#282: He Spin Kicked A Woman Nearly Killing Her - All Because She Gave Him A “Dirty Look”

26:29I don't know why he didn't get 35 years. He's still only going to be, what, 51 years old when he gets out? His criminal identity, his personal information will be made public for at least 10 years after his release. He will be restricted from working with children for 10 years after his release. But after that, I mean, it's free game, I guess, for him. And honestly, it's just not good enough. Lee appealed his sentence saying it was way too harsh. He said, considering I was drunk, I believe the appropriate time that I should be in prison is three years instead of 20 years. He said three years. What's up with this?

27:03Consider I was drunk. Yeah. Yeah, which it works against women. If women are drunk when they're assaulted, it works against them. But when men are drunk, when they're committing crimes, it's like, well, I wasn't in my right mind. And even though there seems to be justice, if you can even call it that, it just felt like women were such an afterthought in the entire justice system. The female victim walks out of this with less dignity and less rights than the male perpetrator. And netizens were left wondering, what's the difference between a roundhouse kick and a sashimi knife? Okay, let me explain.

27:40This is all going to make sense. But we're going to talk about the sashimi knife murders in South Korea because they're somewhat connected to this case. And they're both mujima crimes. So the first killing took place in Gangnam, which is like the Beverly Hills of Seoul. And it took place in a public restroom. Everything about this case is pure nightmare fuel. And it all starts with a man named Sungmin. Sungmin was 26 years old and he had just been diagnosed with schizophrenia. Now, I just want to put a quick disclaimer out there. schizophrenia does not make someone evil there are tons of people with schizophrenia that would never hurt anyone else if we went by that logic then not having schizophrenia would also make you evil because there have been so many cases of people without any mental health diagnosis that have committed atrocious crimes like lee so i will say that and i will say though that i do think that all mental illnesses they do take a toll on people's lives and i imagine schizophrenia is one that is especially hard to live with.

28:40I really admire those people that diligently try their best to take care of themselves and the people around them. And it's not easy. So I get that. But Sung Min's mom tried her absolute best to help her son. She took him to a psychologist in 2008. And she didn't really know what it was. There was just something a bit different about her son. She said that he seemed to have beliefs that just weren't aligned or grounded in reality. And when he talked, it felt like he wasn't able to filter his thoughts. It was almost like as a thought would come into his mind, he would blurt it out and it was just this disorganized, jumbled up mess coming out.

29:18So she takes him to the hospital. The psychologist told Sungmin's mom that his schizophrenia was actually one of the worst cases that he had ever seen in his whole career. Sungmin was at the point where he was so far removed from reality that he couldn't mentally take care of himself. Self-care was not even a thought that came to his mind. And I'm not just talking about skincare or exercise. Sungmin needed full-time care. He needed someone to prepare his meals, to remind him to shower, to clean the house. But the doctor said, don't lose hope. Like most people with schizophrenia, Sungmin might improve drastically if we can develop a strict routine that he sticks to.

29:56We need to make sure that we get him on meds and he does everything that he's supposed to be doing. Have him take these meds. Stick to a routine. it's not going to be easy, but we should be progressing. We should be okay. Sungmin's mom is doing everything she can. Everything the doctor tells her to do, she's trying to do it. I mean, she tried everything short of holding him down and force feeding him medication. He just refused to listen to her. He didn't take any of her advice. His mental condition was worsening. And in 2011, he was hospitalized for six months. and this would just kind of set the pattern of his life.

30:32He would ignore his mom, get worse and worse until he's hospitalized for about six months. It was like a reset button. Then he would get out and the whole process would happen all over again. I mean, I sympathize with him because it must've been really hard for him and also his family. In 2013, he was hospitalized again. Then in 2016. Now at this point, when he's released from the hospital in 2016, he's 34 years old. When he's discharged, the doctors recommended that he lived with full-time care. His parents are like, well, we can't really afford that. And also, no one's going to genuinely care for our son as much as we do.

31:08So we are going to be his full-time care. Everything fell apart when Sungmin and his dad gets into this huge fight. There's no information about what the fight was about, but afterwards, Sungmin and his dad's relationship was just completely shattered. It was broken. Sungmin packs his bags and without a second thought, he elopes. So eloped is a term in the medical field for a patient who basically goes MIA when they most definitely should not be MIA. It's more extreme than an adult running away or even a minor running away. A person who elopes in the medical sense is someone who physically or mentally relies on full-time care and assistance in order to function well in society.

31:47You cannot just run away into the sunset and live happily ever after. An eloped person is someone who has a high chance of hurting themselves or hurting others if they're not found. That's why if you report someone missing and they're an adult, the police will usually ask you, okay, are they elderly or do they have medical concerns that we need to be aware of? His psychologist, his parents, they start looking for him. The police get involved and he's considered a high priority missing persons case. Now, Sungmin is off the radar with his parents and the medical staff. He has no access to shelter, bathrooms, showers, and the most concerning thing, he has no access to his medication.

