MANILA, Philippines – (UPDATED 3:10 P.M.) Actress and TV host Ruffa Gutierrez ended her “tell-all” interview with Mo Twister on TV5’s Paparazzi on Sunday afternoon with a simple wish for her two antagonists, the erstwhile lovers John Lloyd Cruz and Shaina Magdayao.
Ruffa expressed hope John Lloyd will someday be man enough to own up to his problems, that Shaina will be happy and stop blaming other people for her woes, and that both will “tell the truth” about what really happened. “The truth shall set you free,” said the actress-host, who is currently in Dubai for the Kapatid Network’s Middle East roadshow.
Her taped interview with Mo Twister was aired in three segments throughout the show she co-hosts Sundays with Cristy Fermin.
In the last segment, Ruffa showed on-cam the actual messages she received on her mobile phone from John Lloyd, from Shaina, and occasionally, “messages supposedly coming from John Lloyd but which I know were sent by someone else.”
She was referring to the angry text she got at 1:33 a.m. on October 18, 2011, after the concert of actress-singer Vina Morales — her close friend and elder sister of Shaina — which said, “Shut up! What do you want from me?!”
She knew it didn’t come from John Lloyd because many people had seen him dead drunk again and virtually being carried to his car, as often happens, she said.
The next day, Ruffa said she got a text message from John Lloyd apologizing for what happened the night before, for dragging her into the mess, and vowing to “fix this” problem.
Ruffa said she would have kept quiet about the constant harassment she was getting from the John Lloyd-Shaina camp, but felt deeply hurt when the two said — after admitting in an interview in a rival network that no third party was behind their problems — that Ruffa should “stay the hell away from us.”
Ruffa ended her “tell-all” interview with a fond wish for her former boyfriend: “I’d be the happiest when you can finally be a real man” — meaning, own up to his problems, including his alcoholic bouts.
She made it clear “I’m not flirting with John Lloyd; I’m inspired right now by someone else,” and that she is very loyal to that “someone else,” in the same way she was “faithful to John Lloyd when we still had a relationship.”
‘Problematic’ relationship from the start
Earlier in the interview, Ruffa said extreme pressure from “so many sides,” their many incompatibilities, and the personal flaws of John Lloyd, including his occasional drunkenness and womanizing, were behind their breakup. But, she insisted, they had broken up long before actress Shaina started confronting her through text messages, and she resented being cast as some sort of the “other woman” in the failed Cruz-Magdayao relationship.
In between the airing of segments of the interview, co-host Cristy Fermin was getting some anecdotes from guests about what they know of the “triangle” that has so upset Ruffa that she threatened last week to “bare all” the angry text messages and calls she had been getting from the Lloyd-Shaina camp.
In the first two segments of the interview aired in Paparazzi, Ruffa said their relationship had been rocky at the start because many people, including her mother Annabelle Rama, had opposed it. Rama had said in interviews she resented the “sneaky” ways with which John Lloyd carried on with her daughter, making her look like a “kept woman,” and dared him to be “man enough.”
The two met in 2008, became a couple in 2009, and broke up in 2010. But, Ruffa told Mo Twister in the interview taped in Dubai, that between June and October 2010, John Lloyd kept reaching out to her, and “started texting me again.”
In November 2010, right after the Star Magic Ball, she completely turned her back on him. Thus, she was surprised when, in 2011, she started getting calls and text messages from Shaina at odd hours.
“I called John Lloyd and told him, “ayusin mo iyan [fix your mess].” She recalled making it clear “I don’t like receiving calls in the middle of the night.”
