Jeong-ui (Justice)

it's not so simple. I mean, can you really say you've won if the other side is still fighting? Because yes, at its peak, Tijanio's membership was in the hundreds of thousands, and it never reached that again. But Taijanio never did go away. There are still thirty five thousand members on the forum, and people still to this day are posting religiously. And this is what I wanted to understand most. What

is it that's kept tiging your going for years. We can theorize all we want, but it's hard to get a clear picture without talking to someone who's actually part of that group. So our producer Stephanie Karayuki and I set out to try to find someone from Tajano to tell us once and for all why they still believe the Tableau was lying. We started by tracking down Tijano's most notorious member, a man who wasn't just the star of the forum, but the person that the police were

most interested in interrogating. A man who goes by the online handle what becomes a file? What signs my name? I can be, can be comfortable, I can writing on the worst past them. Yeah, blah bla from Vice and I Heart. I'm Dr Thomas and I'm Stephanie Terre. Easy. This is authentic episode six Tony Justice. Steph. You're here because we've been working pretty closely together to get a hold of someone from Tajano. But it's been really hard. Yeah.

I mean I started the search with What Becomes because Officer Sah has spent months trying to track him down because he was considered the main driver of the campaign against Tablow and some of the posts he was making

were advocating physical violence against Tablow and his family. Officers saw him as the worst guy, and then he used the worst guy, so of course we are focusing on him, right And What Becomes is also a big reason that things started getting really serious and the police investigations right because the cops figured out that he'd signed up for the site using a fake I D, which is legal in Korea. And when the cops reported that to Neighbor, which is the platform the tagno was on, Neighbor shut

the whole thing down. So for a while it looked like the police were really on this guy's track and they were maybe about to put him away. I found his cell phone number after I saw Alan, and then I called him from Korea right and after Sa, he'd been working behind the scenes to track down what becomes his real name and address, and when he finally got him, so I realized what becomes was in the States. So he called them, wow, and did he pick up? Picked?

What did he say? So, I asked you to Korea for interrogation to deny why I'm not the Korean citizen anymore. Since after SA couldn't get what becomes back to Korea, he thought, Okay, fine, I can go to him. I was quite excited to fright to the USA. Korea takes defamation extremely seriously, but in the United States it's not as serious of a crime, So that means that there was no way to extradite him. Officers even try to

get interpoll involved, but they wouldn't touch it. Yeah, and that was pretty much it right, Yeah, which is weird to think about because other Tashna members had gone to jail for posting about Tableau and Korea and the things that what Becomes had posted were just as egregious. But because he stayed in the States, he was safe and authorities couldn't even question him. If we had to him,

you might get multi tayed. And why he just started hepen Yeah, now that I think of it, Officers is probably one of just a few people outside of TAJNYO that's ever been able to talk directly to what Becomes exactly. So officers couldn't question him. But was he able to get anything out of on the phone? Well not really, Officer said, told me what he knew, and he figured out that what becomes his real name is Unsucked Kim

and that he was in Chicago. Huh. Yeah, So we know that Kim immigrated to the US with his wife and two daughters. We also know that he ran a small business while putting his kids through college. Eventually he became a U s citizen, and we also know that he would stay pretty active on these Korean forums, and that's how he joined tajan Yo as a forum manager

almost twenty years later, when he was in his fiftiece. Yeah, and what's interesting about all this info is that half of it Kim put out there himself, and the rest was released in articles soon after investigation. And it's not exactly like Kim was super private about who he was. Yeah, I've read some of his posts from that time, and he's talking pretty openly about that he has daughters and that he lives in the United States. He never hid

that exactly. All of this stuff you just said, I knew from reporting on this series, the stuff that you and I haven't talked about, And really, this is why I wanted to bring you on is because I never really got the full story about this. You went on

this reporting trip right by yourself. How did that even start? Well, I've been reading everything I could about him, and I had his Korean name, but I also knew that he might be using a different name here in the US, So really the only thing that I could rely on was his last name. So I just started looking up phone numbers as in You just going through the phone book looking for the last name Kim in Chicago. That's that's gonna be a lot to go through. It was.

I mean, I was using other stuff too, but yeah, I kind of just had to call people, and I probably call it at least a dozen numbers, and most of them were out of service. I think I got maybe one person to answer, but she clearly had no idea what I was talking about, so that was a wrong number. I also found some email addresses on Google, but most of those bounced back, and one of them did go through, but no one ever replied. I also found a couple of addresses, and I was thinking maybe

I could send a letter. You were just really trying everything right. I was hoping that I could interview him, but at the very least I felt like we should tell Mr Kim what we were doing and give him the opportunity to make a comment since for so long he basically was the face of TAJ and Yo. But after all the phone calls and emails didn't go through, I thought, well, if I write a letter, what if it gets lost in the mail or he just doesn't answer.

And at the time I was in Ohio, visiting family, so I thought, I'm not that far from Illinois, so I might as well, at the very least go to the address that I have just to see if I could just talk to him in person. So no sending a letter, just pull up to his house directly. Yeah, exactly. So I got in the car on a Sunday morning and I drove to Chicago to try to find Mr Kim. Hi. Okay, so it's me. It's Stephanie, and it is eighty nine am.

