A distraught Ai-Ai de las Alas is considering filing for divorce from estranged husband Jed Salang, whom she accused of physically, emotionally and mentally abusing her while they were together.
“They would be taking care of all the legalities,” she has told entertainment scribes, referring to her lawyers, who have since been studying the matter very carefully.
The 48-year-old De las Alas, a popular comedienne, actress and singer in the Philippines, recently admitted that she and Salang, 28, have been separated since May 2, when they were supposed to celebrate a month of being married.
It was also the day that she gifted Salang his dream car, a Chevrolet Camaro. But then he wanted more—that they stay in a hotel-casino for three days to celebrate, and so he could also brush elbows with the high rollers at the gambling den.
“I refused to go … because it was not healthy for us to be seen in such a place,” she told ‘The Buzz’, a weekly showbiz programme on ABS-CBN, last Sunday. “I suggested that we should just stay in the house or go to a regular hotel. But he got mad.”
It was around this time that Salang slapped her, shoved her off the bed, and dragged her across the room and out of the door. And this also served as the coup de grace for De las Alas, as she finally realised she couldn’t take it anymore.
A battered wife could only take so much from her abusive husband, she has been telling friends and relatives. In her case it was more than a year, as she and Salang were already living together before their civil wedding in Las Vegas on April 3. They had made plans for a church wedding in the Philippines on December 8.
De las Alas said that her genuine love for Salang has turned to anger, as she was traumatised by the incident. “What else could he do to me?” she asked. “I gave him everything to make him happy.”
In fact, she had been consulting with the best doctors on how she could be pregnant with Salang, as she had wanted to give him a baby.
She had declared that he would be the last man in her life. “I’ll take care of you … I will love you forever,” she had told him, whom she once described as God’s gift to her.
De las Alas used to be married to actor Miguel Vera, by whom she has two grown children. She has another son, the eldest, from a previous relationship.
She had been warned about Salang, yes, but she just did not listen because she was so deeply in love with him.
“I was told that Jed just wanted to make me fall for him and then do something else—I don’t want to say the word,” she told Boy Abunda, host of ‘The Buzz’. “Once he has done that, he’ll leave me for someone else—his ex-girlfriend. I knew and felt that it was true from the start…
But I was scared to admit it to myself.”
She has confessed that there were three of them in their marriage, and even from when she had started living-in with Salang more than a year ago.
In between sobs, she also told Abunda that, “After everything I’ve learnt” about Salang, “I didn’t think he did ever love me even once”.
She added, “I just wanted to have someone to spend the rest of my life with, to have someone I could talk to and love me. And now I’m ashamed to say that things didn’t turn out the way I wanted them to.”
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