Broadcaster Seo Dong-ju [Newsis]
Broadcaster Seo Dong-ju [Newsis]

Broadcaster and US-licensed attorney Seo Dong-ju has opened up about her family life.

On Sunday, Seo posted a lengthy message on her social media, writing, "The mother-daughter relationship seems to be the most difficult and profound of all relationships."

"My father has passed away, and I am no longer in contact with my sibling — so now my mother is the only family I have left," she wrote. "Because of that, I find myself leaning on her more these days, and I increasingly feel that she is someone I simply cannot be without."

She added, "I think a mother-daughter relationship reaches its fullest when a mother sees her daughter as a woman before she sees her as a daughter, and when I, in turn, come to understand my mother as a woman before I see her as my mother. Only then, I think, can we let go of what we expected from each other and love one another as we truly are."

After the post went public, a follower asked why she was not in contact with her sibling, and Seo responded directly in the comments.

"After my father passed away, a lot of things came at once, and as the stress built up during one of our conversations, something just snapped," she said, confirming that she and her sibling are currently not in touch.

Born in 1983, Seo, 43, is the daughter of the late Seo Se-won and Seo Jeong-hee.

After graduating from the University of San Francisco School of Law, Seo worked as an attorney in the United States before returning to South Korea in 2020, where she has since pursued careers in both broadcasting and legal commentary. In June last year, she remarried a non-celebrity four years her junior, marking a new chapter in her life. More recently, she has been sharing glimpses of her daily life with her mother, Seo Jeong-hee, through broadcasts and social media, drawing wide support.

Her father, the late Seo Se-won, was sentenced in 2015 to six months in prison, suspended for two years, on assault charges after beating Seo Jeong-hee. The couple later divorced by mutual agreement. Seo Se-won had been living in Cambodia and died in 2023 at a Korean hospital in Phnom Penh after suffering cardiac arrest while receiving an intravenous drip. He was 67.


min3654@heraldcorp.com