32:23and he's surviving on the streets of Seoul, but just barely. He gets an entry-level job at a restaurant and when he's not at work, he would just mindlessly roam around the streets of Seoul. He would sleep on benches. He would sleep on sidewalks. His work gave him enough money to buy himself food every day, but that's it. He doesn't have money for a motel, for anything. He lives like this for months. He has no home to shower in, no bed to sleep in, no clothes to change into. He didn't even bring things when he ran away. I mean, I feel a little bit of compassion for this guy because this situation is, it seems horrible.

32:59But the reality is he had a loving and supportive home that he could always return to. Most people in his shoes don't even have that. His parents are hopelessly looking for him. The situation got so bad that Sangmin's delusions led him to believe that he didn't actually have schizophrenia. Everyone was trying to convince him that he did. but for whatever ulterior motive that they had. But he himself knew that he did not have it. His mind had convinced himself that he didn't have any sort of mental illness. He was perfectly healthy and maybe his parents were out to get him, were out to control him.

33:35He didn't need the support of his parents or even his doctor. He was content with his life and he was better off without them. His co-workers at the restaurant, on the other hand, were not so content. At this point, Sungmin had not showered since he left his home in January. It is now May. His lack of personal hygiene would lead to what is now dubbed the hygiene incident. The hygiene incident happened May 7th, 2016. So about six months, right? And yes, the co-workers had noticed. For months now, they had noticed. They had whispered about it to one another. They talked to their friends and families outside of work.

34:12and slowly as the weather got hotter and hotter, they just, they couldn't take it anymore. They had to work in this small space with him and every time they passed by him, they would hold their breaths, trying to avoid breathing in. Sometimes they would accidentally rush to put their hands in front of their mouths and it's not the nicest thing to do, but it just felt like instinct. Like it just kind of slammed up. You're at a restaurant, come on. Yeah, and maybe the meaner ones would crinkle their noses and side-eye him a bit. but overall everyone tried to handle it maturely. They talked to each other about it and eventually they talked to the managers about it.

34:47May 5th the manager pulls Sungmin aside and said hey I didn't want to have to say this okay but your personal hygiene habits are negatively affecting the workplace. You've worn the same outfit every single shift and if I'm going to be honest with you the customers are even starting to notice the odor. I'm going to have to ask you to stick to the dress code for your next shift which means you're going to have to shower you're gonna have to change your clothes. We don't know how Sungmin reacted to this. He finished the shift, left work, then came back two days later for his next shift in the same exact outfit.

35:19He hadn't showered. He hadn't changed. He hadn't even washed his hands. The manager felt bad, but he couldn't risk losing customers over this. So he told Sungmin, I'm sorry, but Sungmin, I'm gonna have to move you to the back of the house. I cannot have you interacting with customers like this. Back of the house is restaurant speak for the kitchen or any space that's employees only. His manager is honestly a lot kinder to Sungmin than his co-workers wanted him to be but I think the manager was feeling a lot of sympathy for him. He probably knew that this job was the only thing filling Sungmin's stomach and he didn't want to fire the guy so he just put him in a position that was further away from the customers.

35:55His co-workers aren't too happy. Now it's an even smaller more confined space in the back and like the heat of the cooking and I'm not sure they felt comfortable serving food by made by someone who hadn't showered in so long but they stopped complaining to the manager i mean what more could they do right and i just want to make it very clear no one no one complained to sungmin about his hygiene the manager was the only one that talked to him about it and he was very delicate he was very soft about it nobody was rude to him none of his co-workers were like oh god you stink what's wrong with you or ew go take a shower nobody's they were never aggressive.

36:30They were never rude. I think the whole thing was handled to the best of everyone's ability. The manager nicely stated, hey, these are the rules. Please follow them. And when he didn't, he was moved to the back of the house, so to speak. He wasn't even fired. But Sungmin did not appreciate this. He took it as a demotion. I don't know if there was a paid demotion involved or in his mind, he felt like it was a demotion. Either way, Sungmin was so hurt about all of this and he blamed it all on his female co-workers. He believed that his female co-workers had bad-mouthed him behind his back to the manager and that was the real reason for his demotion.

37:11It wasn't his not showering. It wasn't his personal hygiene. No, that was just the excuse the manager was making. The female colleagues probably made up some crazy lies about him. Look, I don't know why he blamed his female co-workers specifically but he wholeheartedly believed that these women were the cause of his demotion and therefore they were ruining his life. He thought about this non-stop for an entire week. He would work himself up when he thought about these random female co-workers who made it their life mission to make his existence harder. It's like he wanted to feel angry. He wanted to feel like someone was out to get him.

