“Kim Hyeonjin, Born 1998,” A Girl Falsely Framed As A #MeToo Liar

“The Law Stands with Victims” Series: The time Park Jinseong’s victims have walked through

 

By Lee Eunui

Published: March 30, 2023

Translated by Jun Jihai

 

It was the fall of 2019. A few women writers came in. Yoo Jinmok was one of them. What brought them to my law office was not their own doings. That day I heard a familiar name again, “Kim Hyeonjin, Born 1998.” [This is a reference to Cho Namju’s novel Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982. The book deals with the life of an average woman in misogynistic Korean society. It faced a harsh backlash from anti-feminism communities.]

A Poetry Class Ruined by Sexual Harassment

In 2015, Hyeonjin was a 16-year-old high school student. Living in a small town, she wanted to study creative writing in college to be a poet, but she had no idea what to do to make that happen or how to write poems. The only resource she could count on was the Internet. She found Park Jinseong's blog, and his online poetry lesson was 120,000 KRW per month. Getting into college could not be an additional burden on her mother's shoulders, which were already heavy with the weight of working at a diner to feed her family as a single parent. That 120,000 KRW was all she had collected by saving little by little for over a year. But she decided to pay the fee to take his class.

 

Hyeonjin had been thrilled because she thought it was an excellent opportunity, but she became pretty uncomfortable once the classes started. Park Jinseong seriously sexually harassed her during the month via the Kakao Talk messenger app and phone calls.

 

The poet, who was 20 years older than his student, sent her Kakao Talk messages almost every day. “Let’s hold hands while walking on the streets,” “I will be your lover/because I want to,” “Be my lover,” “Do you have any experience with women? Have you ever held hands, kissed, hugged, or even had sex with one?” “Not just a teacher/I’m your teacher and a man,” “I will kill myself if you turn me down,” “It’s possible to have sex with each other’s mind /Our minds can be purely blank while our bodies are having sex,” “Hey, /I wrote a poem/Have I shown you?/It’s super erotic/It’s about sex/Wanna read?” “I want to have Bread-Hyeonjin.” He called her and said, “Women should be taught by men to be a woman.” In addition, he even asked for a picture of Hyeonjin in a school uniform.

 

It was a dilemma for Hyeonjin: she could not give up the poetry class that she had scraped up every penny to take, but she did not want to tolerate and respond politely to such remarks. She expressed her discomfort: “Don’t say things like that,” “I will report you to the police for violating the Act on Sex Offenses against Youth.” (The actual name of this act is “Act on the Protection of Children and Youth Against Sex Offense”.) But he didn’t stop. This middle-aged poet sexually harassed her, hinted that he knew her high school, and said he would go there to give her a book. Hyeonjin used to look up to him as a poet and a teacher, but his words were not merely disappointing but rather shocking to her as a girl who was only 16 years old.

 

She told her concerns and frustrations to her best friend every day. It was a subject that she could not bring up with her mother who was working hard to raise her and her older brother all alone. The fall of her second year in high school, the first step toward her dream—these were both stained by intolerable acts of sexual harassment. As she could not endure it anymore, she had no choice but to end the poetry class.

On March 30th at 10:45 a.m., Cheongju District Court held an appeal hearing for Park Jinseong’s civil suit for defamation by public allegation of false facts. The victim Kim Hyeonjin (front row, fourth from the left), and her lawyer Lee Eunui (front row, fifth from the left) are in front of the court with supporters gathered in an act of solidarity. ⓒ Lee Eunui

Falsely framed as a “defaming gold digger,” Hyeonjin gave up being a poet

 

After several months, Park Jinseong reached out to her with an offer of more poetry classes, but Hyeonjin did not respond. When the college entrance exam was right around the corner, she tried to get in touch with him to get advice on polishing her poetry drafts. The man who persistently tried to get a high school girl as his lover suddenly kept silent. Hyeonjin did not resent him for this or consider it odd. Memories of the sexual harassment and uncomfortable feelings of the year before came back, making her skeptical about her chances of going to college to study creative writing or composing poems. In the end, she decided to give up on poetry entirely. 

