LOS ANGELES – Maria Ressa says she didn’t take Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte seriously when he declared four years ago that “corrupt” journalists weren’t “exempted from assassination.”“In 2016, it was really, really laughable.
And I thought, ‘Oh, doesn’t matter.’ I laughed,” said the country’s most well-known journalist and leader of the independent Rappler news organization.Grim reality set in as Ressa was arrested and thrown in jail, targeted in a series of criminal cases and convicted this summer on libel and tax evasion charges seen widely as attacks on press freedom.
She now faces six years in prison.“A Thousand Cuts,” a new documentary from Filipino-American filmmaker Ramona S. Diaz, tracks Ressa’s dual life in recent years..