Fourth Anniversary of former Seoul mayor's suicide

Submitted by soryang on Tue, 07/09/2024 - 11:07am

I wanted to note today is the fourth anniversary of the suicide of Park Won-soon 박원순 the three time elected mayor of Seoul who was immensely popular and a likely prospect to become the democratic nominee for president of South Korea at the time.

Park was framed by a resentful secretary and a right wing + conservative media conspiracy to get rid of him politically by falsely accusing him of rape and initiating a criminal investigation against him. I wrote an article almost four years ago on his unjust treatment and the convoluted plot to oust him from South Korean politics by a vicious libelous assault on his character. The story is basically that his secretary was obviously infatuated with him. She had avoided transfer from his office for over a year after her mandatory transfer date which should have taken place in accordance with personnel regs. Although he was married, she intended to rise to the top of the political power structure with him. This was documented in her social media posts. Although she claimed to have suffered through hell due to his "sexual harassment" for four years, her office turnover files and social media posts indicated she was probably in love with the mayor and couldn't think more highly of him. In ~~early 2020~~ 2019 she was finally obliged to transfer from his office which she vehemently opposed, (her last known contact with the mayor was in Feb 2020). A male colleague from her new office assignment allegedly raped her after she became drunk at an office party and accompanied him to a hotel room in April 2020. Inexplicably her trauma from the rape by another was turned against the mayor for political purposes.

Here are pictures below of the mayor "sexually harassing" the putative victim, his former secretary, with excerpts that are taken from an article I wrote interpreting South Korean investigative news reports at the time-

Deceased Mayor Park Won-soon- Trial by Media in South Korea

( Source- 열린공감TV 09.12 ) The accuser appears friendly to the mayor at the office Christmas party. She described a happy fourth year Christmas at the mayor's office, and wished the mayor "man se!" on social media.

Something that hasn't been made clear during the Kim Jae-ryun press conferences during the funeral services of Mayor Park, nor in her recent public statement is that the client she represents left the deceased Mayor's office in July 2019. At that time she left a turnover file describing the duties of her office for the benefit of her successor. It is clear from her personally recorded statements in the file, that she held the mayor in the highest esteem, regarded him an honorable man, and as a three term mayor of Seoul, a figure of historic importance. Further she said it was a privilege to serve him as personal secretary, and that the smallest tasks were to be viewed in the role they played supporting the mayor's office. The record of the secretary's own words belie the accusations that "she suffered for four years" because the mayor indecently assaulted her and sexually harassed her.

( Source- 열린공감TV 09.12 ) Who is holding onto whose arm? Picture of the complainant with Mayor Park on the office hiking outing.

Beyond this, Attorney Kim's statements initially failed to make it explicitly clear that after she transferred to a different city office, in July 2019, her client accused a different city employee, Mister A, of raping her after an office party April 14, 2020 at which she had became intoxicated. Many viewers of news reports were left with the mistaken impression that the mayor was a rapist. Attorney Kim's client claims, without her consent, she was taken to a hotel room and raped by this employee from the mayor's protocol office. Apparently, after the hotel CCTV video showing their interaction in front of the hotel, authorities concluded that there was a "relationship" between the parties, and that Ms. Kim's client accompanied the alleged rapist to the hotel room willingly. Attorney Kim calls internet presentations of the video "fake news."...

( Source- 열린공감TV 09.14 ) An undated picture of Mayor Park at the office celebrating his birthday. The complainant initiates body contact in an overly familiar manner.

Initially, there were three separate criminal complaints filed by attorney Kim on behalf of her unnamed client. The first one alleging sexual assault against her client by the Mayor is going nowhere because the accused mayor is dead. The second suit involves so called secondary damage to her client by spreading information against her and subjecting her to threats aimed at inhibiting investigation of the her charges against the mayor. The problems with this second complaint are multiple. It is those close to the complainant who are spreading information about the victim on the internet. It is the attorney for the putative "victim" who is conducting a one sided campaign in the media. The mayor is dead, there is no material connection to the mayor in the so called secondary damages suit. There is a third cause of action against three individuals who are charged with aiding and abetting the mayor's alleged crime of sexual assault. This suit indirectly seeks to obtain compulsory process to unearth the facts related to the underlying allegations against the mayor by investigation of the mayor's actions over the past four years, which the court has already stated it will not investigate, by alleging a cover up. In proceedings related to the third criminal complaint, a Seoul court decided July 22, that it would not issue a warrant to seize and search the mayor's hand phone because the investigators presented insufficient evidence that the mayor had committed any of the underlying crimes described against the alleged victim...

I watched an update video on this story made especially for the 4th Anniversary occasion last night. The investigative reporters asserted that to this date no police or formal investigative authority has found any evidence to support the allegations of Park's former secretary. The matter was basically dropped. South Korean conservative mainstream media- mission accomplished, another popular democratic leader discredited and eliminated from politics.

