Sara Duterte Posted $5,740 Bail in Quezon City. The Charge Is Threatening to Have Marcos Killed.

MANILA — Vice President Sara Duterte posted bail Saturday at the Quezon City Regional Trial Court, a day after a judge ordered her arrest on three counts of grave threats for saying she would have President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. assassinated. Court staff took her fingerprints. Her lawyers put up 360,000 pesos, about $5,740, and she walked out with a copy of the order lifting the warrant, which she said her attorneys had told her to carry.

She emerged in black to a crowd of supporters chanting her name, embraced a woman who was weeping, and asked reporters to escort her to her car. "If possible please go with me, because I do not feel safe with all these police personnel who are harassing those at my home, harassing me since 2023," Duterte said. "What does this administration really want to do with me?"

The charges trace back to an online news conference in 2024, at the point where the alliance between the country's two ruling dynasties was breaking apart in public. Duterte, now 48, said that if she were killed she had arranged for an assassin to kill Marcos, first lady Liza Araneta-Marcos, and Martin Romualdez, then the speaker of the House of Representatives. She warned during the event that she was not joking. She has since said she was expressing fear for her own life rather than making a threat, but the remarks triggered a criminal investigation and a national security review.

"She has no intention of evading the law and will continue to exercise all her legal remedies," said Paul Lawrence Lim, one of her attorneys, after Friday's arrest order.

The criminal case runs alongside an impeachment that is already underway. The Marcos-aligned House voted overwhelmingly in May to impeach Duterte over allegations of unexplained wealth, misuse of confidential state funds and the threats themselves, and the Senate opened her televised trial as an impeachment court in July. Either track could end her career: a conviction on grave threats can carry permanent disqualification from public office, which would take her out of the 2028 presidential race that Marcos's single six-year term will open up.

Marcos and Duterte ran together in 2022 in an alliance that fused the two most powerful political families in the Philippines. Her father, former President Rodrigo Duterte, was arrested in 2025 on an International Criminal Court warrant and is being held in The Hague, where a trial over the killings carried out during his anti-drug campaign is scheduled to begin in late November. Sara Duterte has attacked the Marcos government for handing him to a court she says has no jurisdiction over the country.

The two also diverge on China. Marcos has widened defense cooperation with the United States and pushed back on Chinese vessels operating in the disputed South China Sea, including their use of water cannons against Philippine boats. His vice president has declined to condemn those incidents, which her opponents have made a central line of attack.