 

Her mother and school teacher suggested choosing a different major, and she did. At that time, the #MeToo movement was sweeping Korean society. Hyeonjin heartily joined the movement. She wished for there to be no more victims like herself. So in October 2016, she wrote a Twitter exposé on what she experienced without revealing the perpetrator’s name.

 

Even though she did not write his name, Park Jinseong knew what she wrote was true and the perpetrator in her tweets was himself. Perhaps that is why he tried to contact her right after she made the tweets. Revealing the truth in an open space had a real impact. The middle-aged man finally gave her the apology that the high school girl could never get even after refusing him many times with desperate words such as “You are violating the Act on Sex Offenses against Youth” or “I like girls, not boys.” But his apology was conditional. He insisted that she should not tell anyone his name. He would kneel before her to apologize, give her free poetry classes, and pay for therapy, he said. 

 

Hyeonjin said no to him many times, but that was not enough to stop him from insisting she should not reveal his name and pressuring her to accept his apologies. At not even nineteen, young Hyeonjin was intimidated by the fact that he knew her number and was tired of this never-ending conversation. Her initial intention was to express support for the victims by sharing her experience with no angle for compensation. Hyeonjin’s remark, “I’d like to have money if you insist,” should be understood as a rejection and an attempt to end the conversation, not literally. The perpetrator offered compensation, such as free poetry classes or payment of medical expenses, but Hyeonjin rejected all of them. She did not ask for anything.

 

Hyeonjin’s refusal to be silenced took a heavy toll. [Hyeonjin revealed the perpetrator’s name on March 29th, 2019 on Twitter.] Even though the messages clearly full of sexual harassment and pressure to be silent were still there, like feces on the streets, Park defamed her by making a statement online that “Kim Hyeonjin, Born 1998” was a criminal who defamed him with lies. He maliciously edited their Kakao Talk chats to frame her as being after money. Sometimes himself, or sometimes with his lawyer acquaintance, he urged her to ‘confess’ and apologize. He even exposed her name, age, hometown, and pictures of her on the Internet without her consent. This went on for years.

 

The victim was not aware of a lawsuit related to herself; the perpetrator’s win in court against a newspaper led to him suing Hyeonjin.

 

Park Jinseong turned the victim, a 19-year-old college student, into a “defaming gold digger,” and filed a civil lawsuit against Hankook Ilbo, a Korean newspaper, arguing that its reporting on him in relation to the #MeToo movement was false. [In 2016, Hankook Ilbo issued several reports on allegations of his sexual harassment against five women.] Hyeonjin was not even aware that there was an ongoing trial at that time. Of course, she had no chance to defend herself. In that first trial, the court took the perpetrator’s side, saying that the newspaper's reporting was “defamation by public allegation of false facts.” The decision was indifferent to the truth. The sexually harassing messages dumped over a 16-year-old girl like sewage were submitted to the judges as evidence—but they believed she had faked it. The lawsuit case was settled through arbitration at the appeals court. And Hyeonjin, even at that moment, was excluded.

 

The court’s wrong decision left repercussions. Anti-feminism communities, dominated by male users, had Park Jinseong as a symbol of a victim of the false #MeToo movement. After winning the case, Park Jinseong accused Hyeonjin of defamation through her alleged false #MeToo accusations, demanding 30 million won in damages.

 

Women writers gathered to raise money for litigation expenses

 

When she received the complaint from the perpetrator on October 17th, 2019, Hyeonjin was a 20-year-old junior in college, and she was poor. She had managed to hide her pain from her mother while walking through a long, dark tunnel of harm so as not to put more weight on her mother’s shoulders. But the perpetrator was asking for 30 million in damages this time. The victim broke down. Overwhelmed with despair, she wrote a Twitter thread explaining her circumstances. The first person who decided to take her hand was Yoo Jinmok.

 

Yoo Jinmok and Park Jinseong had been in the same literature club in college. She was made miserable by his obsessive courtship and harassment, and later by rumors that they had had a relationship. After she published Dictionary of Hatred, a novel that accused the literary world of sexual violence, Park Jinseong pestered her, saying that even though he did not do what one of the perpetrator characters in her story does, that character must be him. He relentlessly wrote on his social network account that they used to be in a relationship and she was defaming him with lies. He continued for several years, pushing her to the verge of mental breakdown. For her, he was a perpetrator who had tormented her with obsessive, one-sided courtship 20 years ago and who kept telling the lie that they had been in a relationship, disrupting her writing career even after 20 years.

