-up and sang a duet to boot (don't you just love local showbiz?). But there's just no obliterating that seed of public perception that labels Regine as the other woman-which makes it easy for all the rumors that float around her to persist. Around the same time the Ogie and Regine rumors cropped up, there were also Janno Gibbs and Regine rumors. And, correct me if I'm wrong, but weren't there Robin Padilla and Regine rumors as well?

When the public has made its mind, it's really difficult to shake it off. Case in point, though to a more serious and disturbing degree: the decade-old JonBenet Ramsey murder case that has resurfaced in the international press following the confession of 41-year-old John Mark Karr, an American schoolteacher in Bangkok, Thailand. JonBenet was six years old when she was found dead in the basement of her wealthy parents' fifteen-room home.

Her murder was colored by the facts that the Ramseys were wealthy, and that JonBenet's mother, Patsy, also a beauty pageant titlist back in the day, had been grooming her daughter to be a beauty queen. At six, JonBenet had already participated in several beauty pageants, some of which her mother helped fund. She held a number of child beauty contest titles. For a long time after her murder, the media flashed the little girl's studio pictures, with her all dressed up and almost eerily posing more like a teenager than a girl fresh out of her toddler years.

Both public opinion and the investigation turned against the Ramseys. Suddenly, everyone was an expert on Ramsey-style parenthood. They were judged for pushing their daughter into the beauty limelight and exposing her to society's bad elements like kidnappers and pedophiles, not to mention possibly wreaking havoc on her psychologically. Then speculation turned into accusations, with the remaining three members of the Ramsey family taking their turns as suspect: the mother believed to have accidentally killed JonBenet while she was scolding her for wetting her bed; father John was accused of sexually abusing and then killing his daughter; and brother Burke, nine at the time, was thought to have accidentally killed his sister, which his parents supposedly covered up.

The Ramsey case was believed to be already ice-cold when Karr emerged as a suspect. He has since confessed, and while there's still doubt as to his confession, he's already in Los Angeles, awaiting trial. It would have been a vindication of sorts for the Ramseys-except that the mother died of ovarian cancer just this June, and that while an intruder's hands had strangled the life out of the six-year-old girl beauty queen, as the Ramseys had been maintaining, public opinion has already tainted the family for life, with a lot of people whispering that they had it coming.

It's unfortunate twice over, in this business where everybody has a thing or two to say in what you should or shouldn't do.

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