MANILA — President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines has admitted to sexually assaulting a

housemaid when he was a teenager in a speech that drew condemnation from women’s groups,
but which his office later dismissed as a joke.

Mr. Duterte has made headlines around the world for remarks that run the gamut from innocuously
bawdy to dangerously sexist, including jokes about rape. His speech on Saturday to local officials,
however, appeared to be the first time in which he publicly admitted to personally assaulting a
woman.

In a speech that focused his ire on the Roman Catholic Church — a powerful political foil in this
predominately Catholic country — and what the president sees as its hypocrisy, Mr. Duterte
recounted a confession he made to a priest about entering the bedroom of a maid and assaulting
her.

“I lifted the blanket,” Mr. Duterte, 73, said. “I tried to touch what was inside the panties.”

“I was touching. She woke up. So I left the room,” he added.

The priest, he said, told him to say, “five Hail Marys because you will go to hell.”

Mr. Duterte’s comments were intended to shed light on the church’s sexual abuse crisis, but
instead drew outrage from his own critics, who called on him to immediately resign.

“Unfortunately, Duterte’s machismo and ill-regard of women is also symptomatic of Philippine

society’s entrenched sexism and patriarchal culture,” Joms Salvador, the secretary general of
Gabriela, a women’s rights organization, said in an interview.

Mr. Duterte’s remarks, she said, were dangerous because they normalize violence against
women.

“The maniac in Malacanang has proved that he had no qualms violating the rights of women,” Ms.
Salvador said, referring to the president’s executive mansion.

“This latest confession has brought shame not only on himself but on the entire nation that trusted
him to lead judiciously and righteously. He has proved himself unworthy of his position and should
resign,” she added.

Though Mr. Duterte’s comments were shocking as a personal admission, they were not surprising
to observers of the president.

In February, Mr. Duterte boasted that he ordered military officials to shoot female communist
guerrillas in the genitals.

When campaigning for president in 2016, he joked about missing out on raping an Australian
missionary during a 1989 prison riot in his hometown, Davao City. And he has used sexual jokes
to attack Leila de Lima, a senator and former justice secretary who has been a leading critic of his
contentious war on drugs that has left thousands dead.

Mr. Duterte has reserved his harshest tirades for the Catholic Church, which has led protests
against his bloody crackdown on drug dealers and users.
By one independent estimate, the two-year crackdown has left more than 20,000 people dead.
Recently, Mr. Duterte threatened to behead an outspoken Catholic bishop who led street protests
against the president’s drug war.

Richard Javad Heydarian, a political analyst at De La Salle University in Manila, said the president
has a habit of making outlandish remarks whenever he finds himself in a difficult political situation.

When the president needs to shift the narrative away from questionable policy initiatives, Mr.
Heydarian said, he appears to rely “on outrage to keep himself constantly in headlines.”

“It seems the president has developed a penchant for pushing the envelope without any notion of
rhetorical self restraint, not even during the holidays,” Mr. Heydarian said.