 

She had been an 18-year-old freshman then, but she was now a writer in her forties. Yoo Jinmok filed a lawsuit against Park Jinseong. But the Daejeon District Prosecutors’ Office asked her, the victim, to prove the two had not had a relationship instead of asking the perpetrator to prove they had. All Yoo Jinmok wanted was for the defamation to end and an apology. On the day of their criminal mediation, Park Jinseong screamed and cursed at the courthouse’s front gate instead of apologizing to Yoo Jinmok, who was heading home with her husband and lawyer—me. His behavior was beyond my imagination, and since I have trouble recognizing people’s faces, I almost walked past him thinking he was a mentally ill person. It was not until I heard it from Yoo Jinmok that I realized who he was.

 

When Yoo Jinmok’s husband protested his behavior, Park began swearing at him. After telling Yoo Jinmok to record him picking up a fight, I called 911. It was she who suffered from many of his acts, but ironically, he got his first criminal punishment because he cursed at her husband. [Afterwards, she also filed a civil lawsuit against him for damages and fought for years. I stood by her, and we went through the painful process together.]

 

Yoo Jinmok understood Hyeonjin’s injury, suffering, and frustrations better than anybody else. Yoo Jinmok took the lead in bringing Hyeonjin’s circumstances to the attention of women writers. The courts did not acknowledge the harm caused to the victim, and people on the Internet, who believe what they want to believe, argued she was a #MeToo liar. But the writers could sense the truth based on empathy and their own experiences. Many drops make a shower; so they started to raise money for Hyeonjin little by little.

“A Call for Solidarity to Bring Poet Park Jinseong to Justice”. This is part of a notice from the Twitter account @2021_with_KHJ, run by “People Standing with Kim Hyeonjin,” which helped raise the litigation expenses needed to bring civil and criminal lawsuits against Park Jinseong.

When Yoo Jinmok and other women writers visited my office for Hyeonjin, another journey of togetherness began. The starting point was the District Court in Yeongdong County. We responded to the lawsuit against the victim and filed a counteraction. Women writers who took part in raising the litigation expenses joined the long journey calmly. The lawsuit took more than two years, but during that time Hyeonjin and I were never left by ourselves. At the end of the heartwarming lawsuit, the court allowed both parties, Hyeonjin, and Park Jinseong, to take the stand for examination.

 

Women writers who walked with Hyeonjin, a 20-year-old college student

The case took a new turn: farewell to the years of unfairness

 

In April 2021, the District Court in blooming Yeongdong got heated. Park Jinseong tried to provoke me, the plaintiff’s lawyer, by taking issue with my standing posture. And after the trial, with a lighted cigarette between his fingers, he flew at me, screaming “Are you her [bleep] lawyer?” To my great relief, my secretary, a former soldier and martial arts expert, cut him off and stopped him. The intense situation was cleared up as the women writers who attended the trial started to come out.

 

There had been a wrong judgment in the first place, which served as the legal foundation for other judgments, but the world did not turn its back on a desperate fighter for truth. The court ruled that Hyeonjin was right. With this carefully considered decision, the tide finally began to turn against injustice.

 

The dishonor of being a “#MeToo liar” as well as the frame of “the victim of false #Metoo” that favored the perpetrator were all brought down. That gave strength to Hyeonjin and others who had become disheartened. The fund-raising gained steam to prepare the money for the appellate civil lawsuit and a criminal complaint. That enabled us to move from civil court to investigation agencies. Unfortunately, the statutes of limitations of some particularly malicious acts had already expired, but there were other ones that were still within the statute of limitations. Even in this commotion, Park Jinseong never stopped condemning the victim. He posted an edited Kakao Talk chat on the Internet, arguing that he and Hyeonjin were in a relationship. But the end was near.

