One of Yoochun’s alleged sexual assault victims was acquitted of false charges

Yoochun‘s sexual assault saga is seemingly never ending, and the most recent news out of it is that one alleged victim that was charged with making false accusations was acquitted of the charge. In a plea to the jury, the alleged victim reiterated that she wasn’t lying and that she was a sexual assault victim.

Ms. Song begged innocence and sobbed, “I followed him to the bathroom because we didn’t have much skinship beforehand. It’s true that I couldn’t resist because Yoochun talked to me as if he was going to give me 20,000,000 KRW (~ 17,329 USD) but I never asked for money afterward. Please listen to me. Please trust me.” She added, “I’m a victim of sexual assault. I am so upset and angry.”

Brutal.

This scandal continues to be a tough one to crack because it has so many factors, many of which will likely go forever unknown. What we do know is that the initial accuser was found guilty of making false accusations and blackmailing him, but even that was muddied by the judge’s rationale and Korean consent laws. However, another alleged victim has now been acquitted of making false charges against him, while two others filed charges and were not charged with false accusation, and another made an accusation but didn’t file charges. Of course Yoochun was also acquitted of sexual assault on all those who did file, but the end result has hardly backed the conspiracy theory defense many fans put forward about all of them working together or something, and they can’t rationally just try to hand-wave away the alleged victims.

So what to make of it?

I’ll generally still go with what I said last December.

In the end, people will come to whatever conclusion they want about this scandal, and the tough thing is that I’m not sure anybody can be truly “right” or “wrong” because there’s so much room for interpretation of what happened at the present. Personally, I don’t feel comfortable treating him the same as guys like Park Si Hoo or Kim Hyun Joong, where regardless of the legal decision I can easily make a logical argument that they are guilty of what they were accused of. In Yoochun’s case, it’s hard to be concluding much of anything based on what we now know, because while there’s no evidence that all of these accusations were a connected conspiracy against him or something, there’s also no smoking gun in any of the cases that allows us to point the finger definitively at Yoochun.

That said, the optics of four alleged victims maintaining that they were sexually assaulted by him reflects terribly on Yoochun and it’s personally impossible for me to look at him the same, as this sexual assault case and all its murkiness will always pop into my head.