37:45He couldn't get this out of his mind. And then on May 15th, something else happened. Sungmin was walking down the street when he stopped and noticed something was on his shoe. A woman had walked by and flicked her cigarette butt at him. The story might not even be true, but according to Sungmin, in his mind, she did it on purpose to either A, make his day worse, or maybe she wanted to light him on fire even. In reality, if this did really happen, she probably flicked it on the ground and it just happened to land on or near his shoe. She might not have even noticed it landed there. yeah like i cannot imagine how accurate you have to be to like flick it at someone on the shoe yeah right it's not something you can easily do and i feel like if you were to flick it at someone there would be other things accompanying like harsh words or some sort of look or glare like a a fight me type of action versus just like let me run yeah so this guy was at his boiling point he felt like his female co-workers were conspiring to get him fired the woman on the street was trying to light him on fire, burn him alive.

38:51And after the cigarette butt incident, he said it's like he started waking up to how much women were out to get him. I think that's what... So he said he started noticing everything that all the women in this world were doing to make him miserable. Sometimes they would just ignore his existence, which felt rude. You know, they wouldn't move out of the way when he's walking directly in their line of sight, which like, okay, if you think about it. He's walking directly in their line of sight. Why should they move, right? But even ruder, well, all the women that would deliberately walk slow to make him late for work.

39:25He said the women would get together in groups in front of him on the sidewalk and walk so slowly and they would talk and giggle and take pictures and step by step be crawling down the sidewalk. And they knew, they knew that he was standing behind them and that he was running late for work. And they did this on purpose to make him late for work. They were conspiring with the female co-workers at work to get him fired. That's not all. He had woken up to just how cruel women were. He said women would bump into his shoulder on purpose on this whole metro, the train. They would beat him down on the shoulders, how they, he described it.

40:04Every single day, they would beat him on the shoulder. In reality, if you've ever been to Seoul and if you've ever taken the train, the metro is really full, especially during rush hour. And these women are probably not trying to touch anyone, if I'm going to be honest with you. No one wants to make skin to skin contact on the metro. So it's they're being pushed and shoved themselves and they're not trying to beat anyone down. Seoul has a population of 10 million people. So the metro system is going to be jam packed all the time. But to Sangmin, every day without fail, women would get onto the metro with the sole purpose of beating him on the shoulder.

40:43The ones who weren't there to hit him were there to stand right in front of him and block his way. Again, if you've ever been on a busy train, you know that there's going to be people inches apart and they're going to be jam-packed in there like sardines. No one is standing between you and the door. They're not trying to block you. They're just standing there because they have to get somewhere too. So all you have to do is say, excuse me, then you get off. For him though, the women were blocking him. The men though, if there were men standing in front of the door, they were also probably heading to work, probably being harassed by their own set of women NPCs.

41:18Like he never saw men as nuisances. It's just women that were conspiring against him to ruin his life. Now I do want to put a quick disclaimer out there. I do know that schizophrenia is often accompanied by a lot of paranoid thoughts or beliefs or even hallucinations. I think the problem that people have with this is hallucinations and these paranoid beliefs don't come out of thin air. They don't just magically appear in someone's mind. It's usually already trained by society. There must have already been some sort of deep hatred for women or this conversation about women being nuisances or out to get men that must have stuck in his mind to then evolve into this huge belief of like every single woman is literally out to get him.

42:05And that's the problem. So Sungmin said, woman beat me on the shoulder in the subway every single day, deliberately blocking my way and walking slowly to make me late. A woman threw a cigarette butt on me. And I have endured all of these trivial but very unpleasant things and I just couldn't stand them any longer. I just couldn't. I thought I would die if I stayed like this. So I thought I'd have to kill them first. He believed before any woman hurt him any further, he needed to kill women. So he plotted his first murder, May 17th. He took the train to Gangnam Station, which is why this is often referred to as the Gangnam Station murder.

42:47And Gangnam Station is one of the busiest subway stations in all of Seoul. About 100 ,000 people pass through that station per day on average. It's busy. When he passed through, it's a Monday night around midnight. So there are people, but not enough people. So it's not rush hour. And no one was beating down on his shoulders because it's not busy enough that people are packed like sardines. And if they had, maybe he might have taken out his sashimi knife that he had been hiding in his jacket. Side note, sashimi knives are very thin, long, razor sharp knives that are built for cutting thin slices of fish.

43:20It's a cooking knife. Now, the blade is about an inch thick and a foot long. For reference, the average woman is maybe 6 to 10 inches in the torso. I'm talking like front to back direct line, not waist measurement. So if a foot long blade is stabbed into you, it is long enough to go through the front of your torso and out the back. There will be an entrance and an exit wound. Keep this in mind. Sungmin starts taking exit 10 out of the station because there weren't enough people around to kill anyone in Gangnam Station. He walks up the stairs and it's midnight. It's crisp. And he's already kind of laid out a plan.

43:58He just knew that his victim needed to be a woman and the time would be now and the murder weapon would be the sashimi knife. He just needed to find the right location. So he gets up to the street level and he starts looking around and he's looking at any open businesses and he saw this bar. So he's like, okay, this is perfect. He entered the bar at around 11.40 p.m. And just like outside, there were a good amount of people in it, but it wasn't overcrowded. He walked in unnoticed, took a look around. Good. More than enough women here. More than enough potential victims. Most of them had glasses in their hands, too, which meant, okay.

