EGN NEWS DESK
An creator who defected from North Korea has received a defamation lawsuit that he filed in South Korea in opposition to a fellow defector who accused him of rape and the broadcaster that first reported her allegations.
The South Korean Supreme Court final month upheld a decrease courtroom’s ruling in favor of the creator, Jang Jin-sung. Mr. Jang sued his accuser, Sung Sel-hyang, and the TV channel MBC in 2021, after MBC aired reviews about Ms. Sung’s accusations.
The decrease courtroom’s October ruling discovered Ms. Sung’s allegations to be false and ordered her, MBC and two different defendants — an MBC reporter and Ms. Sung’s husband — to pay Mr. Jang a complete of 47 million received, or $35,000, in damages. It additionally ordered MBC to not rebroadcast its 2021 reviews about Mr. Jang or put up them on-line.
Mr. Jang, who fled North Korea in 2004, is without doubt one of the most internationally acknowledged defectors from the North, finest recognized for his 2014 memoir “Dear Leader.”
Ms. Sung, who additionally defected to the South from North Korea, mentioned she was raped by Mr. Jang and by certainly one of his South Korean associates not lengthy after she first met Mr. Jang in 2016, when he was operating an internet site that specialised in information in regards to the North.
But the decrease courtroom discovered Ms. Sung’s allegations to be false, saying that her statements had been inconsistent, untrustworthy and lacked supporting proof, in accordance with the courtroom’s ruling, which was considered by The New York Times.
Although MBC argued that its reviews had been within the public curiosity, the judges mentioned the channel had been biased towards Ms. Sung and had intimated that her accusations had been true regardless of a scarcity of proof. The Supreme Court’s transient March 14 ruling supported the decrease courtroom’s findings.
“I’ve skilled the techniques of each North and South Korea,” Mr. Jang, 53, mentioned on Friday. “The evil in North Korea was its one-man dictatorship that created a community of jail camps. The evil in South Korea, I’ve realized, was faux information that tries to create prisons of public opinion.”
Ms. Sung filed a lawsuit accusing Mr. Jang and his affiliate of rape and different intercourse crimes and asking the police and prosecutors to deliver fees in opposition to him. But they ultimately declined to take action, citing a scarcity of proof. Mr. Jang’s affiliate was additionally a plaintiff within the defamation swimsuit; he was awarded 11 million received in damages.
Mr. Jang first gained consideration in South Korea together with his poems about starvation in North Korea. His best-selling memoir described his life as a propaganda author within the totalitarian state and his eventual escape from it. The e-book has been translated right into a dozen languages, and Mr. Jang appeared on the quilt of a British journal.
Mr. Jang is certainly one of a sequence of distinguished South Korean males who had been accused of previous sexual misconduct because the nation’s #MeToo motion gained momentum. Many of them have been convicted of sexual assault.
