Tag: Kim Keon-hee

The attacks against the Korean First Lady continue. She was cleared of plagiarizing her Phd dissertation. Now her Master’s thesis is being investigated for plagiarism:

Sookmyung Women’s University launched an inquiry last month into plagiarism allegations involving first lady Kim Keon Hee’s master’s degree thesis on art education, sources said Tuesday. 

Kim has been under allegations that she plagiarized the dissertation, which she submitted in 1999 to the university’s graduate school of education for her master’s degree.

Sookmyung began a probe into Kim’s case in mid-December, an alumni association of the university said, citing a letter sent from the school. The final result is expected to be out by around mid-March if relevant regulations requiring an outcome within 90 days upon such a probe’s launch are observed.

Yonhap

Kim has already been mocked & shamed publicly and she apologized for her prior resume padding actions. What is going on here is that this is likely retaliation for the investigations into Lee Jae-myung’s wife for when her husband was governor of Gyeongi province. What I would like to see is an investigation into the thesis and dissertations of all major political figures in Korea. How widespread is this problem?

First Lady Kim Keon-hee cannot do anything without getting ripped by her critics. Has there ever been a first lady this demonized?:

First lady Kim Keon-hee is back under the microscope on Monday, this time for her charity work during President Yoon Suk-yeol’s visit to Cambodia for the Association of Southeast Asian Nations summit. She was photographed holding a boy suffering from a congenital heart disease, and some opposition politicians are claiming that she tried to imitate an image of “Roman Holiday” star Audrey Hepburn in war-torn Somalia back in 1992.

According to the presidential office, Kim, who is accompanying President Yoon Suk-yeol on his trip to Cambodia and Indonesia, visited the child’s home on Saturday. 

Kim was supposed to meet the boy a day earlier when she visited Hebron Medical Center in Phnom Penh, a facility established in 2007 by a South Korean pediatrician, but the boy did not show up to the event due to his condition.

Kim decided to meet the boy instead of visiting Angkor Wat as part of an official program for first spouses that the Cambodian government had set up, the presidential office said. 

“You can beat it, right? Get well and let’s meet in South Korea,” Kim was quoted by deputy presidential spokesperson Lee Jae-myoung as saying to the boy.

The photos of Kim holding the boy grabbed the attention of the Korean public. 

Wearing a black short-sleeved polo-style shirt and white pants, Kim was holding the boy in her arms while staring into the distance. People online soon compared this photo with Hepburn’s photo taken during her visit to a UNICEF-assisted feeding center in Baidoa, Somalia, in 1992.

In the 1992 photo, Hepburn was wearing a dark polo-style shirt and light-colored chino pants, staring into the distance while holding a child in her arms. Online users and main opposition Democratic Party of Korea (DPK) Rep. Kim Yong-min accused the Korean first lady of mimicking the British actress.

“If you want to emulate someone, try to emulate their spirit and sacrifices, not their pose or attire,” Kim wrote on Facebook. “Also, please start by abandoning the evil of using those who are suffering as ornaments.” 

During a party meeting on Monday, DPK Rep. Jang Kyung-tae accused the presidential office of resorting to “poverty porn” and chided the first lady for committing a “diplomatic discourtesy” for ducking out of the official program for first spouses.

Korea Times

You can read more at the link.

At this point it is pretty clear that the first lady did rely on plagiarism for her Phd dissertation, but I don’t know what this group is hoping to accomplish that hasn’t already been done. She has already been mocked & shamed publicly and she apologized for her actions:

First lady Kim Keon-hee has come under fire again, as a group of professors has reignited the allegations that she plagiarized her Ph.D. dissertation and other published papers. She had been cleared of the allegations last month following an eight-month probe by her alma mater, Kookmin University, which stated ultimately that the “statute of limitations of five years for verifying the papers has expired.”

The group of 16 professors from 14 academic associations, called the Pan-academic National Verification Group for the Verification of Suspicions of Plagiarism of First Lady Kim Keon-hee, held a press conference to unveil their findings verifying Kim’s academic misconduct at the Press Center in Seoul, Tuesday. The group claimed that all of Kim’s academic works are “indisputably entangled with plagiarism,” and that they all violate basic academic standards. 

According to the group’s findings, a total of 220 out of the 860 sentences in Kim’s Ph.D. dissertation that she produced when she attended Kookmin University’s Graduate School of Techno Design in 2008 were copied and pasted without citing the original sources.