44:35He looked around for the bathroom. They would have to use the restroom, right, if they're drinking a lot? That would be perfect. So the bar has two floors. The first floor is the designated bar area where the patrons order and drink drinks and they can stay there like a regular bar that you imagine. Then the second floor is like a norebang situation. Karaoke bar. In Korea, karaoke bars are a little bit different. So it's not like a Western bar where it's just one big room and you go up on stage and see in front of strangers. It's a bunch of mini rooms with a bunch of people behind it. And it's like a private room for you and your friends.

45:08It's nice, right? So he chooses the restroom in between. There's like a, okay, he chooses a restroom. I don't want to overcomplicate it, but there's like a stairwell and both levels are going to be using this restroom. And it was a unisex restroom. And it's not a single unit. So it's not a family restroom. It actually has two stalls and it's unisex. So he didn't go into the men's or the women's. He just went in there. When Sungmin arrived, the bathroom was empty. He went into the one of the two stalls and he waited there. He had his ear pressed up against the wall and he had a sashimi knife in one hand.

45:41And he heard footsteps on the stairs not too long after. They were loud. They were heavy. And Seungmin was pretty sure that they belonged to a man. This would be a no-go. He was listening for the light pitter-patter of women's feet, not the big, strong, loud, masculine thumping of a man. Easy distinction, obviously, okay? I walk like a giant, so I don't know. The next footsteps he heard were a little bit softer. So he's like, ooh, maybe this is a woman. But there were so many soft footsteps behind. And they were getting closer and closer and closer. and the bathroom door swung open and he could hear a bunch of young boys talking, probably freshly 20, which is the drinking age.

46:17And he waited for all of them, like six of them, to use the restroom, wash their hands and leave. And he starts wiping his clammy hands on his pants and he keeps waiting. He couldn't leave just yet. He needed to make sure that he got revenge for everything women had been doing to him. A total of six men came and went while Sungmin stayed hidden in the stall. And then finally, after 30 minutes that felt like an eternity, he heard one single set of soft footsteps enter the restroom. He held his breath. He was certain it was a woman. And she was alone. He was sure of it. The victim's family requested she remain anonymous, so we're going to call her Yeji.

46:59Yeji was at the bar with her boyfriend and one of his friends, and it's unclear if they were celebrating a special occasion or maybe they just wanted a night out. They walked in, got their drinks, and as they're enjoying themselves at around 1 a.m., Yeji leans over and tells her boyfriend that she's going to use the restroom real quick. He asked her, do you want me to take you there? Like, are you okay? She's like, don't be silly. What are you going to do? Like, just listen to me use the restroom. It's right there. I'm going to be back in a few minutes. Besides, it's not too busy in here. It's not like I'm going to get lost in the crowd.

47:27It should be quick. She leaves her drink with them, heads to the stairs, enters the bathroom at 1.07 a.m. She goes in, uses the restroom, and hears someone in the bathroom next to her finish their business. So when she's in the stall, she hears someone flush next to her. And now it sounds like they're washing their hands. So she finishes her business, exits the stall, and then a lot of things happen at once. The first thing she noticed was the smell. The second thing she noticed was the hot burn of the sashimi knife going into the front of her torso and out the back. then she felt a hand push on her as the knife was pulled out and then another burn and again and again and then she just saw this man rush out of the restroom she saw his head bob down the stairs before the door fully swung shut and then she hit the floor her boyfriend got a little worried when she didn't come back right away but he didn't want to overreact and go check up on her he also didn't know probably that the restrooms were unisex so it's not like he can burst into the woman's restroom and be like, yeah, Ji, are you in here?

48:31He glanced around. I mean, everything seemed okay. Nobody was freaking out. There was no commotion. So he reasoned with himself. Well, okay, maybe she was on her period. Maybe she had stomach cramps. But after 30 minutes had gone by, he started getting really worried. Is she sick? Did she get lost? He and his friend walked up those same stairs that Sungmin had rushed down half an hour ago. They push open the door and And before they registered what they were looking at, their feet came to a wet stop on the floor. They looked down at the squishing noise and they had stepped in blood. Yeji was alive, but barely.

49:08She was unconscious and barely breathing. She was bleeding out on the bathroom floor. You have to remember that she was stabbed four times. But because the sashimi knife went through her entire body, there were eight wounds that she was bleeding out of. she was rushed into an ambulance and the paramedics tried to stop the bleeding but too much had already spilled out and her pulse was fading and eventually it stopped completely yeji died on may 17th 2016 before the sun came up she was 23 years old which is in korean age so probably in u.s age it's like 21

49:52The police had no trouble finding Sungmin. There was CCTV at the stairwell of the bar. They caught Sungmin going up. They caught Yeji going up and then Sungmin running down. He was sitting in an interrogation room by 10 a.m. that morning and he denied everything. He said, no, I don't even know why I'm here. I wasn't involved in whatever you think I was and I have no idea why this footlong sashimi knife covered in blood is in my jacket pocket right now. I have no clue. He still had the blood covered knife in his pocket when the police arrested him and he still denied all the charges. He was like, what girl?

