hankyoreh

By Jeon Jong-hwi, staff reporter
On April 6, 2010, a sergeant surnamed Kim was interrogating a female suspect at Dongjak Police Station. She was in her late 40s, in on labor-related charges. During her questioning, the woman went to a restroom inside the detective department.
Kim heard the woman talking on the phone in the restroom. The restroom door was already ajar. Kim opened the door wide to see what she was doing inside.
The woman came out from the restroom in a few minutes and complained vehemently. Kim answered, “I didn’t know what you were doing there so I just checked it.” He then denied having opened the door.
The woman in question is Park Haeng-ran, a unionist from Kiryung Electronics. Park felt her privacy had been violated, but received no apology. At 12pm on that day, the woman went into convulsions from psychological shock, and was sent to the hospital.
Park quivered with humiliation after being seen by a man while she was half-naked in the restroom.
She was brought to the police station due to a quarrel with an executive at Kiryung Electronics in the morning. In the police station’s lobby, she swung her arm to avoid being photographed by the executive and broke his cell phone. Park couldn’t understand why she had to be interrogated and charged with damaging the executive’s cell phone.
The next day, Park and Kiryung Electronics trade union held a press conference in front of Seoul’s Donjak Police Station to discuss the police officer’s action and get an apology from him.
Instead of saying sorry, the police arrested the union members saying that they violated the ‘Assembly and Demonstration Act’. The police regarded a press conference as an illegal demonstration. While the Hankyoreh and a few other media outlets reported about the suspected sexual crime, conservative media kept silent.
At first, Dongjak Police Station insisted that Kim only called Park from his seat. They modified their statement later and said, “Kim walked toward the restroom but he didn’t open the door.” The police refused to hand over the relevant CCTV footage.
Quite soon after, Park heard that sergeant Kim filed a libel suit against her. Kim claimed that Park defamed him by spreading unfounded claims to media and the public.
Park believed that she would be acquitted before long. She thought the criminal department of the Seoul Supreme Prosecutors’ Office, led by Prosecutor General Lee Myung-soon, would serve the public interest and reach a fair conclusion.
The result, however, differed entirely from her expectation. On December 2010, Park was indicted by Prosecutor Park Yeong-su. The weirdest thing was, even though Park’s investigation had not attracted public attention by then, all conservative media covered the case on that day.
The contents of the reports mostly demonstrated the prosecutor’s one-sided points. No one made a phone call to Park Haeng-ran to verify the facts.
Park couldn’t help but be infuriated. In the conservative media’s coverage, she was depicted as a shameless woman who faked the truth and defamed a police officer to get out of her unfavorable situation.
The conservative Chosun Ilbo ran the headline, “Sexual harassment by police officer? Turned out to be a lie”. Another conservative Joongang Ilbo ran an article under the headline, “Police accuse a unionist from Korean Confederation of Trade Unions of lying.” An online newspaper even wrote that, “It’s suspected that left-wing trade unions are struggling politically, using ‘sexual issue’ as a pretext.”
Around December 2010, 10 unionists from Kiryung’s trade union were supposed to go back to the company after being on strike for 1,895 days. A month earlier, labor and management already agreed with the decision. But only 2 months after the consensus, Park was indicted.
Trade union members said that prosecutors’ accusation and the media’s report about it were the apparent revenge for the union by conservatives.
But the Department of Justice had played for Park’s side from the first trial to the Supreme Court. On June 24 2012, Supreme Court announced that they rejected an appeal of prosecutors and confirmed Park’s innocence.
Judging panel concluded that Kim was likely to open the restroom door considering the circumstantial evidences followed; Kim grabbed the knob and leaned his body forward and stepped back. While he was doing that, a light was reflected above the restroom door and then disappeared. Park came out from the restroom and protested to Kim for more than 5 minutes. The court ruling stated, “We have no evidence to deny Park’s claim.”
“Park is having a hard time now despite the final judgment of the Supreme Court. She believed it was obvious that she would be exonerated right after, but it has been dragged out over 2 years,” said Kim So-yeon, a chief of Kiryung Electronics branch of Korean Metal Workers’ Union. “She still refuses to use shared-restrooms.”
Sergeant Kim, who is still working at Dongjak Police Station, said, “I haven’t checked the ruling yet. I have nothing to say about it.”
Kiryung trade union’s suffering has not ended yet. They are waiting for the findings of other cases from Supreme Court and High Court into suspicions that they physically hurt an executive at Dongjak Police Station on April 6, 2010, and that they held an illegal demonstration the next day.

Translated by Kim Ji-seung, Hankyoreh English intern

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