Filed under: Korea
I wasn’t going to write about this for privacy reasons, but in light of the insanity and completely unfounded, fabricated gossip, rumors, and bullshit going around on various Korean blogs and places like Dave’s ESL, I feel that I have to make a statement of some sort.
The person being accused of rape and held in Busan is someone that I’ve been good friends with for four years. We knew each other back home from musical ventures and attending Buddhist meditation retreats together. People seem to think they have clear image of who or what this person is, and from the brief, nauseating time I spent reading some of the posts, I can tell you: you don’t.
First of all, he’s not a typical American in any way shape or form. He is someone who spent most of his life being shuffled to different countries under refugee status, and just recently became an American citizen. He’s a little over five feet tall, ninety pounds, and makes a point of finding something genuine to compliment about every new person he meets. The week before he headed to Busan, he spent at my house, and although he was an annoying houseguest at times, I by no means ever felt threatened by him.
He may be guilty, he may deserve to spend time in jail. I don’t know, I wasn’t there, and neither were any of you. That is for an investigation to figure out. I’m not going to recount what he told me on the phone, but I was the one he called when he was arrested, just because I’m the only person he knows in Korea who might have had a lead to a lawyer. I have no idea how accurate his version is, although from a personal character standpoint, I don’t find this person to be even remotely violent, but to me it sounded like a severe breakdown in communication between two people who were really drunk resulting in a “he said/she said” scenario that is every coed’s worst nightmare.
Regardless of whether he is guilty or not, I do believe he deserves to have fair representation and trial, which as a foreigner, it doesn’t look like he is going to get. They scheduled a court date within hours of arresting him for the next morning, with no intention of providing representation or a translator. Luckily, one of the people I contacted had the foresight to contact the embassy who sent a translator to the courthouse. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have had anything. As far as I’ve heard from him and another close mutual friend, for the initial court hearing, he didn’t have any professional representation, and wasn’t given time to find any. Since then, I think he’s found someone, at a cost of several thousand dollars. I haven’t been in contact with him for the last week, and don’t know what his status is.
I’m not opening my blog up for public debate. I’m not going to visit, read, or comment on any of the sites discussing this. I will disable comments to my blog if I have to. I wanted to make a statement on behalf of my friend, but I am not interested in having a firestorm on here. I will delete posts that I don’t care for.
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Ruby Ramblings 
I’m not going to comment obvious mistreatment he’s experiencing by state officials regardless whether he’s guilty or not but you are a friend to be treasured.
Comment by Milan January 20, 2010 @ 3:25 pmThe description of the guy sounds more like my Aunt Virginia. I am pretty sure what happened is, they were tired and they went to sleep off the bender. He woke up trying to get a grasp of where he was, realized he was with his new friend. He realized the blanket came off her, put it back on top of her and proceeded to innocently spoon. Some Ajuma thought dirty foreigner and screamed holy murder. And in order for the young lady to save face she reported it as such. While foreigners think nothing of small public displays of affection such as putting your hand around your girl, we need to be aware of where we are and also remember to be a little more alert.
Comment by Dude January 25, 2010 @ 6:08 am[…] PDRTJS_settings_537957_post_368 = { "id" : "537957", "unique_id" : "wp-post-368", "title" : "Foreigner+Accused+of+Sexual+Assault", "item_id" : "_post_368", "permalink" : "http%3A%2F%2Fyouseok.wordpress.com%2F2010%2F02%2F01%2Fforeigner-accused-of-sexual-assault%2F" } And yes I know I missed a particular sex assault case in Hauendae, this wasn’t intentional. You can read about it over at Ruby Canary. https://therubycanary.wordpress.com/2010/01/20/on-a-more-serious-note/ […]
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