FALSE: Angelina Jolie hopes US finds a leader like Duterte to eradicate drug problem

At a glance:

• Claim: Actress and humanitarian Angelina Jolie was quoted as saying, “I hope we find a Rodrigo Duterte in America to help us eradicate drugs here.” 
• Rating: FALSE
• The facts: There are no audio or video recordings, transcripts, or official reports of Jolie saying the quote attributed to her. 
• Why we fact-checked this: This post was emailed to Rappler for verification and similar posts were found through the social media monitoring tool CrowdTangle. One post has around 21,000 shares, 1,700 comments, and 6,900 reactions. 

Complete details:

Actress and humanitarian Angelina Jolie supposedly said, “I hope we find a Rodrigo Duterte in America to help us eradicate drugs here,” according to a quote card shared on multiple Facebook posts. 

Some versions of the quote card compare Jolie’s support of President Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drugs with a supposed quote by Vice President Leni Robredo: “The Duterte ‘failed’ war on drugs should be stop (sic). We should legalize narcotics instead.”

This claim was emailed to Rappler for verification. The post sent to Rappler was dated March 15 and has minimal interactions on Facebook. However, a similar post from October 2019 has around 6,900 reactions, 1,700 comments, and 21,000 shares.

A version of this claim was shared with at least 7 Facebook pages, according to the social media monitoring tool CrowdTangle. Five of these were posted on March 10, while the other two were posted in 2019.

This claim is false. 

There are no audio or video recordings, transcripts, or official reports of Jolie saying the quote attributed to her.

A similar quote that circulated in 2016 was posted on the website philnews.ph, which describes itself as satirical. This claim was debunked by Rappler in 2018. 

There are no transcripts or reports of the supposed quote by Robredo, either. No results were found when searching for the quote with quotation marks on Google, which yields pages with the same words in the same order.

The Vice President had called the Duterte administration’s drug war a failure in the past and she spoke about Portugal’s decriminalization of the acquisition, possession, and use of small quantities of psychoactive drugs. However, she spoke about these on two separate occasions.

On January 6, 2020, while talking about her findings from her 18-day stint as co-chair of the Inter-Agency Committee on Anti-Illegal Drugs (ICAD), Robredo said: “Failure talaga siya dahil ‘yung kampanya laban sa ilegal na droga, maraming aspeto ito. Maraming aspeto at nakikita natin, gaya ng sinabi ko sa report, na masyado nang natutukan ‘yung street-level enforcement, ‘yung pagtugis sa maliit na mga pushers at users.“

(It’s really a failure because the campaign against illegal drugs has a lot of aspects. It has many aspects, and like what I mentioned in the report, they put too much focus on street-level enforcement, going after the small-time pushers and users.)

Duterte had designated Robredo as ICAD co-chair in 2019 but he fired her from the post 18 days after she accepted the job, saying he could not trust her.

At a forum in the University of the Philippines in Los Baños on April 17, 2017, Robredo was asked about an alternative to the drug war, and she responded that the government should look to other countries and cited Portugal as an example of a country with a successful anti-drug campaign.

She said: “Portugal found a system to combat drugs that was peaceful and orderly. They reformed their laws; they strengthened rehabilitation [of addicts]; they fixed their institutions responsible for rehabilitating.” – Vernise Tantuco/Rappler.com

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