“I was hysterical,” Heart Evangelista recalls her reaction when she found out that her mom and manager Cecile Ongpauco was going to have a presscon about her and her boyfriend, Senator Chiz Escudero.
“What? Why? She’s my manager! She’s my mom! It’s a nightmare!”
Chiz admits that they were both blindsided by this move. “Nothing, no indication whatsoever…”
The actress and the politician were the subjects of the recent media firestorm when Cecile went public with the supposed seven reasons why Heart’s boyfriend Senator Chiz Escudero is deemed “unacceptable” to their family—listing Chiz’s alleged “personality problem,” alcoholism, and “opportunism” as its key points.
Heart and Chiz have been generally reluctant to talk to the press at length about this issue.
Chiz explains that had it been a political issue, he would not mince his words: “If it were Jinggoy [Estrada] hitting me or any other politician hitting me, I would hit straight back. I’m a straight shooter, more often than not. But since it’s them,kailangan kong manimbang. I cannot answer directly.”
“Them,” of course, refers to Rey and Cecile Ongpauco, the parents of the girlfriend who could one day be his wife.
Heart, for her part, would repeatedly say that she was “put in this situation not by my choice.”
Speaking of her mom, Heart clarifies: “I’m not in this interview to make diin nashe’s wrong, ganyan. I’m here because I’m trying to explain that I love them and I feel bad. That I’m so depressed now and I feel bad when people are saying these things—even if siguro I should be relieved pa nga na people are on my side. I feel worse because it’s my mom…”
As the public may already know, the senator is not the first man the Ongpaucos have rejected.
Heart says the parental rejection has happened before with Ian Dy, Jericho Rosales, and Daniel Matsunaga. All three come from different backgrounds, but all of them were deemed unsuitable for the Ongpaucos’ bunso.
“They let me do stuff,” Heart says about her parents. “It’s just when I’m in a relationship and it gets serious, then they don’t like it. And maybe because no one would be good enough.”
When Heart was still with Jericho, Heart says, her mom “went to all the [ABS-CBN] bosses and cried to them and said a lot of things about me, too.”
The star notes that the difference between then and now is that her mom “wasn’t my manager at that time” and none of that bad talk became public.
Heart and Jericho weathered the storms that tested their three-year relationship. But the breakup finally came shortly after Heart made amends with her family whom she had a falling out with because of her relationship with the actor.
“When they said that he was cheating on me with Carmen Soo, I really did think that he was,” Heart says.
“I really thought that he cheated on me. I really did. And that was because they told me that he was and I was convinced.”
As she grew older, Heart has accepted that her mom is “just really scared to lose me.” She eventually got “used to that system already” and no longer felt “suffocated.”
Her mom did try to change her ways, Heart acknowledges.
“She was trying to let me go. She was really trying her best to not get herself involved with my past relationships. It was always like that. She would try.
"But in the end, everything that she kept inside would just blow up, and it would just affect me so much and also the relationship that I was in.”
Such a blow-up occurred once more when the senator came into the picture. “I guess this is what happened” with Chiz, Heart says.
In a four-hour exclusive interview for the YES! May 2013 issue, Heart and Chiz address a lot of the unanswered questions concerning the scandal they are currently involved in—like Heart’s money gone “missing,” how Chiz’s relationship was with Heart’s parents prior to the scandal, why Rey had a brawl with Heart’s driver (not Chiz’s driver as previously reported), what happened before the media tirade, and what drove Cecile to go to extreme lengths to separate her daughter from the senator.
Also in the YES! May 2013 issue: Julia Montes’s star-studded debutante ball, theEat Bulaga! cast’s travel photos in London, and Rocco Nacino’s profile in the YES!Pogi Series.
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