How a Dior Handbag Caused Martial Law In South Korea

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Transcript

Did you hear that, for about six hours this week, the nation of South Korea was under Martial Law?

I know what you’re asking right now … how did that happen?

Oh, wait. No? That wasn’t your question? Your question is “what is Martial Law?” Ha! Well that’s easy! Martial law is … I’m sorry somehow no one knows exactly what martial law is.

The simple definition is that it’s an emergency measure that allows the military to take the place of the civilian government and exercise jurisdiction over civilians in the area where it’s declared. That’s according to the Brennan Center for Justice, and if you’re thinking that definition sounds vague, you’re correct!

The Brennan Center also adds that martial law “has no established definition” and that the laws governing it, at least in this country, are “complicated and unsettled – and, as a result, the concept has never been well understood.”

So I hope that clears things up for everybody!

Now, as for how South Korea ended up briefly imposing martial law this week, the explanation at least sounds a little more entertaining. This is obviously simplifying it a bit, but the catalyst behind all of this it seems, in large part, is a $2,200 Christian Dior handbag.

But to get to that point, we have to back up to 2019. That’s when a man named Yoon Suk-Yeol…

…who we’ll just call Yoon from here on out, was named Prosecutor General of South Korea, which is akin to being named Attorney General here in the United States.

South Korea’s Democratic Party was in charge at the time, led by President Moon Jae-In…

…and they both welcomed Yoon’s appointment to this role.

But that all changed when, shortly into his reign as Prosecutor General, Yoon’s office launched an investigation into freshly nominated Minister of Justice Cho Kuk.

Cho was considered a liberal, and was appointed by Democratic President Moon, so this, clearly, was not what the Democratic Party had in mind when they said they were happy with Yoon getting the prosecutor job.

Before we get to how they responded, we need to talk about some of the specifics of the scandal that brought down Minister of Justice Cho.

Plagiarism is a big one. Cho was accused of plagiarizing theses written by Japanese scholars during his studies at Seoul National University and also later at Berkley. So, plagiarism, remember that one.

Next is his wife, Chung Kyung-sim.

Shortly after his nomination to the Minister of Justice role, Cho’s wife was indicted on forgery charges. When asked what should be done if she were found guilty, he said she should be held accountable to the fullest extent of the law. Also, important. Write that one down too.

For the record, she was eventually charged on 15 counts and sentenced to four years in prison.

Don’t go thinking Cho himself escaped without facing justice, though.

In a separate scandal, he was accused of falsifying academic records for his daughter, Cho Min…

…to help her get into medical school in what was called one of the most serious cases of academic misconduct in South Korean history.

That scandal is the one that ultimately forced Cho to resign as Minister of Justice and eventually sent him to prison as well for two years.

A political scandal ending in someone actually going to prison probably sounds pretty FOREIGN to those of us in the United States, but this is just how politics work in South Korea

A 2018 American Enterprise Institute article mentioned that, at that point in history, half of South Korea’s living ex-presidents were all in prison

We’re talking about a country that has only officially been a democracy since 1987, and that same American Enterprise Institute article mentions that the citizenry is still a little on the fence about whether they need democracy or not. Across all age groups at that time, less than 50 percent of South Koreans said it was “essential” to live in a democracy.

So, while at least half of this country will be way up in arms when Trump inevitably marches his political enemies straight to Guantanamo, the people of South Korea will be wondering what all the fuss is about, because their politicians go to prison all the time.

And sure enough, after refusing to end his investigations into President Moon’s corner of the political spectrum, the Democratic Party responded by launching investigations of their own into Yoon and his family.

They weren’t able to remove him from the Prosecutor job, though. Instead, in March 2021, Yoon tendered his resignation from that job and, uh oh, shortly thereafter, announced his candidacy for President of South Korea, running as the candidate for the conservative but awesomely named People Power Party.

Which, again, might as well be an announcement that you’re planning to go to prison someday.

Now, apparently, seeing your elected officials routinely carted off to jail, usually on corruption charges, goes a long way toward making people feel apathetic about going to the polls. By the time he was campaigning, Yoon was embroiled in a bunch of scandals of his own. So it shouldn’t surprise anyone to learn that the 2022 South Korean presidential election was considered so much of a “lesser of two evils” kind of affair that voters nicknamed it the Squid Game Election.

Yikes!

Yoon won, but by the slimmest margin in South Korean election history, .07 percent.

Now, you’ll recall, when I talked about Yoon’s efforts as Prosecutor General to take down Minister of Justice Cho, two of the big allegations against Cho were that he plagiarized a bunch in college and that his wife was guilty of a litany of financial misdeeds.

And remember, I also mentioned there were lots of questions about whether he’d let his wife be prosecuted, and he did end up letting that happen, not long before being prosecuted himself.

Well, it seems like maybe Prosecutor Yoon was throwing stones while standing, shoes off, inside a big ole’ glass house. Because the biggest scandal during President Yoon’s reign so far has been … his wife.

Her name is Kim Keon-hee, and she prefers the term “president’s spouse” over “first lady” thank you very much.

Folks started looking into her right around the time her husband started looking into Minister of Justice Cho. That was 2019 and, that same year, the media reported that Kim’s house had been seized three separate times on account of her failure to pay taxes.

That was the same year Cho’s replacement as Minister of Justice, Choo Mi-ae…

…launched an investigation into whether Kim took kickbacks during her time working as an event planner.

In 2021, it was revealed that Kim lied on her resume, claiming she had academic credits from New York’s prestigious Stern School of Business that she didn’t actually have.