Like former President No Moo-hyun who also committed suicide, and current democratic party leader Lee Jae-myung, who is now being subjected to four different trumped up prosecutions by the Yoon administration, Park was a prominent human rights lawyer before his election to office. Prosecutors who prosecuted former democratic party prime minister Han Myung-suk, and Lee Jae-myung may be subjected to investigation and impeachment proceedings themselves for abuse of process, submitting false testimony etc. The corruption of the administration of justice is out of control in South Korea. Political lawfare has got to go. Prosecutors are now compared to Hanahoe 하나회, the group of military officers who backed successive dictators in South Korea in years past. Mainstream media's participation in prosecutorial schemes to attack opposition politicians have caused South Korea's reputation for democratic governance to falter considerably.

(edit misspelled Hanahoe 하나회)

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South Korea politics Seoul mayor suicide

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Submitted by earthling1 on Tue, 07/09/2024 - 11:50am

Thanks Soryang

I remember his suicide as being suspicious at the time.
Could she have been a three letter agency plant?

—

Neither Russia nor China is our enemy.
Neither Iran nor Venezuela are threatening America.
Cuba is a dead horse, stop beating it.

Submitted by soryang on Tue, 07/09/2024 - 1:13pm

I don't think she was

@earthling1

...but I had a lot of misgivings about the attorney from the department of children and families who undertook her cause and transformed it into a campaign against the mayor. I think its important to bear in mind, that the putative victim of the mayor, most likely resented the mayor, for not preventing her transfer from his office, and at same time held him responsible for subsequent events like her alleged rape or sexual assault at the hotel months after she had stopped working for him. I imagine that her encounters or contacts with the mayor after her transfer involved her pleading with him to allow her to return to his office. But that is just speculation. This is what I wrote at the time about the attorney who started this campaign against the mayor-

Attorney Kim has a questionable background as a bona fide representative of women's rights and the "me too" movement in South Korea. As a former public official at the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family, Kim Jae-ryun, berated, insulted and threatened a mother whose daughter had been murdered in connection with workplace sexual harassment. Kim's response suggests she was protecting the employer's interests against those of the wronged surviving mother. There is a witness to the meeting which occurred during the prior administration. There is a recording of the conversation of the victim's mother with Kim Jae-ryun in which the latter repeatedly yells rudely, berates the mother, and then threatens her with legal action.

( Source- 열린공감TV 09.14 ) Attorney Kim Jae-ryun presents doubts and presumptions as certainties (narrator).

Kim Jae-ryun is a conservative having served as a public employee during the conservative Park Geun-hye administration. She had a role as a director in the Peace and Reconciliation Foundation which was established with funds provided under the agreement between Japan and the Park Geun-hye administration to settle the outstanding claims of the survivors of the wartime sex slaves of the Japanese Imperial Army. Survivors weren't consulted. The claims were allegedly settled for a sum equivalent to about nine million dollars. Kim's husband Ryu Je-woong, in a supervisory role at YTN News, was alleged to have edited reporting about the Park settlement to paint it in the best possible light. Ryu is also alleged to have improperly suppressed a news report in 2015 implicating Samsung Chairman Lee Gon-hee in a sex scandal where there was video evidence of him engaging prostitutes. Several months later in 2016, the independent investigative journalism group Newstapa reported the Samsung Chairman's sex scandal. In another instance, Ryu allegedly chose an editorial policy of painting survivors of the victims of the Sewol Ferry Disaster during the Park Administration as gold diggers rather than grieving family members. The workers union at YTN demanded his dismissal.

Against this backdrop, one has to ask whose interests was the attorney really defending? Please keep in mind, that no one, I mean no one, in the English language media would agree with my take on this. People in the western media take what they are told about foreign events at face value, whatever they are told, they report. The gist of western reporting on this story is "oh, Park is a dirt bag just like other Korean politicians and big shots who sexually abuse their employees and so on."

I'll also note that sex abuse allegations were made against Lee Jun-seok, the former somewhat youthful PPP party leader (notoriously anti-feminist in political orientation) to push him out of the PPP party leadership position by the so called Yoon faction, after Lee (called Junstone) and his supporters basically put Yoon in the presidential office. Anti-feminist young male voters were the demographic that put Yoon over the top in the presidential election in 2022. One of Yoon's campaign slogans adopted to elicit this support was a promise to get rid of the Department of Women and Families because it was a counterproductive waste of taxpayer money causing a low birth rate and social acrimony.

Probably more than you wanted to know, but this is how I view these things. I think there is an ethical issue with the mayor being touched by and allowing his secretary to act in an overly familiar way, but I agree with authorities who don't believe anything in the nature of a crime occurred. If one looks at contemporary Korean dramas in the media, one has to realize that regardless of what is claimed officially in South Korea, inappropriate office relationships are viewed differently than they are here. Nevertheless, the mayor's judgement seems to have been poor when it came to his former young attractive secretary, but it looked to me that the misbehavior in appearance was her overfamiliarity with him. I don't believe that any crime occurred whatsoever. I think he came to his senses when he finally let her be transferred out of his office, and she couldn't accept that.

