After two months in hiding in New York, former Dongguk assistant professor Shin Jeong-ah surprised everyone by returning to Korea today .
She was greeted at the airport by five investigators, who promptly put her under arrest.
To reporters, she apologized for inviting public criticism and said she would explain everything to prosecutors.
This should get interesting.
UPDATE: Oh, BTW, in an interview conducted in New York, Shin said the nude photos were fake, former presidential secretary Byeon Yang-kyoon was just an acquaintance, that reporters were backstabbing her, that allegations stem from her being a single woman in the art field, and that her degrees were not fake. After all, she said, she paid fees to the university, and even bought a graduation gown!
I guess it’s possible she’s telling the truth, although maybe she spent her time in the States hanging out with Azia Kim.
UPDATE 2: Interestingly, while Shin has come back to Korea, another key witness in “Shin Jeong-ah Gate,” Buddhist monk and Dongguk University director Ven. Jangyun, was caught yesterday trying to flee the country to China. The bald one tried to board a flight to Weihai, but was stopped at immigration when his name came up on a list of individuals banned from travel.
{ 24 comments… read them below or add one }
“Pubic criticism”? From my vantage point, everything was blocked by that darn grey box. And I’m sure there is another gag to be had from that last phrase, too.
Cute, Brendon.
You should have kept the typo, Robert.
She did nothing wrong. She is a hard-working Korean lady.
It seems odd that Jangyun would try to flee the country. He raised suspicions about Shin Jeong-ah after all — he wasn’t involved in protecting her or covering up, from what I’ve heard. And, with Shin obviously on the defensive, unlikely he’d be a target of retribution. Doesn’t make much sense, maybe there’s more to the story.
So, he was going away to China a week before the Chusok holiday? Damn, I knew I was getting a raw deal at my university.
I sense another Archbishop of Paris moment.
If you’re a fugitive of sorts, and you had to make a run to China, wouldn’t you want to take a boat? I guess the visa screening is just as tight in Incheon but there has to be a boat that makes the midnight run.(?)
Incheon harbor, that is.
#8,
My guess is that he wasn’t notified that he was being put on a ‘no-fly’ list.
Someguy, Fair enough. I was just curious as to the porousness of the border.
I give her props for not choosing suicide. Even considering her deeds, the media abused her thoroughly and so did society.
Not sure how much of a right to remain silent, or mook bi gwon, exists in the ROK for its citizens, but I suggest she say as minimally as possible, do whatever time or monetary penalties they demand, and cash in American style with a tell-all book.
That’s what I recommend that she do.
It’s a slam dunk best seller.
What I don’t get is, why she came came back (I am assuming visa issues?). At any rate she’s disgraced nationally now as a fraud, and her naked photos are plastered all over the newspapers and internet (and she didn’t even get any money for them!) and that’s not to mention the little issue of her being a wanted criminal. As long as she stays out of the country, nobody knows who she is or cares for that matter. She can have a normal life.
I doubt her crimes are severe enough to have her extradited, and if Seoul requested that she be, she could always go someplace like Brazil (lots of Koreans there) were there are too many serious criminals for anyone to give a rat’s ass.
Maybe she decided to take some men down with her.
Besides, she’d be an illegal immigrant in the US.
What crimes did she commit besides a fake degree? Unless they can pin an adultery charge on her for messing around with a married guy, it seems that she won’t get too much in the way of criminal punishment, though her career is ruined. If she were smart, maybe she’s stacked away some of her earnings from her job and from gifts from ‘patrons’. And as wjk says, she could write a tell-all book that would likely become a bestseller and get a nice payout to do a real nude spread and then retire quite nicely on the proceeds. If she wanted a quiet life after that, she could live anywhere other than Korea.
But then again, with the monk trying to flee, it seems there may be much more to this story. Why would a witness want to flee? Maybe this story is bigger than we know at this point. Still, there must be a way for her to serve a short sentence, if any at all, and then to cash in and live elsewhere.
That monk must have been really desperate to get out of Korea if his destination was Weihai.
Who cares???
She’s not even hot!
#7 Sperwer: “…I sense another Archbishop of Paris moment”.
Are you referring to this one?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Darboy
Taken hostage and shot shortly before the suppression of the Paris Commune of 1871.
I like obscure historical analogies as much as the next guy (well, it was obscure to me, I shouldn’t speak for anyone else here; the only reason it rang a bell is that I happened to be reading through the Paris Commune wiki article a while back). But Archbishop Deboy never tried to flee; indeed, through the entire siege of Paris by the Prussians he had remained at his post.
Maybe you were thinking of Louis XVI’s attempted flight to the frontier during the French revolution? But I presume there is no question of capital punishment in this case involving modern ROK society; if so that would be another fault in the analogy.
Maybe you were thinking of a different Archbishop of Paris:
“….Darboy was the third archbishop of Paris to die violently between 1848 and 1871…”
Or maybe you meant this one:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J.....seph_Gobel
Looks like he turned apostate; I guess that could be seen as “attempting to flee the jurisdiction”, and it wasn’t enough to save him from Madame la Guillotine.
The one in 1848 got shot off the top of the barricades while attempting to be a strictly apolitical “bearer of an olive branch” between police and insurrectionists.
I wonder if the current holder of the bishopric is still drawing hazardous duty pay? Based on this history it seems well-deserved; given the law of averages it’s probably about time the “youths” of Paris bagged themselves an archbishop.
I’m surprised that Shin didn’t come home in a wheelchair.
Well, she looks a lot better than when she left – that whole ‘baseball cap and longsleeved clown tee’ look was pretty bad. Even on a busy schedule of fact-finding, it looks like she managed to get in a perm and still had time to do some shopping for a new fall coat. You go, girl!
> What I don’t get is, why she came came back?
Obviously it’s not to clear her name, as that’s impossible now. I think she has sworn to give it all up kill that Monk, at whatever cost; he knows it and that’s why he ran.
Lawd, what a movie this is gonna make…
give it all up AND kill that Monk
{sorry}
Korean women have been known to consider Revenge, on occassion…
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