50:21What murder? Who are you talking about? I have, you have no evidence. Contrary to Sungmin's belief, CCTV footage and a bloody knife are pretty good pieces of evidence. The police managed to bring him back to reality and convince him that, hey, the game is up. And when they asked him why, they wanted to know if Sungmin knew the victim, if he had been following the victim, stalking her, how long he had been watching her. Typically with stabbings, there is a connection between the perpetrator and the victim. to stab someone requires you to get very close to them to push the knife into them and to look into their eyes while you do it it takes a certain level of hatred it takes anger and usually there's some sort of tangible animosity there but in this case the stabbing was completely random Yeji had no idea who Sungmin was and vice versa so what in the world led him to do this Sungmin said women always ignore me so I hid in the bathroom to kill a woman okay it's giving incel it's giving elliot rogers and the police thought so too sungmin could already see the accusations forming in their heads and they probably thought that this was some misogynistic incel that got rejected hated all the women and sungmin wanted to make it very clear that's not who he was he said i have i have no vendetta against ordinary women i'm not a misogynist you know there were times in my life where i was very popular with women and there were woman that liked me.

51:42The crime was due to the actual damage that women have done to me. And by actual damage, he's talking about the fact that women were walking slowly in front of him on purpose. The ones that beat him on the shoulder in the Metro, the one that flicked the cigarette butt at him. He's saying this is actual damage. He said people who just hate on women randomly on the internet are childish and he's nothing like him. He said that he has real life beef with women in general. And he's not a raging misogynist. He's saying, I wouldn't have hated women if they hadn't done all this to me. When Sungmin was in the interrogation room, it was pretty obvious that something deeper was going on.

52:21I mean, the police could literally smell it. His lack of personal hygiene suggested that he struggled with a severe mental illness and or was without a home, which was interesting because according to their police files, his mother was alive and well and avidly searching for her son. So they call in his mom and she's the one to tell them about the whole situation, about his mental health, him not taking his meds, refusing treatment. But still, a schizophrenia diagnosis is no excuse for murder. They brought in five different behavior profiles to examine him and they came back with a schizophrenia diagnosis.

52:54The police already knew that, but the psychologist said that he was deep in his delusions that day. They said he firmly believes in these vague feelings and thoughts that he has been victimized by women and in his way of speaking, it's very certain that he believes that women are doing this to him on purpose. He committed a crime with deliberate actions without directly relating a motive to the crime to the victim. It's a characteristic of motiveless crime that the plan is not systematic compared to the purpose, such as he had no plan to escape the next day. He had no plan to get rid of the sashimi knife or the murder weapon.

53:30In other words, they argued that he was heavily under the influence of his delusions and the crime was nothing personal against Yeji. They stated that the crime lacked motive because he didn't plan anything other than the actual crime. He didn't try to get away with it. So the police chalked it up to his schizophrenia and they called it a day. They didn't even acknowledge. And I think what netizens wanted, I don't think they wanted to go and persecute everyone with schizophrenia that did something because, you know, the law is very particular about how you can plead insanity, right? But they just wanted, netizens just wanted acknowledgement.

54:02It wasn't even about putting Sungmin in jail. People just wanted to admit the reason that he even had these delusions to begin with is because society has this narrative about women. Like delusions don't come out of thin air. There must be some sort of internal bias already established by the environment, by society, by how people talk about women online, in shows, in movies that made him feel like women are after him. But police didn't even acknowledge that. at the end of the day they said this has nothing to do with anything it's just his schizophrenia so what happened to him so we're gonna get to the trial in a second yeah but they were like this has nothing to do with anything it's just schizophrenia they said there is a need to distinguish between hate crimes and crimes driven by mental illness the latest case falls in the latter category.

54:54Okay, maybe that would make sense if it weren't for the fact that Sungmin exclusively and explicitly mentioned women as the cause of his suffering. He also let six men enter and leave the restroom before he attacked Yeji. There were men that came in alone before her, but he attacked the first alone woman. The police can't just ignore Sungmin's explicit statement that he committed the crime because women ignored him. When netizens pointed it out, the police responded, we can't simply conclude something based on a statement that was made by a man with such a severe mental illness. Okay, this, I think the case was already going to get a lot of attention regardless, but the police really helped make it front page news because think of the logic.

55:34They blame his actions on his mental illness and when he told them that he did it because he doesn't like women, they didn't believe him because of his mental illness. The police categorized this as a random mujima crime, meaning that there is the perpetrator and the victim have no connections. Korean netizens were so upset at this, were so upset at the classifications because they said, you know, these mujima crimes, they're not really random if it's always women or the victim. This is not random then. It's just violence against women. Are men sitting there reading about these mujima crimes going, oh, I'm so scared now.

