Put Amal Clooney and Maria Ressa in a room next to each other, and you might think them an odd couple.
The willowy Amal, at 1.74 metres tall, is as well known as a style icon and wife to actor George Clooney as for her work as a leading international human rights lawyer.
Maria, on the other hand, is a 56-year-old diminutive livewire.
An internationally renowned journalist, she is usually pictured gazing through her frameless glasses, clad in practical trouser suits and a dab of lipstick her only apparent make-up.
Yet these two women are now allied in a serious battle for media freedom in the Philippines – a battle both describe as being important to the future of democracy worldwide.
Meanwhile, Amal’s husband, George Clooney, has described Maria as “the bravest of them all … she is that version of us at our best, holding truth to power.”
In July last year it was announced that Amal would join a legal team that is trying to keep Maria out of jail and doing the kind of journalism that has annoyed authoritarian Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte.
Said Amal: “We will pursue all available legal remedies to vindicate her rights and defend press freedom and the rule of law in the Philippines.”
And in September, Amal raised Maria’s case at the United Nations General Assembly as an example of governments violating the right to a free press.
She said of Maria “[she] stands at five foot two, but stands taller than so many of us in her courage and personal sacrifice for the cause of telling the truth”.
Duterte, elected President in 2016, is best known internationally for his murderous “war on drugs”, in which an estimated 50,000 people have been shot down by police and vigilantes.
He has also made a habit of persecuting his critics. A number of his political rivals are presently in jail.
Maria has seriously annoyed him with continuous reporting on the drug killings and allegations of corruption surrounding his regime.
She has annoyed him so much that she has been arrested and bailed a number of times in the past 12 months on charges ranging from tax infringements to defamation.
She most recently appeared in court charged with “cyber libel” over stories alleging that a former chief justice had corrupt links to a Filipino businessman.
She was found guilty but released on bail pending an appeal.
This charge carries a penalty of between six months and six years imprisonment. She described the verdict as a “cautionary tale” and urged other journalists to have courage.
“If you don’t use your rights,” she said, “you will lose them.”
So who is Maria Ressa, and how has she attracted such international star power?
Internationally renowned journalist Maria Ressa has attracted an incredible following after launching a newsroom in Manila.
(Getty)The Australian Women’s Weekly met her in the Manila newsroom of Rappler, the web and social media news outlet and voice of the free press which she founded in 2012.
She is now both CEO and executive editor.
It was hard to keep her sitting down for long enough to do an interview.
She is in perpetual motion – writing, talking on her mobile phone, calling out to her journalists.
On this day she had been up since before dawn to meet a deadline and she had appointments jam-packed until long after dark.
Meanwhile, she was constantly on social media, posting selfies and updates on what she and Rappler were doing.
The office has the feeling of a Silicon Valley start-up.
There are balloons in Rappler‘s trademark orange, lots of polished concrete and meeting rooms with notes scrawled onto the glass walls covering everything, from stories to be pursued to reporters’ names and coffee orders.
Maria, meanwhile, is always smiling.
She describes it as “my natural resting face”. This, despite the fact that she rarely sleeps the night through, faces constant threats on social media of murder and rape, is forced to have personal security and stands a real chance of being thrown into a Philippines jail for the rest of her life.
The Filipino-American is always smiling.
(Getty)Maria and Rappler are currently facing seven cases in at least five courts in the Philippines, as well as another two sets of allegations currently pending decisions by the authorities, but also likely to head to the courts.
It is, says Maria, a “weaponising” of the law by Duterte’s administration.
Meanwhile, Facebook is being used against her. For many Filipinos, Facebook is synonymous with the internet.
There are more mobile phones than citizens, and 97 per cent of Filipinos connected to the internet have a Facebook account.
Since Duterte came to power in 2016, there has been an organised campaign of misinformation that continues today, and critics and rival politicians are denounced by a network of websites, amplified by Duterte-aligned mainstream media and the government communications staff.
