S. Korea Prez hopeful denies ‘date rape’ conspiracy
Seoul, April 21: South Korean presidential candidate Hong Joon-Pyo on Friday denied his own confession of complicity in an attempted date rape, as voter outrage mounted.
The firebrand prosecutorturned-politician and candidate of ousted President Park Geun-hye’s conservative party has been compared to Donald Trump for his outspoken rhetoric and sexist remarks.
While a first-year student at the prestigious Korea University, Mr Hong wrote in a 2005 memoir, a roommate at his boarding house “asked us to obtain a stimulant” and then mixed it into a beer for a girl he had a crush on. The man returned to the dormitory, his face scratched and his shirt torn, according to the book.
“He said the drug did not work,” Mr Hong wrote. “When he attempted to remove her clothes, she woke up and put up strong resistance, biting and scratching him in the face.”
“He asserted that if the drug been authentic, it should have worked. We said, ‘Yes, it is real. It is used to get pigs to copulate and we’ve been told it is also effective with humans’.”
Mr Hong later became a criminal prosecutor and acknowledged in the book “how seriously wrong such mischief was”, calling the incident a prank. “If I went back to that time, I would never join in such an escapade again,” he wrote.
But his confession has become the centre of furious controversy ahead of the election on May 9.
“A sex crime as a prank? You are not up to being a presidential candidate,” posted one netizen.
The former governor of South Gyeongsang, backed by the Liberty Korea party, tried to distance himself from the account on Friday, saying he had “overheard” the story from other residents of his boarding house, who were studying at a different school, and did not take part in the plot himself.