56:10No, it's women sitting at home going, I'm so scared because that could be me. He wasn't just looking for a victim. He was looking for a female victim. That's the key difference. So on May 24th, Sungmin did a crime scene reconstruction. These were pretty rare to see in the West, but in Korea, it's more or less common for the police to bring in the perpetrator to the scene of the crime and replay what they did. So seeing the perpetrator hold a fake knife and stab a dummy is a lot stronger in court than a statement saying, I stabbed the victim. So it's good for the prosecutors. Before they all get to the bar, Sungmin pauses at the exit 10 of Gangnam Station.

56:45He turns to the reporters and says, I'm calm now. I don't have any personal grudge or feelings against the victim. And I'm sorry that she had to be sacrificed. He used the word sacrificed like she had to atone for a sin. The police were still adamant that this was a crime resulting from his schizophrenia and not his hatred for women. Netizens were baffled, especially after hearing that because would it be unrealistic sake to assume that his crime was influenced by both his unchecked mental illness and his hatred for women like it doesn't have to be either or so his trial started in september and the defense had a tough time due to the mountain of evidence you know i think the bloody knife in his coat jacket is pretty hard to talk your way out of but they did their best they tried blaming all of this on his mental illness and incompetence somewhere in the slew of medical professionals that cared for him during his hospital stays throughout the years.

57:42They said it's not Sungmin's fault, it's schizophrenia's fault. They asked the judge for a mandatory 20 years in a mental health facility and an ankle monitor. The prosecutors aimed for life in prison. They brought out the overwhelming amount of evidence and, you know, there was no doubt that Sungmin had murdered Yeji, but there was also the evidence that he was looking for a female victim. Sungmin was sentenced to 30 years in jail. Now, I think that there were a lot of mixed feelings about this in South Korea. You know, I think there were feelings of at the end of the day, he did what he did.

58:16He probably needs mental help more than jail. And then other people were saying it doesn't matter. Like this feels like a gender based crime. So there were both I could see both sides. The Korean Supreme Court denied Sungmin's appeal and he will be in jail until 2046. then he will be released back into the streets of Seoul. A few days after Yeji's death, netizens posted on Twitter about a memorial outside of Gangnam station for Yeji. The hashtags Gangnam murder man and bathroom murderer went viral on Korean platforms and thousands of people showed up and they left these white flowers, sticky notes with short messages for the victim and the public.

58:56I mean the window of the station was covered in a wall of colorful sticky notes. From inside, it looked like stained glass. Most of them read, female hate is a social problem. The woman who remained will make this a better world. I want to be alive at the end of my workday. Is it too much to ask to be safe to reject people I don't like? Like all these feelings that a lot of women in South Korea had been struggling with were now being posted in this whole collage of anxiety, paranoid thoughts, and just threats to their safety. And I think to visualize that was a big moment in South Korea. People wrote, I'm still alive because I didn't go to that restroom that day to indicate how random this was.

59:42There were a few people that claimed that this whole case was reverse misogyny. Yeah, so people thought that women were making a big deal out of something that wasn't femicide and trying to cast a bad shadow on men. There were people that came out and posted messages amongst all of these messages that said, women with victim mentality are overexpanding this case. Don't use this to fuel your political agendas. Members of Euby Storehouse, an alt-right internet forum, posted about how they were going to wear masks and show up at the memorial to express their power. The police heard about this, sent dozens of police officers out to the station to control the scene if something happened.

1:00:23In the end, only one member showed up and the protesters tried to rip off his mask. They said, if you're not a member of EB, take it off with dignity. Netizens said, yes, it's tragic that sometimes victims are men and we all know that men aren't monsters as a whole. But the point is, women can't be sure which men are monsters and who aren't until they're dead on the bathroom floor. So it's not really about you, okay? Like that's what's terrifying about being a woman. And side note, I got to tell you about EB's storehouse because they were recently in drama like a week ago so eb storehouse is it's pretty famous in korea it's like the incel community of south korea it's a website that has contributed nothing but a solid net negative into the world members of the community are often self-described as anti-feminist anti-immigrant and anti-lgbtq and just like anti-everything self-proclaimed shit humans if you will i don't know why they're so proud of it there's a scary amount of them roaming around anonymously and at the website's peak they had about 700 000 daily users in south korea has like a population of 40 million so that's a good chunk wow yeah i mean i think you can already imagine what kind of posts are on there your typical incel forum they also are avid fans of molka, which is illegal cameras that film women in bathrooms.

1:01:48But hopefully the next story gives you a better picture of these people. Have you listened to our episode on the Sewol Ferry disaster? It was a huge incident in South Korea where hundreds of students from Danwon High School passed away on a ferry. There was political corruption, corporate greed, billionaires involved. It is considered one of the most tragic incidents in South Korea's modern history. EB made fun of the victims the entire time on their forum. They even mocked the parents for, quote, using their child's death to get paid by the government. I don't know if you remember this detail.