Korea Times

Here appears to be the real reason this group has been formed:

Meanwhile, the ruling People Power Party (PPP) questioned the credibility of the Pan-academic National Verification Group’s findings, claiming that the group supports the DPK and has political intentions.

“As the group’s name may suggest, the verification group pretends to make a scholastic presentation on behalf of the academic community … However, the bottom line is that it is merely a political organization that supports DPK leader Lee Jae-myung,” PPP spokesperson Rep. Park Jung-ha commented on the PPP’s website, Tuesday.

Park said that some of the 14 academic associations that are part of the organization had openly supported Lee during the presidential campaign earlier in March and called on them to “stop deceiving people under the pretext of academic investigation.”

You can read more at the link, but this appears to all just be in retaliation for the ongoing investigation into Lee Jae-myung’s wife.

This makes me wonder what the investigation would have determined if President Yoon had lost the election:

 A university on Monday cleared First Lady Kim Keon-hee of plagiarism after a monthslong probe into in her academic papers.

Kookmin University in Seoul conducted an investigation into Kim’s four research papers over allegations of misconduct raised last year. 

Kim earned her PhD in design at the university in 2008.

The university said its investigating committee concluded her doctoral dissertation and two other papers “constitute neither plagiarism nor research misconduct that seriously deviates from the range normally accepted in the academic disciplines.” 

As for the remaining paper, it was impossible to verify whether there had been misconduct, the school said.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link.

I guess animal rights is a pretty safe issue for the highly criticized first lady to come out in public in support of:

First lady Kim Keon-hee called for animal rights in her first media interview given since her husband, President Yoon Suk-yeol, took office on May 10. 

“Korea and China are the only two economically successful countries that consume dog meat,” Kim said during an interview with local newspaper Seoul Shinmun that was published on Monday. “I believe the universal culture (of not consuming dog meat) should be shared in Korea with other developed countries. Otherwise, it could stoke an anti-Korean sentiment,” Kim said. 

To end the practice, Kim said the government could support dog meat traders to transition into new industries, underlining the unsanitary environment in which dogs are raised before being consumed as meat.

“Dog meat is not good for health. Dogs that are raised to be consumed as meat are locked in small cages, where they eat, sleep and defecate all their lives. And some of them are even fed antibiotics,” Kim said. “Ultimately, dog meat consumption must be stopped out of respect for man’s best friend and life.”

Korea Times

You can read more at the link.

Here is the latest attempt to bring down Yoon Suk-yeol’s campaign through criticisms of his wife:

The latest fodder emerged Sunday during MBC TV’s airing of recordings of phone calls between Yoon’s wife, Kim Keon-hee, and a reporter for a liberal YouTube channel, in which Kim claimed she was a “spiritual” person who preferred discussing the meaning of life with “dosas,” or gurus, to visiting nightclubs.

Kim’s remark received attention because she has previously been reported to have close ties to shamanism and introduced certain shamans to her husband.

Then, local newspaper Segye Times reported Monday that a shaman introduced by Kim has been exercising undue influence over Yoon’s campaign while working as an adviser for a subunit named “Network Headquarters.”

The PPP scrambled to dispel the allegations, saying the person in question is not a shaman but a Buddhist figure who has made several visits to the campaign but has never been appointed an adviser nor had any sway in the campaign.

On Tuesday, the party announced the dissolution of the Network Headquarters, saying the decision was made by Yoon.

When asked to address the claims, Yoon expressed disbelief.

“I was introduced to him by a party official and we introduced ourselves, but I know him to be a monk,” the candidate told reporters Monday. “I saw the article about (him being involved in) my schedule and public messaging, but it’s a truly absurd story.”

Yoon’s opponents have likened his wife to Choi Soon-sil, a confidante of former conservative President Park Geun-hye, who was also accused of having ties to shamanism and running state affairs from behind the scenes.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link, but the comparison to Choi Soon-sil is ridiculous when Choi was essentially a lobbyist collecting money from Samsung for her sports foundation in return for influence over then President Park. The shamanism claims was just sensationalism added to the story by the media. What is going on now with the claims against the Yoon campaign is likely the same thing. With that said his Kim Keon-hee needs to be careful what she says to the media because they will use anything she says in or out of context to damage her husband’s campaign.