The News UpFront: (TOP STORY) as of Friday, January 10, 2014
~ An interview statement from the Toronto-based reigning Miss International 2013 Bea Santiago that her father had apologized to her for leaving the family allegedly for another woman has opened a can of worms involving her mother and the entire Santiago family. The story spins out of control as her father, an elected public official in a small Bicol region town in the Philippines, took to Facebook to publicize his hurts, accusing his ex-wife of infidelity while at one point claiming they resumed intimate relations and boasted having pictures and witnesses to confirm his assertions. The controversy could cost her the beauty title she won in mid-December in Japan.
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TORONTO – A story of intrigue and deception; of love and sex; of betrayal and misery; of loss and triumph.
No less than the father of Toronto-based Bea Rose Santiago, recently crowned Miss International 2013, unraveled them all in a sweeping indictment of his daughter and mother, his former wife.
It’s the ugly reality of many beauty contests into which young women are sucked for the promise of glory. And if the narrative of Paul V. Santiago, Bea’s father, is to be accepted as gospel truth, the beauty titlist has fallen victim to the call of the limelight at great personal cost.
As soon as she won the crown in Japan in mid-December and returned to Manila, Bea plunged into media interviews, among them with the Philippine network giant ABS-CBN. There she declared that she has “forgiven” her father after he reportedly asked an apology for allegedly neglecting and abandoning her and the family for another woman.
“Her statement that she has forgiven me is utterly false,” Santiago, a town official in Mandaon, Masbate, wrote in a lengthy reply posted in his Facebook page. “I never asked for her forgiveness as I have not sinned against her or her siblings”.
“Clearly, Bea is out to bent (sic) her rancor not only upon a politician who declined her demanding request but even to her own father who has fed and unconditionally loved her,” he said. That request, according to him, involved large sums of money (300,000 pesos or roughly 7,000 Canadian dollars) to finance the cost of “facial enhancements” she wanted in early 2013.
Santiago said Bea’s characterization had “pushed” him to the wall and would affect his credibility as a public official in Mandaon, a small municipality in Masbate province in the Bicol region with a population of less than 50,000.
Santiago said Bea falsely depicted her family in the interview, stressing that she “remains insatiable with Ms. International Crown as she is trying hard to sell this cheap gimmick”.
“It pains (them) to hear Bea concocting a tale in which I am being put in bad light to suit her thirst for fame and perhaps to sell a story,” he wrote.
Bea modeled for at least two agencies and was among the beauties under the tutelage of Toronto-based impresario Edgar Sulit, who owns and runs International Professional Entertainment Network (IPEN).
Even before the Bea Santiago family scandal broke out, Sulit has expressed dismay at Bea’s seeming omission of IPEN as her beauty stable in Toronto. “She’s an ingrate,” a colleague of Sulit said.
Bea was not immediately available for comment. Attempts to contact her through friends were unfruitful.
In the interview with ABS-CBN’s “Buzz ng Bayan” and posted on January 6, Bea claimed “she felt ‘blessed’ after accepting her father’s apology for leaving her when she was a child”. That was supposed to have taken place right before she joined the Binibining Pilipinas contest.
“Recalling the time she hated her father,” the ABS-CBN story goes, “the beauty queen said: ‘I had to go to church all the time and confess. I felt guilty (of hating my father). It’s still there, kind of’.”
“Actually last December, before I joined Binibini,” the story continues, “parang na-bless ako kasi that Christmas was very meaningful . . . All he said was ‘I’m sorry,’ and everything was just okay. It felt like the lightest Christmas sa akin last year, she said”.
Santiago was inconsolable. While he stated that he “never wanted to wash our family’s dirty linens in public,” he went on to denounce his ex-wife, Bea’s mother, who he said “is so manipulative and cunning” that even “managed to brainwash my children into thinking that I left them for another woman when the truth is, that it is their mother who is living in with another man”.
The former wife, Ophelia Monterde, did not respond to phone calls when reached as this story was being written.
Santiago said his “blind love” for her made him ignore rumours about his wife’s infidelity. In 2006 when the family moved to Toronto, Bea and her two siblings “found out that their mother was living in with someone else”. “My children were constrained to live in one roof with their mother’s common law partner,” he wrote.
He confessed that her betrayal “deeply hurt and disappointed” him but kept it to himself for the sake of their children. “I never had the chance to share my pain and sufferings with them as I do not want to run after their mother knowing that she already sought comfort in another man,” he said.
Santiago said he’s asking Bea – whom he calls “a loose canon that is firing in all directions” – to retract her statements and make an apology to him.
“I just want to set out what is true since Bea’s false public statement casts doubt on my honor and integrity as a person, as public official and as a law abiding citizen”.
“I challenge you to do so under oath,” he told Bea. “If not, you owe me, the public, as well as the Binibining Pilipinas Charities a sincere apology. Your propensity to lie just like your mother may cost you your Ms. International Crown!”.****