These forces have been ranged against Maria and Rappler.
Faced with all these threats, in April last year Maria visited the Columbia Law School in New York for the launch of TrialWatch, a Clooney Foundation for Justice project that aims to monitor courts throughout the world for human rights issues.
At the time, she was just beginning to get frightened. After initially being optimistic that the charges against her would never proceed, they were now moving fast.
Maria and Rappler are currently facing seven cases in at least five courts in the Philippines.
(Getty)That was when George Clooney singled her out in the audience and described her as the bravest of them all.
Afterwards, she was ushered into a room to meet the Clooneys.
They were offered coffee by aides, but George spied a Nespresso machine – the brand for which he is an ambassador – and said “I can do this,” and made Amal and Maria “excellent” coffee.
Maria whipped out her phone and took a selfie of the three of them together.
Says Maria: “They are both such beautiful people – inside and out. And they very consciously use their celebrity for good causes.”
Amal began to talk to Maria about “how cases like mine proceed, and I just took out my notebook and took pages of notes because she was so amazing”. Both George and Amal “asked all the right questions”.
They clearly understood journalism.
“You wouldn’t normally expect somebody who’s a celebrity or somebody who’s an actor to know the nitty gritty of being in the trenches, but they did.”
Later, Maria found out that Amal’s mother, Baria Alamuddin, and George’s father, Nick Clooney, were both journalists.
Amal ran through the worst-case scenario for Maria’s cases.
“That was quite frightening. She told me I could go to jail for 63 years.”
Then she offered to be Maria’s lawyer. At the time, Amal was representing two Reuters journalists imprisoned in Myanmar.
They had just lost their appeal – but Amal told Maria she believed they would be released within two weeks.
“I didn’t quite believe her, but she said, ‘There’s things that happen publicly and there are things that happen behind the scenes.’ George said, ‘She’s been up till three in the morning for weeks working on their case’.”
Sure enough, two weeks later the Myanmar journalists were released under a presidential amnesty. As soon as she heard this news, Maria rang Amal back, and took her up on her offer of being her lawyer.
Maria’s Filipino lawyers will appear for her in court but Amal, together with international human rights lawyer Caoilfhionn Gallagher QC and lawyers from a top US firm, Covington & Burling LLP, will look at protections in international law.
Just before Amal announced her involvement, Duterte had claimed that Rappler was part of a “matrix” of organisations and individuals conspiring to overturn his government.
Human rights lawyers and others named as part of the supposed matrix were investigated for sedition – a non-bailable offence, meaning anyone charged would go straight to jail.
But the journalists were left alone.
Amal offered to be Maria’s lawyer after she was singled out by the lawyer’s husband, George Clooney.
(Getty)It might be speculated that this is thanks to Amal’s involvement, and the international attention she had brought to her case.
Maria understandably won’t talk much about the legal strategies her team is adopting, but she does say, “I feel like a weight has been lifted from my shoulders”.
Meanwhile, life in Manila continues to be tough.
Just before the Philippines mid-term elections last May, Facebook took down a network of accounts and pages for “inauthentic behaviour” and took the unusual step of directly linking them to Duterte’s staff.
“Too little, too late,” says Maria.
She believes social media is the “accelerant” in a cascade of misinformation that has been “like injecting fentanyl into your vein or injecting a drug that has not been approved into the body politic”.
The mainstream media has lost the battle for public attention and trust.
“I am well aware of Facebook’s power for good, but at the moment the ‘bad guys’ have been better at working out how to use social media than the good guys,” she
says.
“We have a patronage-based political system, a lot of poor and uneducated people, and this stuff infects easily.”
Despite its laid-back feel, the Rappler newsroom is forced to have tight security. A Duterte-supporting blogger invaded the office last year and livestreamed a call to his followers to come to the office and shoot the journalists.
Facebook took down the livestream – after a day.