 

Right after Park Jinseong lost a case against Hyeonjin for damages, another court ruled that he defamed Yoo Jinmok with false facts. Although it took nearly a year, his spate of statements online that Hyeonjin’s #MeToo claims were lies backfired, and he was sentenced to serve time by the Daejoen High Court as a punishment for defamation by publicly alleged false facts. The execution of punishment was suspended, though, but he was additionally ordered to do over 300 hours of community service. This person, who had underlined that he was a poet composing beautiful poems in reflection of himself, appealed both the civil and criminal judgments. Around the same time, Park Jinseong lost his appeal trial on defaming Yoo Jinmok.

Park Jinseong’s act of uploading a series of posts claiming that Hyeonjin was a defaming criminal and a #MeToo liar backfired, and he was sentenced by the Daejeon High Court (one year of imprisonment with labor, suspended conditionally on the completion of two years of probation). He was ordered to do 320 hours of community service.

People in need of a “False #MeToo” frame conspired with Park Jinseong; people gathered strength with “Kim Hyeonjin, Born 1998” to break that frame

 

It took five years for Yoo Jinmok to be acknowledged as a true victim and to stop the defiling of her reputation, and Hyeonjin, even now that four years have passed, is still in the midst of hard times. What has helped them not to fall apart during those days is, ironically, the more severe and harsh condemnations by other people. Besides the harm by Park Jinseong, what gave unbearable suffering to victims were the sideway glances, thoughtless comments, and the accusing of those who identified with a perpetrator who consistently used fabrication. The making of Park into a victim of false #MeToo accusations and the delusional frame of false #MeToo itself are not the work of one person. Most people who had been enjoying positions which enabled them to be disrespectful felt discomfort and rebelled against the changes that must be made for the sake of an equal, respectful society. For them, #MeToo was something bothering and threatening. They wanted to believe that many of the victims’ stories were false or exaggerated.

 

For these people, Park’s claims about false #MeToo must have been appealing. The court’s ruling that the victim’s #MeToo accusation was false became a magic flute. The fact that the real victim was excluded from the trial or the full text of Kakao Talk conversations that contradicted the court’s judgment did not matter to them. The “victim of false #MeToo” frame was built by people who needed it to exist.

 

But the frame was torn down at last by the victims’ courage, people’s willingness to contribute to lawsuit expenses and many years of fights. After it came down, the creators of the frame blamed Park Jinseong as if it had been one person’s fault, instead of blaming their own foolish and false symbolization. But I repeat, there were far more than one person who created this widely-embraced, shameful frame.

 

On the surface level, the world finally realized that Hyeonjin, Park Jinseong’s underage victim and the first to make a #MeToo accusation against him, was the real victim who had to get through unfairness and had to fight at the risk of her life. Just like people suffer from radiation sickness after exposure, Hyeonjin has suffered from being treated as a perpetrator who committed defamation even though she was the victim of sexual harassment. Her life has been out of balance, but everything is coming back into place at last. The world will soon forget the victim’s pain and the perpetrator’s malicious acts. But Hyeonjin will walk the road of recovery for a while, slowly.

 

The pain that Hyeonjin suffered; the long process of getting back on her feet thanks to the support of others; the life of a victim, moving in the right direction even if at a slow pace—those will influence people who calmly observe her, and steer the world that hurt her to take a better way. I am grateful for our shared journey and the influence she has had on me. It is with support for the many Hyeonjins in this world that, instead of “Hyeonjin, Born 1998” which was the result of false frame by the perpetrator, I call her name once again—“Hyeonjin,” the brave survivor.

 

Lee Eunui became a lawyer after graduating from law school in 2014. She opened “Lee Eunui Law Firm” right in front of the Seoul High Prosecutors' Office and has been handling cases of sexual violence and sex discrimination. She is not dreaming of extraordinary justice or immersive progress in our society, but a world with common sense, a world where reasonable thoughts and discourse are valid. She has been on the frontline of a battleground for nine years as a lawyer and as a writer who has published books such as Leaving Samsung, It’s Okay to Be Sensitive, Ready to Feel Uncomfortable, and Gentle Violence.

 

*Original article: https://www.ildaro.com/9596