(corrected a few typos)

—

語必忠信行必正直

Submitted by earthling1 on Tue, 07/09/2024 - 3:14pm

Hath no fury

@soryang
Like a woman's scorn?
To be fair, neither sex takes rejection well.

#1 ...but I had a lot of misgivings about the attorney from the department of children and families who undertook her cause and transformed it into a campaign against the mayor. I think its important to bear in mind, that the putative victim of the mayor, most likely resented the mayor, for not preventing her transfer from his office, and at same time held him responsible for subsequent events like her alleged rape or sexual assault at the hotel months after she had stopped working for him. I imagine that her encounters or contacts with the mayor after her transfer involved her pleading with him to allow her to return to his office. But that is just speculation. This is what I wrote at the time about the attorney who started this campaign against the mayor- Attorney Kim has a questionable background as a bona fide representative of women's rights and the "me too" movement in South Korea. As a former public official at the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family, Kim Jae-ryun, berated, insulted and threatened a mother whose daughter had been murdered in connection with workplace sexual harassment. Kim's response suggests she was protecting the employer's interests against those of the wronged surviving mother. There is a witness to the meeting which occurred during the prior administration. There is a recording of the conversation of the victim's mother with Kim Jae-ryun in which the latter repeatedly yells rudely, berates the mother, and then threatens her with legal action. ( Source- 열린공감TV 09.14 ) Attorney Kim Jae-ryun presents doubts and presumptions as certainties (narrator). Kim Jae-ryun is a conservative having served as a public employee during the conservative Park Geun-hye administration. She had a role as a director in the Peace and Reconciliation Foundation which was established with funds provided under the agreement between Japan and the Park Geun-hye administration to settle the outstanding claims of the survivors of the wartime sex slaves of the Japanese Imperial Army. Survivors weren't consulted. The claims were allegedly settled for a sum equivalent to about nine million dollars. Kim's husband Ryu Je-woong, in a supervisory role at YTN News, was alleged to have edited reporting about the Park settlement to paint it in the best possible light. Ryu is also alleged to have improperly suppressed a news report in 2015 implicating Samsung Chairman Lee Gon-hee in a sex scandal where there was video evidence of him engaging prostitutes. Several months later in 2016, the independent investigative journalism group Newstapa reported the Samsung Chairman's sex scandal. In another instance, Ryu allegedly chose an editorial policy of painting survivors of the victims of the Sewol Ferry Disaster during the Park Administration as gold diggers rather than grieving family members. The workers union at YTN demanded his dismissal. Against this backdrop, one has to ask whose interests was the attorney really defending? Please keep in mind, that no one, I mean no one, in the English language media would agree with my take on this. People in the western media take what they are told about foreign events at face value, whatever they are told, they report. The gist of western reporting on this story is "oh, Park is a dirt bag just like other Korean politicians and big shots who sexually abuse their employees and so on." I'll also note that sex abuse allegations were made against Lee Jun-seok, the former somewhat youthful PPP party leader (notoriously anti-feminist in political orientation) to push him out of the PPP party leadership position by the so called Yoon faction, after Lee (called Junstone) and his supporters basically put Yoon in the presidential office. Anti-feminist young male voters were the demographic that put Yoon over the top in the presidential election in 2022. One of Yoon's campaign slogans adopted to elicit this support was a promise to get rid of the Department of Women and Families because it was a counterproductive waste of taxpayer money causing a low birth rate and social acrimony. Probably more than you wanted to know, but this is how I view these things. I think there is an ethical issue with the mayor being touched by and allowing his secretary to act in an overly familiar way, but I agree with authorities who don't believe anything in the nature of a crime occurred. If one looks at contemporary Korean dramas in the media, one has to realize that regardless of what is claimed officially in South Korea, inappropriate office relationships are viewed differently than they are here. Nevertheless, the mayor's judgement seems to have been poor when it came to his former young attractive secretary, but it looked to me that the misbehavior in appearance was her overfamiliarity with him. I don't believe that any crime occurred whatsoever. I think he came to his senses when he finally let her be transferred out of his office, and she couldn't accept that. (corrected a few typos)

—

Neither Russia nor China is our enemy.
Neither Iran nor Venezuela are threatening America.
Cuba is a dead horse, stop beating it.

Submitted by soryang on Tue, 07/09/2024 - 5:22pm

Yes, that's what I thought

@earthling1

But I just watched another 15-20 minutes about the "victim," and she appears to be getting the red carpet treatment. Some people were in the process of releasing a documentary about the former mayor, and apparently it's been blocked by an injunction. She was allegedly living the good life in LA going to USC, with some jurisdiction in the South Korean government having sponsored her or awarded her a scholarship to get a graduate degree. All this is reported by anonymous ~~reporters~~ sources who allegedly know her personally. Allegedly she finished the program. The investigative reporter says he looked at the pics and its her. But her identity is confidential under South Korea law as the litigant in this type of case.

(edited for grammar and one correction)

—

語必忠信行必正直