The former head of a test-prep hagwon and several employees are set to stand trial after allegedly filing a false sexual assault complaint against a former staff member who left to open a rival business.
The Seoul Central District Prosecutors' Office's Second Division for Women and Children's Crime Investigations (chief prosecutor Park Ji-na) indicted four people on charges of inciting false accusation, including the former hagwon head, identified only as A, who was detained and indicted on Thursday.
A is accused of orchestrating the scheme after a former employee, identified as B, quit last May and opened a competing hagwon. Prosecutors say A proposed the false complaint to a current staff member and submitted a fabricated report to police alleging that B had committed sexual assault.
The staff member who filed the false complaint against B and gave false testimony during the police investigation was also indicted without detention.
The hagwon's current head and another employee were also referred to trial on charges of drafting a false written statement claiming B had committed sexual assault at a workplace workshop and attaching it as evidence to the complaint.
Prosecutors uncovered signs of a false accusation while reviewing a sexual assault case that police had declined to forward for prosecution but that the complainant had appealed. They then launched a supplementary investigation.
Investigators analyzed a full year of phone records for all parties involved and reviewed a series of complaints A had filed against former employees after their departures.
The investigation revealed that A had orchestrated a systematic and premeditated false accusation scheme — staging a fictitious workplace sexual violence incident for the purpose of personal retaliation. A was found to have used burner phones to communicate with employees recruited as fake witnesses.
After the false-accusation investigation began, prosecutors detected signs that A and the hagwon's current head had selectively edited audio recordings and took both into custody.
Forensic audio analysis by the Supreme Prosecutors' Office's Scientific Investigation Division confirmed that A and others had tampered with the recordings in an attempt to conceal the crime and mislead investigators.
Prosecutors described the case as "an attempt to exploit the state's criminal justice system as a tool for personal retaliation," adding that they plan to "respond sternly to crimes that undermine the foundations of the judicial order, including false accusations."
False accusation cases are by nature difficult to detect at the police investigation stage, and many are identified and prosecuted only when prosecutors uncover them while conducting supplementary reviews of ordinary complaints.
The number of people booked for false accusations dropped to 201 in 2021, immediately after the redistribution of investigative authority between prosecutors and police, down from 707 in 2020 — a decline of more than half. Over the same period, the number of false accusation cases independently identified by police rose by only 29, from 116 to 145.
20ki@heraldcorp.com
