SEOUL, South Korea – Taught at European universities and appeared on the cover of a British magazine. Your book has been translated into a dozen languages. He was already a guest on CNN.
Jang Jin-sung is one of North Korea’s most internationally recognized defectors. His 2014 memoir, “Dear Leader,” captivated readers with what he said were first-hand descriptions of a private party held by Kim Jong-il, the former North Korean leader, and statements about what it was like to be one of the few “award winning poets” chosen to write propaganda about the Kim family.
But two women say that their heroic story of fleeing the authoritarian country has masked a secret. Both accused Jang of raping them in South Korea after he defected, and they said he used his celebrity status to attack them.
A woman, a North Korean defector, filed a lawsuit accusing Jang and one of his associates of rape and other sexual crimes. The other woman presented allegations this week in interviews with The New York Times and other media in South Korea. She has not filed a formal complaint to the police against Jang and said her main intention is to show solidarity with the other woman.
Jang, 49, denied the charges and said he never raped the North Korean defector and that his relationship with the second woman was consensual. The associate also denied the charges and challenged the North Korean woman for defamation. Mr. Jang also threatened to attack her and has already sued the television station that first reported her accusations against him.
This case is now on trial. The two lawsuits filed by the North Korean are being investigated by the police, who will decide whether to sue. Authorities are also investigating Jang’s associate’s lawsuit.
A number of prominent South Korean men have been convicted of sexual assault in recent years, when the country’s #MeToo movement began to take root. It helped expose what experts consider the spread of sexual exploitation across the country. The dangers can be especially pronounced among women in North Korea who, because of their circumstances as deserters, may find themselves with few resources.
In 2016, Mr. Jang ran a website in South Korea called New Focus International, which specializes in news from North Korea. That year, he proposed an interview with Sung Sel-hyang, a little-known defector in North Korea who ran an online children’s clothing store while studying at a college in Seoul.
Sung said she was surprised and grateful for the attention. But she said she was never presented on Mr. Jang’s website.
Instead, Sung claims in a lawsuit that when he first met Jang in 2016, he got her drunk and asked his South Korean partner to take her home. Mrs. Sung claims that the man took her to her own apartment and raped her.
In a separate lawsuit, Sung said Jang raped her in a hotel room in Seoul a month later. According to the case file, when she tried to resist, he used a nude picture of her on the bed that had been taken by Mr. Jang’s associate without his knowledge, and threatened to upload the image to her school’s website.
Sung said in the file that Jang continued to use the photo as blackmail and raped her three more times over the course of a few months. He also offered it to two South Korean men whose friendship or financial support he had cultivated, according to his request.
“I felt ashamed for what happened to me and thought that no one would support me,” said Sung, 32, in an interview. “To me, he was such a powerful figure that I thought I would have no chance of fighting him.”
She has had contact with Jang over the years, but decided to perform last month in a television appearance on the South Korean TV station MBC. After that, she filed a lawsuit against Mr. Jang and his associate, prompting the police to open a formal investigation.
MBC was the first to publicize the charges against Jang. Since then, he has posted statements on Facebook and YouTube vehemently denying the allegations and has challenged “any female North Korean defector to report me to the police if I sexually assaulted them”.
A South Korean native, Kang Haeryun, 32, spoke this week and said Jang raped her while she worked as an editor for her website in 2014.
“I tried to suppress my traumatic memories for six years, but I decided to speak up and show solidarity with Sung Sel-hyang because we, rape survivors, must fight together,” said Kang in an interview.
Ms. Kang said the alleged rape took place in the apartment of one of Mr. Kang’s friends on November 18, 2014, about two years before the #MeToo movement started in South Korea. She confided to two friends what it happened soon after, she said. The two friends confirmed in interviews to The Times that they did.
“She said he came after her and she said ‘no’, but he continued,” said Hahna Yoon, one of the friends. “I said this is rape. ”Another friend, Kim Hyeon-kyeong, said that Ms. Kang told her that Mr. Jang had sexually attacked her, and that she left her job because of it.
Ms. Kang said it took her years to realize that she was a victim, and that she never went to the police because she initially felt powerless in the face of Mr. Jang’s fame and then lived with self-hatred.
Jang denied raping Kang and said in an interview that his relationship with her was consensual.
Although she does not plan to file a lawsuit against Jang because of the likelihood of a protracted legal battle, Kang said she was willing to be questioned by the police as part of her investigation. Her reason for presenting in an interview, she said, was to support Sung.
Although South Korean women have been pushing to hold sexual predators accountable in recent years, the situation of North Korean deserters has been less public.
About 72 percent of the 33,700 North Korean defectors who have fled to the South are women, according to government data. Many are victims during their dangerous journey. Even after arriving in the South, they remain vulnerable to sexual violence, especially from other deserters, human rights experts said.
Deserters generally socialize within their own community, where victims of sexual violence feel pressured to keep quiet, said Jeon Su-mi, a lawyer for female deserters who are victims of sexual crimes.
Male celebrity defectors – former high-ranking officers, survivors of North Korean prison camps, authors and activists, among them – exert enormous influence on this community, said Jeon. Some use their status to sexually abuse deserters, especially those who have just arrived.
“I saw these men groping young deserters over dinner and wine in the evening and then taking them to motels for what they call the ‘second round’,” she said.
Ms. Sung said her mother died when she was five and that she sold hats at the market until she and her grandmother fled North Korea in 2006. Her dream of building a new life in the South, she said, has turned into a nightmare after meeting Mr. Jang. She said she burned herself with cigarettes of despair.
But Sung also said that an entrepreneur introduced to her by Jang last fall became one of her biggest supporters, that the two fell in love and that he encouraged her decision to introduce herself.
Mr Jang accused the man of manipulating Mrs Sung to make false statements, described himself as a “matchmaker” and said the charges against him were “a scam”.
“It was she who asked me to introduce her to a wealthy South Korean,” he said, referring to Sung. “I am not a sex offender.”
Mr. Jang is best known in South Korea for his heartbreaking poem, “I Sell My Daughter for 100 Won”, about a North Korean mother who tries to find a new family for her daughter before she dies of cancer .
Despite being one of the best-known North Korean defectors, Jang faced relatively little public scrutiny about his biography. In the English version of “Dear Leader”, for example, Mr. Jang describes himself as a North Korean “poet laureate”, but fellow defectors particularly doubted for years that he ever had such a title.
This week, Jang admitted that he was never a North Korean laureate poet, but that his poems were praised by Kim Jong-il. “I never said with my own mouth that I was a North Korean poet laureate,” he said, contradicting his own memories.