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The DB discussion started in the news section, but Lee Sun kyun’s passing has become a huge international story with potential far reaching ramifications. Lee was caught up in a Gangnam VIP club drug bust when he was implicated by the female bar manager, who had SIX prior drug arrests on her record. Lee denied the charges and later claimed that he was being blackmailed by the manager (in fact paying her hundreds of thousands of dollars). Normally, at the preliminary investigation stage, a potential suspect’s name is not reported to the public. But Korea’s current conservative President ran on a platform of zero tolerance, war on drugs. There was a political agenda to get high profile cases. (Ironically, Yoon’s own wife is about to be indicated for a large stock manipulation scheme.)
The club manager also implicated seven other people, including singer G-Dragon, in order to get favorable treatment for her own crimes and sentencing. The difference was that GD assembled his own team, including the top criminal defense attorney and former Supreme Court Justice, to handle the investigation. His team pushed back at the police demands for interrogations, got ahead of the public relations fallout, and submitted their client to several drug tests. Like Lee, all those drug tests came back negative. GD’s team convinced the police that they had no objective evidence of GD’s involvement in drugs, or whether he was even at the club — to push the case file be closed. However, Lee’s case continued for three long interrogations, including a 19 hour session just before his extreme decision (police are only allowed to interrogate a witness for 6 hours; no competent counsel would allow such a lengthy interrogation to take place.) It appears that Lee may have been at the VIP club, knew the manager so the police were desperate to make a case against him.
Lee’s investigation went beyond the norm with the tabloid press to national media outlets publishing leaked information and speculation about the case, including recorded phone messages and texts from the club manager. Clearly, the police and manager had been leaking information to the press to put Lee in a bad light and not in context to facts in the case. It was reported that Lee claimed that he snorted white powder at the club thinking it was a sleeping pill. Adding to his woes were unverified netizen claims of infidelity by the actor. He was being vilified by the court of public opinion and not a court of law. He was never formally charged with a crime, but the narrative about him was out of control.
Then, on December 27, Koreans were shocked by Lee’s extreme choice. Dispatch published a scathing article about the police conduct in Lee’s case. (Ironically, in a few days Dispatch will ruin the career of a young female idol for dating an older actor – – to feed the parasocial, gossipy Korean couple culture.) Several local journalists also berated their colleagues for publishing unverified and private…
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