And then, in 2022, remember what I said about glass houses, the first lady was accused of plagiarism over her work to obtain a PHD from a university in Korea.

But what should have been her biggest scandal was brought to light in 2023. That’s when, after a long investigation that ALSO started in 2019, Kim and her mother both were found by the 23rd criminal division of the Seoul Central District Court to have participated in a stock manipulation scheme meant to inflate the value of a Korean company that is very confusingly named Deutsch Motors.

And that brings us to glass houses part two. You’ll recall that Minister of Justice Cho was adamant that his wife should be punished for her crimes Well, when it came time to take his own wife to task, former Prosecutor General turned now President Yoon said nothing, and his justice department cleared her of all charges, even though others who were involved in the scheme in the exact same way Kim was were charged

Needless to say, the former prosecutor who went after a guy’s wife refusing to prosecute his own wife is a terrible look, and it sent Yoon’s approval ratings into the toilet.

But somehow, this still isn’t the scandal that sent the country of South Korea to the near breaking point it was at earlier this week.

In November 2023, a left wing YouTube channel called Voice of Seoul posted footage filmed right after President Yoon took office showing First Lady Kim accepting what the opposition claimed was a bribe in the form of a $2,250 Christian Dior handbag from a Korean-American pastor named Choi Jae-young. Turns out he was secretly filming her with a camera embedded in his watch.

Oops!

Now, according to an outlet called The Diplomat, which focuses on Asia Pacific news, the public reaction to this scandal was kinda ho-hum at first. South Korean politics are riddled with way bigger scandals than this all the time.

But that changed after Yoon just straight up refused to talk about it. He didn’t mention it at all after it happened. At first.

But within Yoon’s party, there was lots of concern about the impact all of these first lady controversies would have on the general election that was slated for April 2024. To quiet things down a bit, on February 7th, President Yoon addressed the handbag scandal in a pre-taped TV interview.

Unfortunately for him and his political future, it backfired tremendously. He claimed that the video was all a left wing scheme to make his wife look bad, which it totally was, but that didn’t change the fact that she did take that handbag, and doing so, bribe or not, was a violation of South Korean law. President Yoon, for all intents and purposes, just reiterated the same defense his party had been making since the scandal broke.

Meanwhile, a poll conducted before the interview showed that the public mostly just wanted a formal apology from the First Lady. Instead, they got an apology from no one, not from her or the president, and calls for a formal probe into the matter were ignored by the Yoon administration.

The authors of Diplomat article I mentioned say they penned an editorial in March about how Yoon needed to address the handbag scandal in a more substantial way or there were gonna be huge ramifications come election time, but that the editorial was rejected by a major news outlet for lacking hard evidence.

That’s too bad for the president, because it seems like they were right! In those April general elections, the opposition Democratic Party took 175 of the 300 seats in the National Assembly.

After that, they set their sights on making sure Yoon became the lamest duck in lame duck presidential history. The pressure to make sure his wife faced punishment of some sort was ratcheted way up, especially when ANOTHER scandal involving her influencing the selection of People Power Party candidates came to light not long after the election.

The opposition also tried to impeach three of Yoon’s top prosecutors.

But their biggest blow to his future plans came just last week when the opposition majority in parliament voted to cut almost $3 billion from the president’s 2025 budget.

Even though he framed it as a threat from North Korea, it was almost certainly that budget cut vote that President Yoon was referring to when, on December 3rd, he declared martial law in an effort to put down “anti-state forces” that needed to be eliminated quickly to “normalize the country.”

The declaration was so wild and unexpected that opposition leader Lee Jae-myung thought the video of Yoon making the announcement was a deepfake.

“I was lying in bed with my wife in our home when my wife suddenly showed me a YouTube video and said, ‘The president is declaring martial law.’ I replied, ‘That’s a deepfake. It has to be a deepfake.’”

Part of the declaration called for the suspension of all parliamentary activities, which Yoon tried to enforce by stationing soldiers at parliament building entrances. Unfortunately for Yoon, the opposition party responded with a resounding “what are you gonna do, shoot us?” and made their way into the building to vote on the matter anyway.

That made for lots of movie style action, like when the Democratic Party’s 35 year old female spokesperson, Ahn Gwi-ryeong, grabbed a soldier’s rifle when he pointed it at her.

Meanwhile, Democratic Party leader Lee Jae-Myung posted video to TikTok of him scaling a fence outside the parliament building to get in.

190 assembly members made it inside and launched into an immediate debate on the martial law declaration. While debating, soldiers supporting the martial law order broke into the parliament building but parliamentary staffers barricaded entrances and stopped them from reaching those debating lawmakers. When it was all said and done, the martial law declaration was rejected by a vote of 190-0.

Six hours after announcing it, President Yoon lifted the order. And then everything went back to normal.

Just joking! Now everyone, including leaders within his own party, are calling for Yoon to be jettisoned from office immediately. All six opposition parties filed impeachment motions with plans to vote on them within days.

Yoon’s entire cabinet and all of his aides have offered to resign and the leader of the Democratic Party issued a statement saying they are “deeply sorry to the public” and that “the president must directly and thoroughly explain this tragic situation” and called for anyone who supported the martial law declaration to be held accountable.

To force his hand a little, South Korea’s largest labor union, the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions, went on indefinite strike until Yoon resigns.

And of course, protests demanding Yoon’s removal from office broke out all across the country.

By the time you watch read this video transcript, there’s a damn good chance Yoon Suk-yeol is no longer the president of South Korea.

So, I’m no political expert or anything, but I think he and his wife should’ve just apologized for that handbag. It seems like at least some of this could’ve been avoided if they just did that.