Maria says she is relieved that she doesn’t have children because, if she did, she would be more frightened. She is unmarried and has sent her elderly parents out of the country for safety.
She declines to speak about the people who are important in her personal life. “I don’t want them targeted.”
Launching Rappler
Maria is a dual US and Filipino citizen, the daughter of two Filipinos. Her natural father died when she was an infant, and she was raised by her mother and stepfather, an Italian American.
In 1972, at the beginning of martial law under former president Ferdinand Marcos, they moved from the Philippines to New Jersey.
Maria was just nine years old. The move was formative for her, and began a crisis of identity that ended with a determined decision.
For better or worse, she is Filipino.
Maria recalls the shock of that childhood arrival in the US. “We landed in December. It was really cold. I was the shortest kid in public school. At one point I wanted blonde hair because there was no one like me. I never felt really American. I knew that I wanted to come back to the Philippines.”
In her senior year at Princeton – where she was a contemporary with Michelle Obama – she applied for a Fulbright scholarship to study political theatre in the Philippines.
But once back in Manila, she “fell into” journalism. It was 1986, in the wake of the people power revolution that deposed Marcos. A new constitution was being written. “It was a very exciting, optimistic time,” Maria says.
She worked for CNN in Manila and then across South-East Asia, before deciding to make the Philippines her permanent home and moving back to work for one of the biggest television networks, ABS-CBN, which has also recently been attacked by Duterte and threatened with non-renewal of its licence.
Meanwhile, she wrote two books about the rise of terrorism in South-East Asia. She founded Rappler in 2012 as a response to the collapse of the advertising-based business models that have traditionally supported quality journalism across the Western world.
It was an experiment in a new method of connecting with audiences. Maria was fuelled by optimism about the potential for social media to “cascade information” and allow good journalism to regain its power as a trusted source and brand.
The name “Rappler” is a combination of the words “rap” as in to talk, and ripple, as in to make waves. Rappler grew quickly, building networks across the country. By 2016, when Duterte was elected, it was scoring up to 40 million views a month.
Then the political attacks began, advertising fell away and Maria became painfully aware that the very social media networks that had made Rappler possible were now being used as a political weapon.
It started on Facebook, with false allegations that Rappler was American owned.
These were repeated by President Duterte in a state of the nation address in January 2018. The legal actions began – starting with the revocation of Rappler‘s licence to operate on the grounds that it was in breach of laws requiring media to be Filipino owned.
The basis for this claim was that Rappler had received money from the US-based philanthropic Omidyar Network. Rappler contested the revocation in the courts, and the case is now under review by the authorities.
Then came a total of four counts of tax violation, also to do with the Omidyar investment. Maria has pleaded not guilty to the charges, which are now before the courts.
Maria has US citizenship and could in theory simply move to the US to avoid the legal actions.
She refuses to do so because that would leave the 80-odd journalists who work for her exposed to the anger of the regime.
She believes that the Philippines, with its relatively weak political structures, is the “petri dish” for those wanting to use social media to manipulate and undermine democratic processes.
“What we’re going through in the Philippines you are all going to go through soon. The tactics that we’re living through are coming soon to a democracy near you. We are the canary in the coal mine,” she says.
How does she cope? Maria has to think before replying. “I work,” she says.
“That’s the best response. Despite whatever they throw at us, we keep doing what we do.” She also makes an effort to exercise, making regular trips to the gym.
But at another level, she is ready for the battle ahead.
“I feel like this is what I have to do right now. My values are very clear, and so are my standards and ethics.
“Of course there are a lot of things to fear but I’ve known from when I was a kid that people let their fears prevent them getting what they want in life. What you have to do is, whatever you’re most afraid of, you have to envision it in your head. You touch it, hold it and then reach out to your fear and you embrace it, because that robs it of its power over you.
“And today I have been to the gym – so I’m okay. I’m really okay.”
And there is that smile again.
Read this in the July issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly, on sale now.
