&imwidth=800&imheight=600&format=webp&quality=medium "South Korea's ex-first lady Kim Keon Hee arrested on corruption charges: Who is she and what is the case against her")
South Korea's former first lady, Kim Keon-hee, was arrested on Tuesday (Aug. 12) after she appeared for a five-hour hearing in court. The court then issued a warrant for her arrest. The prosecution had requested a warrant to arrest her over allegations of interfering in the graft case probe. The charges against her include stock fraud, bribery and illegal influence peddling. Kim will join her husband and former South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol in jail as he faces trial in the martial law imposition case.
Who is Kim Keon Hee?
She married Yoon on 2012 and the couple has no children. They reportedly have around six dogs and five cats. In 2022, when Yoon was elected as the president of South Korea, she said that she preferred the term ' President's spouse' over ' First Lady.' Keon-hee's father passed away when she was in school, and her mother Choi Eun-sun was tried but acquitted in a case related to running of elderly care house without a medical license. She was also sentenced in a real estate fraud case. She is also known to be an animal rights activist, and she vowed to end dog meat consumption in the country during her husband’s tenure as president. She received a parole in May 2024. In 2022, she was termed as ‘fashionista’ by world media after she attended the 2022 NATO Summit in Spain.
What is she accused of?
Keon-hee was accused of falsifying her academic details while applying for teaching jobs back in 2007. According to local reports, Kim Keon-hee applied for a job at University of Suwon in 2007 where she claimed that she studied in New York University in 2006, but reports revealed that the programme she claimed to have studied was only available to MBA students. She also claimed to have worked as the director of the Korea Association of Game Industry (K-Games) since 2002. But K-Games was established in 2004. A controversy also broke out when she claimed that she was a recipient of a 2004 Seoul International Cartoon & Animation Festival prize. But S Korea's Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, had no record of her having won an award.
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She is also accused of helping her mother in stock price manipulation and making upto $1.68 million from it. However, she and her mother were acquitted in that case.
She was again under the scanner when a 2022 video showed her accepting $2,200 Christian Dior handbag at her company’s Seoul office. The South Korean opposition claimed that she broke the anti-corruption laws. In 2024, a documentary showed recorded phone conversations between Kim and investigative journalist Lee Myung-soo from the Voice of Seoul, reealing the first lady’s claims of influence over her husband. Kim allegedly states: “I don’t think Yoon Suk-yeol is really the president. That fool is just a puppet.” She asks the journalist: “Why do you like women so much?” before declaring that she can read his palm lines to predict his “luck with women”. She then tells him that his “sexual power is strong” and that he is “popular with the ladies”.
