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‘MeToo moments occur when men don’t pay’: South Korean presidential candidate Yoon Suk-yeol’s wife sparks outrage with YouTube comments
- Kim Keon-hee’s comments – meant to highlight scandals dogging the ruling Democratic Party – backfire as she claims ‘conservatives make sure they pay’
- She later apologises for ‘inappropriate remarks’, but the episode highlights how gender-based conflict, on the rise in South Korea, has coloured the election
Park Chan-kyong
Published: 5:13pm, 17 Jan, 2022
The wife of South Korean presidential hopeful Yoon Suk-yeol has sparked outrage for saying that #MeToo scandals occur because the women involved were not “paid” by men.
Kim Keon-hee, 49, made the remarks to a reporter from Voice of Seoul, a YouTube news channel with liberal leanings that is supportive of the ruling Democratic Party. Yoon is a member of the opposition People Power Party.
Copies of the audio recording – part of 52 phone conversations that Kim had with a Voice of Seoul reporter between July and December last year – were released to MBC TV, one of
South Korea’s three major free-to-air broadcasters, which aired the conversation late on Sunday.
This came about after a court allowed the recording to be played on air, albeit with parts redacted, after dismissing a request from the People Power Party to stop it hitting the airwaves.
“MeToo incidents occur because they [men] don’t pay, surely. They wanna play around but have no money. I understand them,” Kim said.
She was referring to how the prominent politicians from the ruling liberal Democratic Party had been mired in a series of sex scandals in recent years.
Among them were the former governor of South Chungcheong province
Ahn Hee-jung, who was sentenced to 42 months in prison in 2019 for sexually assaulting his aide; former mayor of Seoul Park Won-soon, who committed suicide in 2020 after his secretary filed a police report alleging four years of sexual harassment; and former Busan city mayor Oh Keo-don, who resigned in 2020 amid similar allegations.
Kim was heard saying that unlike liberal politicians “conservatives make sure they pay”.
“They don’t use people free of charge,” she said, adding that she felt sorry for ex-governor Ahn and that she and Yoon were on “Ahn Hee-jung’s side”.
[Conservatives] don’t use people free of charge
Kim Keon-hee
“Conservatives should pay to do it,” she added, going on to say that conservatives should not follow in the footsteps of liberals in failing to pay the women involved, as they never knew when incidents would come back to haunt them.
Social media users criticised her remarks, saying she was bringing fresh pain for
#MeToo survivors and was supportive of sexual attackers.
Kim Ji-eun, the woman victimised by Ahn Hee-jung, called for a sincere apology from Kim Keon-hee, accusing her of making a total “mockery” of the #MeToo movement in South Korea.
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