TEEN star Julia Barretto has said that she has reconciled with her father, actor Dennis Padilla.
Barretto, 19, made the revelation after she commented on a viral photo of her father who visited her at the gym last month, according to a report in “Tonight with Boy Abunda” over ABS-CBN recently.
The photo of Barretto and her father has received positive comments from netizens.
“I know that he goes to the gym, nagulat na lang ako, sabi ko ‘Papa!’ Iba-iba kasi ang schedules namin kaya hindi kami magkatagpo. We’ve been talking even before meeting. It’s not like we patched things up here. We’ve been patching up things even before,” said Barretto.
Barretto is hoping that everything will be settled between her and her father.
“I’m just really glad that we are starting to patch things up. Little by little nagiging okay na ang lahat. As a daughter, it makes me really happy. At the end of the day, he is still my dad,” she said.
“Gusto ko sa huli okay kami. Walang hard feelings,” added Barretto, who regularly appears in the Kapamilya Sunday noontime variety show “ASAP.”
Barretto added that her mother Marjorie supported her decision.
“Si mom naman kung saan kami masaya hinahayaan na lang n’ya kami run. My siblings are happy, guidance lang s’ya,” Barretto added.
Padilla and his daughter have been at odds after she filed a petition to drop her father’s real surname Baldivia from her legal name in 2014. It wasn’t known if Julia will no longer pursue the change in name.
Marjorie has earlier said that her daughter wanted to formalize the Barretto name to avoid confusion in the records of the National Statistics Office.
The 1997 marriage of Dennis and Marjorie has been declared bigamous and therefore null and void in 2009 after the court found out that Dennis had a prior marriage in 1994.
Padilla, 54, has two other children by Marjorie. They are Claudia and Leon. He is regularly seen in the prime time show “FPJ’s Ang Probinsyano.”