A TACLOBAN court on Friday affirmed the terrorism financing conviction of community journalist Frenchie Mae Cumpio and lay worker Marielle Domequil, and denied their bid to be released on bail. The ruling paves the way for the two women to be transferred to a women’s prison in Metro Manila after more than six years behind bars.
Judge Georgina Uy Perez of Tacloban City Regional Trial Court Branch 45 dismissed both motions “for lack of merit,” rejecting defense arguments that the conviction rested on unreliable witnesses and that the two accused posed no flight risk. Lawyers for Cumpio and Domequil said they intend to bring the case before the Court of Appeals.
The ruling means the two will be moved from the Tacloban City Jail to the Correctional Institution for Women in Mandaluyong City — far from their families in Eastern Visayas — as they wait for their appeal to be heard.
The court’s decision was first reported by Bulatlat and Altermidya, two alternative news outfits that have been following the case closely.
Frenchie Mae Cumpio was 21 years old and already working as a journalist when police and military forces raided her home in the middle of the night of Feb. 7, 2020, in Tacloban City, in the eastern Philippine province of Leyte.
Cumpio was the executive director of Eastern Vista, an alternative news website, and a radio news anchor who frequently reported on alleged police and military abuses as well as community welfare issues in Eastern Visayas. She was, by most accounts, the kind of journalist that made powerful people uncomfortable.
Days before her arrest, Cumpio had reportedthat masked men had been tailing the staff of Eastern Vista. She was able to publish about what was happening to them just days before she was taken.
Authorities said they found firearms, a grenade, and cash when they raided the boarding house where she lived. Cumpio and her co-accused said the evidence was planted — that they were turned away during the search and could not witness what officers were doing. She was arrested alongside four others — Alexander Philip Abinguna, Mira Legion, Marissa Cabaljao, and church worker Marielle Domequil — a group that would come to be known as the “Tacloban 5.”
As Rights Report Philippines reported in January, the arrests did not happen in a vacuum. They were part of a wider, systematic use of anti-terror laws against journalists and activists, the so-called “terrorism-financing machine.”
The charges piled up. First came illegal possession of firearms. Then, more than a year later, terrorism financing — the allegation that Cumpio and Domequil had traveled to the mountains of Catbalogan, Samar, in March 2019, and handed over cash and supplies to fighters of the New People’s Army, the armed wing of the Communist Party of the Philippines.
Both women denied it. Cumpio said she was in Tacloban City on that day, reporting about the harassment faced by evacuees in San Jose de Buan. Domequil said she was at the Makabayan office in Tacloban, not feeling well, and presented Facebook activity logs and text messages with her sister as proof. The judge was not convinced. Murder charges were also quietly filed against Cumpio, only to be dismissed in November 2025 — after five years — because the name on the complaint did not match hers.
On Jan. 22, 2026, after nearly six years in detention, the verdict came. The Tacloban Regional Trial Court found Cumpio guilty of financing terrorism and sentenced her to between 12 and 18 years in prison. She was acquitted on the separate firearms charge. She became the first journalist in the Philippines convicted of terrorism financing.
A February analysis by Rights Report Philippines said the same apparatus crushing journalists in the Philippines is also bearing down on human rights workers, community organizers, and church people.
Press freedom groups condemned the ruling as resting on flawed evidence, noting that key prosecution witnesses provided inconsistent and unreliable testimony. Five UN special rapporteurs called the conviction “troubling” and urged the court to grant Cumpio bail while she pursues her appeal. That request was denied. (Rights Report Philippines)
