SEOUL, South Korea – He has taught at European universities and has appeared on the cover of a UK magazine. His book has been translated into a dozen languages. He was once a guest on CNN.
Jang Jin-sung is one of the most internationally recognized defectors from North Korea. His 2014 memoir, “Dear Leader,” delighted readers with first-hand statements about a private party held by former North Korean leader Kim Jong-il and claims of what it was like to be one of the few “Poet Prize Winners” chosen to write propaganda about the Kim family.
But two women say his heroic escape story from the authoritarian country has hidden a secret. Both of them accused Mr. Jang of raping her in South Korea after he defected and they said he used his celebrity status to pursue them.
A woman, a North Korean defector, has filed a lawsuit accusing both Mr. Jang and one of his associates of rape and other sex crimes. The other woman made allegations in interviews with the New York Times and other media outlets in South Korea this week. She did not file a formal complaint with the police against Mr. Jang, saying her main intention was to show solidarity with the other woman.
Jang, 49, denied the allegations, saying he never raped the North Korean defector and that his relationship with the second wife was consensual. The employee has also denied the allegations and countered the North Korean woman for defamation. Mr. Jang has threatened to counter her as well and has already sued the television company that first reported her allegations against him.
This case is now being tried in court. The two lawsuits filed by the North Korean woman will be investigated by the police, who will then decide on the prosecution. The authorities are also examining the counterclaim by Mr. Jang’s employee.
A number of prominent South Korean men have been convicted of sexual assault in recent years when the country’s #MeToo movement took root. It has helped uncover what experts consider to be ubiquitous sexual exploitation across the country. The dangers can be particularly pronounced among North Korean women, who may have little recourse due to their deserter circumstances.
In 2016, Mr. Jang ran a website in South Korea called New Focus International that specialized in North Korean news. That year he suggested an interview with Sung Sel-hyang, a little-known defector from North Korea who ran an online children’s clothing store while studying in Seoul.
Ms. Sung said she was both surprised and grateful for the attention. But she said she never was featured on Mr. Jang’s website.
Instead, Ms. Sung alleged in a lawsuit that when she first met Mr. Jang in 2016, he made her drunk and asked his South Korean co-worker to take her home. Ms. Sung claims that the man took her to his own home and raped her.
In a separate lawsuit, Ms. Sung said that Mr. Jang raped her in a hotel room in Seoul a month later. According to the legal records, when she tried to resist, he used a photo of her naked in bed taken by Mr. Jang’s staff without her knowledge and threatened to upload the picture to her school’s website.
Ms. Sung said in the legal filing that Mr. Jang continued to use the photo as blackmail and raped her three more times over the course of several months. He also offered it to two South Korean men whose friendship or financial support he had cultivated depending on the suit.
“I was ashamed of what happened to me and I thought no one would support me,” Ms. Sung, 32, said in an interview. “He was such a powerful figure to me that I thought I had no chance of fighting him.”
She had been in touch with Mr. Jang over the years but decided to check in last month for a television appearance on the South Korean television broadcaster MBC. She then filed a lawsuit against Mr. Jang and his co-worker and asked the police to open a formal investigation.
MBC was the first to broadcast the allegations against Mr. Jang. Since then, he has posted statements on Facebook and YouTube in which he vehemently denies the allegations and “urged all North Korean defectors to report me to the police if I have sexually assaulted them.”
A native of South Korea, Kang Haeryun, 32, spoke this week and said that Mr. Jang raped her while she was working as an editor for his website in 2014.
“I tried to suppress my traumatic memories for six years, but I decided to come out and show solidarity with Sung Sel-hyang because we rape survivors have to fight together,” Ms. Kang said in an interview. .
Ms. Kang said the alleged rape took place in the home of a friend of Mr. Kang’s on November 18, 2014, about two years before the #MeToo movement began in South Korea. She confided in two friends what happened shortly after, she said. The two friends confirmed in interviews with The Times that she did.
“She said he had come across her and she said ‘no’ but he kept walking,” said Hahna Yoon, one of the friends. “I said this is rape. Another friend, Kim Hyeon-kyeong, said that Ms. Kang told her that Mr. Jang sexually assaulted her and that it made her leave her job.
Ms. Kang said it took her years to realize she was a victim and that she never went to the police because she initially felt powerless in the face of Mr. Jang’s fame and later became self-loathing.
Mr. Jang denied the rape of Ms. Kang and said in an interview that his relationship with her was consensual.
Although she has no intention of filing a lawsuit against Mr. Jang because of the likelihood of a protracted legal battle, Ms. Kang said she was ready to be questioned by the police as part of her investigation. Your motive for reporting in an interview is to support Ms. Sung.
While South Korean women have attempted to hold sexual predators accountable in recent years, the plight of female North Korean defectors has been less public.
Around 72 percent of the 33,700 North Korean defectors who fled to the south are women, according to the government. Many fall victim on their dangerous journey. Even after arriving in the south, they remain vulnerable to sexual violence, especially from other defectors, human rights experts said.
Defectors usually socialize in their own close community, where victims of sexual violence are pressured to remain silent, said Jeon Su-mi, an advocate for defectors who are victims of sex crimes. .
Prominent male defectors – former high-ranking officials, North Korean prison camp survivors, writers and activists among them – are having a tremendous impact on this community, Ms. Jeon said. Some use their status to sexually abuse female defectors, especially those who have just arrived.
“I saw these men groping young women defectors over dinner and dinner and later taking them to motels for a so-called ‘second round’,” she said. .
Ms. Sung said her mother died when she was five years old and that she sold hats in the market until she and her grandmother fled North Korea in 2006. Her dream of starting a new life in the south has become a nightmare meeting with Mr. Jang. She said she burned herself with cigarettes out of desperation.
But Ms. Sung also said that a businessman Mr. Jang introduced to her last fall had become one of her biggest supporters, that the two fell in love, and that he encouraged her decision to come forward.
Mr. Jang accused the man of manipulating Ms. Sung into making false statements, called himself a “matchmaker” and said the allegations against him were “a scam”.
“She asked me to introduce her to a rich South Korean man,” he said, referring to Ms. Sung. “I’m not a sex criminal.”
Mr. Jang is best known in South Korea for his heartbreaking poem, “I’m Selling My Daughter for 100 Won,” about a North Korean mother trying to find a new family for her daughter before she dies of cancer.
Although Mr. Jang is one of North Korea’s most famous defectors, there has been relatively little public scrutiny in his biography. In the English version of “Dear Leader”, for example, Mr. Jang describes himself as a North Korean “Poet Laureate”, but other defectors have for years privately doubted that he ever held such a title.
This week, Mr. Jang admitted that he had never been a North Korean poet award winner, but that his poems had been praised by Kim Jong-il. “I never said with my own mouth that I was a North Korean poet award winner,” he said, contradicting his own memories.
