Former South Korean First Lady Kim Keon Hee (IMAGE: X)
Kim Keon Hee Gets Jailed: Kim Keon Hee, wife of the disgraced and now-jailed former President Yoon Suk Yeol, just got hit with a prison sentence, one year and eight months for bribery.
And that’s just from one of the three criminal trials she’s tangled up in right now. Both sides, prosecutors and Kim’s lawyers, can still appeal.
The court said Kim took bribes from the Unification Church, a group with a pretty controversial reputation. The gifts included a Chanel bag and a Graff diamond necklace. But she dodged the charges of stock manipulation and plotting with her husband to get free public opinion polls.
The court said there wasn’t enough evidence for those, and the statute of limitations had already run out. She also got cleared over a second Chanel bag.
Prosecutors put the whole mess of bribes, stocks, and polls at about 1.15 billion won, which is roughly $813,000.
Judge Woo In-seong didn’t mince words in the ruling. He said Kim “misused her status as a means of pursuing profit.
The defendant was unable to refuse the expensive luxury items provided in connection with a special favour, and was thirsty to receive and decorate herself with them.”
Pretty harsh. Still, the judge noted that Kim hadn’t actually asked for the gifts, didn’t pass on any requests from the church to her husband, and is apparently reflecting on what she did.
This is just the latest in a string of blows for the former first couple. Both keep insisting they did nothing wrong, but Kim has admitted to accepting the Chanel bags from the church.
Yoon, meanwhile, faces his own storm; he’s on trial for insurrection after briefly declaring martial law in 2024, plus a bunch of other accusations. But Kim’s scandals go way back. The stock manipulation allegations trace back over ten years, tied to a car dealership.
She got arrested last August after a special counsel stepped in. Prosecutors wanted 15 years for everything they accused her of, but the court landed on a much shorter sentence.
Then there’s the plagiarism saga. Persistent rumours about her academic work led Sookmyung Women’s University to strip her of her master’s degree last summer.
Kookmin University followed up by revoking her PhD, even though they’d cleared her in an earlier investigation, right after Sookmyung made its decision.
Over the years, there have been speculations that Kim had been manipulating stocks between 2010-2012 concerning the Korean BMW dealership Deutsch Motors, and was making unreasonable gains.
It did not augur well with optics when Yoon, as the president, vetoed a bill that sought to have a special investigation into his wife.
However, the proverbial straw that strained the camel was a bag costing 2,200 of Christian Dior (not linked to the Chanel bags she was found guilty of dispossessing on Wednesday).
Later in late 2023, a left-leaning YouTube channel published a secretly recorded video where a Korean-American pastor gave a gift to Kim in the form of a calfskin handbag.
Their secretive interaction, which occurred in 2022 following the election of Yoon, took place on a hidden video recording of the pastor on his wristwatch.
The scandal went off, and Yoon saw new lows in terms of support. Kim had virtually vanished until the president declared martial law late on a Tuesday night of 2023, putting the country and the couple into a much bigger crisis.
Yoon was impeached and thrown out of office, and within a short time, special investigations were launched against him, his wife and his deputies, including his prime minister, who was sentenced last week to a 23-year jail term.
In the month before that, Yoon had been sentenced to five years on the grounds of resistance to the efforts to detain him and refusing to allow Cabinet members to debate his martial law decree.
More and longer sentences can be followed; he has yet to be tried on other charges, including rebellion, eight criminal trials.
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