Singer songwriter Freddie Aguilar
Singer songwriter Freddie Aguilar famous for the song ‘Anak’ and now more famous for financial stupidity and business incompetence sees his life go faster down the drain then his meteoric rise.
Someone close to him told me the following: His restaurant Ka Freddie’s in AntiPolo has faced years of losing money due to bad management and has by the last reports received closed down after losing money for years and having a lot of equipment stolen. The end came as is so often with Mr. Aguilar in a violent confrontation. Accusing his sister Maritess of stealing and screwing up his business (After having borrowed money from her to keep his life going as well as borrowing money from his other sister Zoraida) slapped her on the face, she in turn smashed up a number of chairs and her drug addict husband Abraham Rey Hippolito got out his pistol and started shooting in the air. Customers fleeing from the establishment sealed its demise and with it yet another badly thought out business of Mr. Aguilar’s.
After losing to drugs, alcohol bad investments and wife’s revenge, more than one hundred million pesos made from the sales of his best and highest selling album Kumusta Ka, Freddie was forced to sell his library to Concorde Records for the sum of P7 million. However several of the albums did not belong to him and there are some legal difficulties now facing him. Magdalena and other songs from the album belong to G Records producer Jo-Mari Gonzales; Kumusta Ka belongs to Robin Jacob (producer and financier of the said album owed more than P5M in producer royalties) and other songs to Vicor. He also faces a court case for selling/using Anak without permission from Vicor the legal owners, but Mr. Aguilar seems to think there is one law for him and one law for everyone else.
His wife Josephine left him after one too many affairs with a string of women. The last and present girlfriend was only 17 when he started the affair, statutory rape in the Philippines, (Age of consent being 18) but of course money silences the family and the law doesn’t it?
Meagan Aguilar left the home many years ago at the age of 16 after continuous abuse from Freddie and his wife. She lived for sometime with her aunt Aida Aguilar and her husband Robin Jacob (Producer of Kumusta Ka) which apparently irked Mr. Aguilar intensely.
It seems that it is easy to be a rebel when one has no money, but when one becomes rich one succumbs to the allure of wealth, sip-sip-ness and arrogance. A small boy from the province with a talent and no education, bad management and an ego the size of Mount Pinatubo does not make for a lasting career.
Mr. Aguilar could have been a great role model but he has become an old drunken joke. Money gone, wife gone, children alienated, family disgusted and forgotten for the most part by Filipinos who have had better music role models in the form of Erasure Heads to look up to. He could have been the greatest musical artist to go around the world, but instead he persisted in planting his ego firmly up his ass!
Of course this is not an unusual story in the world of entertainment. It happens all over the world, but the Philippines could really do with a good role model at this time.