1:02:20When the parents held a hunger strike to get answers from the government, do you remember the detail where people showed up and started eating in front of them? That's dumb. That was organized and done by EB Storehouse. Those were EB members. What the fuck? They thought it would be hilarious to eat in front of the grieving parents. over 100 UB users showed up to eat in front of the victim's parents. In regards to the Sewol tragedy UB went viral again in 2015 because there was a post titled I have eaten my friends on UB. An UB user clearly in his 20s we know this because he was arrested after so no longer a high school student somehow got his hands on a Tanwon High School uniform whether he bought it, purchased it off a student I don't know.

1:03:03The school that was impacted by Sewol. He posted a picture of half of his face, the uniform, and he was eating fish cakes. And he wrote, the fish cakes were made from fish that fed off the lost bodies of the two students that the families haven't been able to locate since the disaster. So technically, I'm eating my friends. Wow, I am at a loss for words. Oh, you're going to die when I tell you the next part of what they just did a week ago. So thankfully, this user was arrested for contempt and defamation by the South Korean courts, which I will say, I know that we talk a lot about South Korean cases because I'm Korean and I am genuinely interested on everything that's going on over there.

1:03:43South Korea does have some pretty good defamation laws. So he was arrested. I think in America, you wouldn't be arrested for this. You would just be canceled socially. But he was arrested. And if you're thinking, OK, well, 2015, that's still eight years ago. We've made some progress since then, right? still can't be going on just a week ago a popular south korean gaming company did one of the stupidest most toxic things i've ever seen from a huge company in a really long time so the story starts early july project moon part of limbus announced their summer game event and one of the main characters in the game was a female lead she looks like every game character ever like bright orange hair that's perfect and flowy regardless of who she's killing or fighting in the game.

1:04:27Her figure is like the most insane hourglass shape that is literally unattainable in real life. But whatever, it's just a game, right? A group of men in South Korea didn't like it. They took one look at this game and started foaming at the mouth in anger, like they were smashing their fists on their keyboard, joining internet forums, going crazy. The main lead of the game was wearing a skin tight wetsuit. They said, why is she not in a bikini? It sounds like I'm making this up. It sounds like this is something that happened a million years ago, like a troll event, right? But no, welcome to 2023.

1:05:01They start gathering on these forums, claiming that the game developers must have hired a bunch of females to make this game. Why else would the female lead be so covered up? She's never covered up. The female lead is always in a bikini. So why this summer event is she covered up? It must be a bunch of women that designed this game. So she's supposed to be wearing a bikini. She's not sexy enough. They started writing the most heinous reviews on this game, accusing radical, quote, radical feminism to be the downfall of this company and the gaming industry as a whole. They started a witch hunt to track down the designer of this specific character.

1:05:35And they discovered the designer, dun dun dun, was a male designer. Well, then story over, right? Radical feminism over, right? A man designed this character. No, no, no. They argued. He must have felt pressured to dress this character conservatively by his female co-workers Side note, the character is wearing a skin tight wetsuit that shows off literally every curve. Like I hardly call that conservative Again, are we seeing the problem here? They must find a woman at the root of this so-called problem They start cyber stalking every single employee that they could find online that had worked on this game They went through each of their social media accounts and one of the female employees had a tweet that she reposted from her personal account five years ago.

1:06:20And the tweet supported the cause to stop mole camera, illegal spy cams in South Korea. The use of illegally placed spy cams in hotel restrooms, hotel rooms, motels that were targeting women. She retweeted the initiative to stop this already illegal act. It's already illegal. It's not like she's trying to make it illegal. she was fired from limbus company after this quote came to light as if this is like a controversial tweet this is a week ago 2023 one week the company fired her why because all these guys online were making such a big fuss about it how she's a radical feminist and she's imposing her political agendas onto this game and the game probably these are their demographic they're yeah oh my god and i say this in quotations like came to light because she's not hiding it.

1:07:12The company fired her stating that they had company rules that each employee was to follow and one of them included not voicing controversial, controversial opinions on social media accounts. Spy cams are illegal. To voice that you don't think people should be doing illegal things is now controversial. Imagine you get fired because you tweeted, hey everyone, stop speeding, it's against the law. Or hey everyone, don't commit homicide, it's against the law. How on earth is that controversial? To give you an accurate picture on how ridiculous this is, this is the timeline. People suspected radical feminism in a gaming company because the female character wasn't half naked.

1:07:51People wished to hunt down the supposed feminist female designer behind this deplorable character. Oh shit, it's a male designer. Okay, fine, he gets a pass. Wait, there's another person that worked on this game? And she's a woman? Let's dig through her social media. Find a post from five years ago that showed that she doesn't like illegal filming. Ask for her to be fired since it goes against their ideologies. And she actually gets fired. This is a week ago. Not like 2001. Not that that would make it better, but this is a week ago. Netizens flipped out. I would say that the group of primarily men that conducted this witch hunt do not represent most men in South Korea because, I mean, most men were so infuriated they were taking to social media to voice their concerns.

