Facebook feud resurrects Tim Garcia, reveals his new identity as Trans woman ‘Isabel’

By Cristina DC Pastor

About 5 years before Jeane Napoles, there was Timothy Mark Garcia, known among Manhattan’s fashion cognoscenti as Tim Garcia, a publicist for designer Marc Jacobs.

Tim is the son of former comptroller of the Armed Forces of the Philippines, Maj. Gen. Carlos Garcia. The older Garcia now sits in a Philippine jail after he was convicted of amassing up to $6.2 million in ill-gotten wealth.

Tim was sent to a Brooklyn jail in 2009 for money laundering. Tim, who is gay, his two brothers, and their mother – all of them U.S. citizens — are accused of transferring $2 million from the Philippines to the U.S., carrying bulk cash of up to $100K as they traveled from Manila to the U.S. The entire family faces plunder charges in the Philippines.

Tim spent 95 days at the Brooklyn Metropolitan Detention Center, and released on $1 million bail.

Because of his lifestyle in fashion and statements that tend to reflect indifference and a lack of remorse, Tim became a poster child for scions of corrupt Philippine officials. He follows the trail started by the Marcos children Imee, Ferdinand Jr. and Irene, who were known for their extravagant lifestyles and lavish parties when their dictator-father was in power.

After Tim Garcia, Jeane Napoles was cast in the same mold in 2013. The young socialite was photographed looking fashionably leggy inside a limo while her mother Janet Lim Napoles battled corruption charges for her role in a P10-billion ‘pork barrel’ scheme paid off to certain lawmakers.

Tim’s post-jailhouse confession made blog news and made Filipino netizens very angry. He shared in a Daily Beast interview how he was locked up with “organized crime people…and trannies who needed hormone treatments.”

“It’s life altering,” he said in the article. “Imagine living a comfortable lifestyle and then all of a sudden you’re forced to coexist with armed robbers, organized crime people and people who sell drugs. The cream of the criminal crop. They put me with pedophiles. I was trying not to get raped every day.”

Nothing else was heard from Tim since 2009. Until this week.

An online feud erupted in late June between Gender Proud founder Geena Rocero and her former mentor, Paola Isabella Rocha Tornito, known by her Facebook name as LA Paola.

The root of the fight appeared to be an incident at a Valkyrie nightclub in Manila where a fashion designer was denied entry because of the club’s ‘No Cross-dressing Policy.’ Rocero, who gained fame after revealing on TED Talk that she is a transgender model, rallied the LGBT community in the Philippines to denounce Valkyrie, and for the club to put an end to policies that tend to discriminate the gay community.

LA Paola, a socialite who is another transgender Filipina according to people who have followed her posts, seemed not to approve of Rocero’s conduct in the middle of the nightclub controversy. She admonished Rocero, “You don’t sound like an activist and role model to your followers. You sound like a screaming faggot from the ghetto.”

And thus began a volley of personal insults thrown at Rocero. LA Paola lobbed a bombshell accusation: She accused Rocero of money laundering by acting as a bag woman for one ‘Isabel Cruz.’

She wrote, “Did anyone know that Tim Garcia (son of the corrupt general in Manila) aka Isabel Cruz and Geena Rocero are best of friends and buddies? Ooops, Geena is the official courier from Manila for Isabel’s allowance in New York City. Because their assets and money were confiscated by the federal Supreme Court of United States. Ooops! That’s money laundering. Again you can go to jail here in the United States.”

With that, she posted a photo of Tim Garcia aka Isabel (sporting long hair), Rocero, and herself dining in an Argentine restaurant in New York, and captioned it, “The good old days.” In that undated photo, LA Paola further said that “Isabel was on her one year transition period. In fact we were talking about her future surgery.”

With that, Tim Garcia is back in the community’s consciousness. No longer as Tim the fashion publicist but as Tim a recently transformed woman.

Rocero vehemently denied the money laundering accusation and threatened with a lawsuit. In her own account, Isabel is surnamed Garcia instead of Cruz.

She said, “Paola ISABELLA Rocha Tornito (La Paola) introduced me to Isabel Garcia. I met Isabel Garcia because she is ‘anak anakan’ of Paola. Paola was her mentor. When they had a falling out, La Paola wanted to implicate me in their fight. I refused to be involved.

“I met Isabel Garcia through La Paola. Isabel Garcia and I are not best friends. The picture La Paola is circulating doesn’t prove anything. It is being used by La Paola to support her fabricated stories against me.

“I haven’t seen Isabel Garcia in so many years. I have absolutely nothing to do with the corruption issue of the Garcia family. I am not complicit to whatever crime they may have committed.

“I have committed mistakes in the past and even now, but I have not committed the crime of money laundering that La Paola is accusing me of.

“I am now in the process of filing a libel case against Paola. This is the last you will hear from me regarding this issue.”

Some leaders in the LGBT community would like the tirades to end, and for the parties to focus on the bigger, more “necessary struggles.”

“Let us draw our attention back to the need to fight against transphobia, hate crimes, bullying, and systemic violence that our Trans community face,” said Irma Bajar of GABRIELA USA. “I want to call the community to join the necessary struggle alongside our trans communities for basic human rights including non- discrimination, housing, jobs, health care, and genuine safety within all communities and most especially liberation from state repression and violence.”