Claire Castro is already at her office when the Rolling Stone Philippines team arrives, dressed in pink, settled deep into her chair, mid-conversation with her staff. She stands up the moment we walk in.
The woman who has spent the better part of a year being Malacañang’s most combative, most viral voice — the one who gave President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. something his communications team had been unable to provide for the first three years of his presidency — is, in person, immediately warm.
Feisty at the podium, yes. An attack dog, as her critics say. But in this room, in pink, she is also just a woman who window-shops online to fall asleep at night.
This is the contradiction at the heart of Claire Castro. At press briefings, she is sharp and quick, a trial lawyer’s instincts fused with decades of radio training, someone who knows where a reporter’s question is going before they finish asking it.
In person, she laughs easily, gets starstruck when the president walks in, and will tell you without any apparent irony that she became a fan of Marcos in a meeting no cameras were allowed into, five days into a job she never planned to take.
She was not a supporter when he ran. She was not paying close attention to his campaign. She was a practising lawyer in private life, running her own YouTube channel where she had made vlogs questioning the administration’s handling of PhilHealth and the Maharlika Investment Fund. She cherished her independence, her privacy, her income from private practice.
And then, one week before her oath-taking in February 2025, the president invited her to Malacañang. She walked in expecting a conversation. He looked at her and said: “Can you help the government?”
“I was so mesmerized. My heart melted with those words,” says Castro. “And I said yes.”
She still does not know why Marcos chose her. She has not asked. Up to this interview, conducted in June, more than a year into the job, she genuinely cannot explain it.
“I was part of the media. I [was] a member of the KBP (Kapisanan ng Mga Brodkaster ng Pilipinas),” Castro wonders. “Or baka cute ako. Hindi ko alam.”
What she did not receive, upon accepting, was any kind of briefing. No guidelines, no format, no instruction on how to be the face of the Palace, just the information that she would be the one standing at the podium.
Her first appearance before the Malacañang Press Corps came immediately after her oath-taking. TV5’s Maricel Halili threw the first question: How would she react to former President Rodrigo Duterte’s claim that the Marcos administration was heading toward dictatorship?
“Wala akong pinanood… Sabak kaagad!” she says. Her answer that day came straight from instinct: “Ano pa ba ang ating i-e-expect sa dating Pangulong Rodrigo Duterte? Gumawa ng intriga, magplanta ng ebidensya!” Marcos never called to correct her. She took that as the only feedback she needed as his new spokesperson.
Castro’s first year has been, by any measure, a transformation for Malacañang’s communications. Marcos had cycled through spokespersons since 2022, each one struggling to find the register that could match the louder, more populist energy of his erstwhile ally, Vice President Sara Duterte.
Castro found it immediately, not by being a loyalist, but by being a fighter. Her mandate, as she defines it herself, is simple.
“Fake news is flying around,” she says. “So how can we counter that? I have to prepare all those issues that are going viral. I should be backed up by the evidence. I have to give you the truth with the pieces of evidence that I have. Nothing more, nothing less.”
The irony is not lost on observers, or, when pressed, on Castro herself. She is now the most vocal anti-disinformation voice in the Palace, speaking for a president whose 2022 campaign has been documented in multiple studies as a beneficiary of coordinated disinformation networks.
She says she was not a Marcos supporter then and was not following him closely. “To tell you the truth, I never read anything about the President during the campaign,” she says. “I was not interested.”
What she knows now, from being inside the room, is a different Marcos from the one the critics describe.
The story she comes back to is from her fifth day on the job. The president was speaking to his staff about a government project and the assistance it would provide to ordinary Filipinos. He stopped and said something she says she never heard a public official say without an audience.
“Sabi niya, ‘People should not thank you; it is our obligation. We don’t need to hear from them the word thank you kasi this is our job… At kapag hindi natin ito nagawa, failure tayo.’” She gets goosebumps recounting it, a year later. “Walang media ‘yon ah. Hindi siya paepal. That’s from his heart. Nagulat ako.”
That trust, quietly and carefully built, has translated into real influence. When a bill granting Filipino citizenship to Chinese businessman Li Duan Wang was up for Marcos’ signature, Castro pulled the president aside after a meeting.
“My suggestion is, can you just read everything and try to know the background of this [person?]” she remembered telling the president, noting how it was only Senator Risa Hontiveros who raised red flags over Li’s links to the now-banned Philippine offshore gaming operator industry and the Chinese Communist Party.
Castro followed up repeatedly in the weeks that followed, worried that the bill would lapse into law. Marcos eventually vetoed the bill in April 2025.
“After a month or two, that person was accused of kidnapping. So that’s why, after that… ‘pag nakikita mo [ang] pangulo, nagsasalita, you will give that respect,” says Castro.
Navigating Marcos’ silence is another matter entirely. When it comes to the President’s falling out with his older sister, Senator Imee Marcos, Castro has learned to read what he will not say out loud. “Hayaan mo na lang, Claire,” he tells her, whenever the senator’s criticism of her brother lands in the headlines.
But Castro still has to face the Malacañang Press Corps. She still has to answer.
“The thing that I would react to regarding Senator Imee is about fake news,” she says. “It’s my job to correct.” But everything else, she lets go, because the president already has.
“I have to give you the truth with the pieces of evidence that I have. Nothing more, nothing less.”
Off camera, Castro is a study in contrasts with her public persona. She sleeps at 3 a.m. because she monitors social media until her eyes close. She wakes at 6:30 a.m. for piping hot black coffee. She contacts Cabinet secretaries individually when preparing for briefings because she needs the context, not just the data.
She missed a call from the president once because she was at an event with Communications Secretary Dave Gomez. She panicked for a bit, but was relieved when the president texted his instructions instead, not minding that he had missed a call from the most powerful man in the land.
She says she has also copyrighted “Ante Claire,” the nickname that started as a dig from critics and that she embraced in a single live on-camera moment, clapping and declaring it could be potentially useful in an electoral campaign.
She laughs while telling the story. She insists she has no plans to run for office.
“If I have the ambition,” Castro says, “it will definitely affect how I would make a remark. ‘Ah, teka lang, kasi botante ‘to eh.’ Ay, hindi puwedeng ganun.”
She wants to be remembered as one thing when this is all over.
“Fake news buster,” she says, without hesitation.
Undersecretary Claire Castro never supported the man she now speaks for. She just walked in and figured it out.
Read the rest of this story in the Rolling Stone Philippines’ Voices Issue, now available for pre-order on Sari-sari Shopping and in major newsstands soon.
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