1:08:37They posted, okay, so I guess it's safe to assume that the company supports illegal filming. Great. I will note that from now on. They posted things like incels really be at war every day. They posted, they're such an embarrassment to our country and to men. Others posted, I hope that all foreigners find out that someone was fired over retweeting a tweet about being against illegal filming. Yeah, it was bad. And like, that was a really long side note, but I feel like that just represents who Ubi's storehouse is as a group. Now, back to the story. Netizens felt upset at the authorities for Yeji's case.

1:09:13They felt like officers in the court were entirely ignoring the role gender-based violence had to play in this case. They chalked it up to mental illness and left it at that. Not only does that further stigmatize people with schizophrenia and mental illnesses, it ignores the deeply misogynistic culture that continues to allow all these thoughts to thrive. Protesters organized marchers holding signs that said she died because she was a woman. Yeji's death sparked a lot of conversation about gender-based violence in Korea. A sociology professor summed everything up pretty nicely and he said, you know, the fact that a reaction to this murder is viewed as an overreaction from women means that gender awareness education has not been properly conducted in this country.

1:09:52Korean society as a whole is male-centered, and it's no longer an individual problem, but a social problem. Public hate speech and crimes against foreigners, women, and minorities should be punished through legislation. It should be enforced through education as a serious crime. And for a while, it seemed like South Korea was taking the necessary steps to make the nation safer for women. Until 2022. Everyone gathered at Gangnam Station and filled the windows with more post-it notes. it had been six years since Yeji's murder. People were protesting outside with signs that read, for women, everywhere is Gangnam Station.

1:10:30On the sixth anniversary of Yeji's murder, has anything changed? Why did they gather again? Because another victim was murdered in a subway station bathroom around the six-year anniversary of Yeji's murder. her name was joy and her killer was actually a former co-worker of hers i mean it's just gender-based violence that's the only way there's no excuse there's no explanation to these crimes joy had met this co-worker let's call him jay and jay was so obsessed with her but not even in a way that made sense he would just stare at her follow her around he never tried to get to know her he just wanted her to be his.

1:11:12He got her phone number. He would call her 300 times a day, leaving threatening voicemails that he would kill her if she didn't go out with him, how she was his, belonged to him, all of these things. He found out where she lived. He would roam around her apartment building. He would threaten to end his own life if she didn't go on a date with him. I mean, she was so fed up. Eventually she told him harshly, you know, because at first she was saying, I have a boyfriend, I have a boyfriend. And then eventually she said, I don't want to date you. Please just leave me alone. He wouldn't leave her alone.

1:11:41She told her managers they fired him and they were going to press charges. She was going through the legal system. He was briefly arrested and let out on bail. And while he was on bail awaiting trial, he stabbed Joy to death in the restroom, the subway station restroom. I mean, this case had so many similarities to the Gangnam bathroom murder that it immediately blew up and netizens connected the case together. The president of South Korea had something very interesting to say about it. Instead of promising to fix these problems and prevent more women like Joy from being murdered in the future, he said structural racism is a thing of the past.

1:12:23They're both Korean, by the way. Literally what? No one knows. I don't even. This is like a Mujima tweet. I don't even. Don't ask me why he wrote that. Yeah, everyone was like, what are you talking about? But it made sense because this is the same president that scrapped government gender quotas immediately after entering the office. There are currently three women in his 19-member cabinet. He has removed the term gender inequality from textbooks and canceled funding for programs that fight everyday sexism. Side note, his mother-in-law just got arrested, so I would say he's not having the best presidency right now.

1:12:58But anyway, yeah, after Joy was murdered, the citizens of Soru gathered outside the bathroom entrance and created a sticky note memorial, just like the one outside Gangnam Station. They wrote things like, we survived another day. How many more women need to die for this country to change? And I think the one thing that stands out to me is that through all of these don't ask questions cases, there is this underlying idea that some people have that women were created for men. Like in the Busan Roundhouse kick, Lee believes that women exist to fulfill his sick fantasy that he has with non-consensual essay.

1:13:37Even a glance on the street must have been for him. And in Sungmin's case, he believes that women exist to make his life harder. Everything they must do, they do because of him to make his life rough. They must be walking slow because of him. not because they're having conversations with their friends and they have their own lives but it's for him and South Korean netizens are fed up this could also explain why South Korea has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world a lot of Korean netizens believe without fixing societal problems it's going to stay that way women are just over it to put it nicely they're not getting married they're not having children and I just want to point out women do not exist for men and men would not exist without women.

1:14:22So let's just all be nicer to one another, you know? And that is today's case. And again, this is not a woman versus men topic. And if you as a man are watching this and you feel like it is, I think that would be a really good moment of self-reflection because, you know, I think most men that watch these videos and are in my personal life, they don't ever see these cases as men versus women. They see it as how do we help? What can we do? So make sure to leave your thoughts in the comments. Please stay safe. I will see you guys on Wednesday for the main hour.