I am freakishly on time. The drive from my parents place is like five hours long, so I had a bunch of time to think. I was thinking about the Tajanio Forum and Mr Kim, and I was also running through all the questions that I wanted to ask him. But as I got closer, I started thinking about something that had occurred to me but that I sort of also avoided thinking about too much. When I got there,

I've hearked and I called our supervising producer, Janet. One of the things that I've been thinking about, how can I come off as like super comforting and happy and also like be wearing my face mask and be like a random black person walking into this building totally. I mean, I felt sort of weird for even saying that to her, because I was the one who said I wanted to find Mr Kim right right, And I was thinking, you know what if I ruined our chance to talk to

him because I'm suspicious? Yeah, yo, okay, So to be real, this is actually part of what I want to talk about, because when you told me that you've just been wandering around looking around in Chicago, I thought, man, I mean depending on the community. Just a solitary black person walking in uninvited to a residential building that can already make people really nervous, let alone what it is you want

to talk to them about. I mean, I've been in the situation where you know, you kind of have to be overly really really friendly because you have to anticipate that people may have preconceived notions or stereotypes of you, but you still have to interact with them exactly x exactly. That's exactly how it's feeling. And you know what happens in these scenarios, like you can't think about it too much. And I was already there, so I kind of had to shove these feelings aside and just keep going yeah,

I get it. Oh, well, so you were there. What was it like? So I got out of the car and I looked at the building, and up close it looked different. Like on Google Maps, it looked like an apartment complex, but in person, it looked more like some sort of facility. Basically, it's so quiet. It seems loud because of the wind, but it's actually very quiet. There's the wind, the front head, sliding doors, and a number that I had to call to be buzzed in. Your

call has been forwarded to an automated voice messaging system. Joe, Hello, it's not available at the cell. Please record your message. When you finished recording, you may hang up. I kept dialing, but nobody at the front desk was there, but someone came up and let me in. I had what I was pretty sure was Mr Kim's apartment number, so I walked down the hall, found it and knocked here someone no answer. I waited a while, but I figured, okay,

I'm here. I can't just leave, so I started asking around. I think I probably asked four to five people, just hey, do you know Mr Kim? Yeah exactly, but nobody did. And then I walked up to this one person are. She didn't know him either, but when she found out that I'm a reporter, she said that she did have something she wanted to tell me. I work for a

Vice News. Well start taking notes, yes, of what you're hearing about a place like this the good and this neighbor had lived in the building for a couple of years and didn't once he use her real name, So I'm going to call her Paula. We chatted for an hour, So tell me more, like, who who comes to live here? Sometimes I've seen some children bring their parents over here. So it turns out that this complex is like an

affordable housing community for lower income elderly residents. Paula told me that a lot of people who stay there get some kind of government assistance, and sometimes nurses will come and help people bathe or do stuff around the house. Okay, so it's a nursing home. Not really. Nursing home usually have pretty strict rules, but at this place, residents can come and go whenever they want. But also there was something kind of off about it. Paula started telling me

the story. There's this one woman that she was brought in because her children encouraged her, and boy did she thought it. Now she walks around like like a dead face, your blank face, and I think she just gave up the fight and she just she probably just waiting until the day comes when she's taken. Oh man, this place sounds like it was just kind of sad. Yeah, yeah, I don't really know, and I also don't know how

much of Paula's story is true. But this place did have something that felt kind of sad about it, and I wasn't sure if this is a place where someone like Mr Kim, likely in the sixties and out goes to live a full life. But this vibe that I was getting it could also be because I was there on a weekend and maybe most residents were just gone. So Paula was telling me more about the apartment when all of a sudden, the door zipped open and to

medical staff rolling a stretcher came in. Oh, somebody's being returned. It looked like somebody who was at the hospital nearby was coming back to their apartment. The neighbors were crowding around to say hi. It felt intimate, like outsiders shouldn't be seeing this, so I figured I should just go. The next day, I went to another address, and I was pretty sure that this one was a relative of Mr Kim's, so I wanted to see if maybe they

could help me get in touch with him. Just ringing the doorbell Hello, Someone opened the door, but they didn't want to talk, so I stopped recording. They did confirm that they were related to Mr Kim, but they didn't have anything else to say. I wasn't surprised, but it did help connect some dots. It felt like the chances were high that Kim did live in those apartments, so I went back. I figured even if he didn't answer, I could at least write a note and put it

under the door, so I knocked on the door. I was fully prepared to just write a note and try later, but then I heard someone moving around inside, so I tried talking through the door. Hi, business Stephanie. Mr Kim. Can I ask you a question? Him? Oh? Mr Kim, An I giving my information? He said no, he didn't want to talk. So I wrote down my information and slid it under the door and walked away. So he

obviously didn't want to talk about any of this. Yeah, I mean, I guess there is an outside chance that that wasn't him, but the address and his family down the road. It adds up. We did write several letters to him, but he never replied, which sucks because I had a lot of things that I wanted to ask him about. I'm sure you did too. Yeah, I mean to start off with why Tableau? Yeah, and like how did he even start down this journey with tablow? And

what if you think about the forum now? Does he regret any of it or does he wish that he did things differently? And I also kind of want to know about his life, like what is he up to now and why does he still not believe Tableau? Right? Because you found out that he's still posting about Tableau yep, our producer Minji and I were checking out all the

comments associated with his user name. We found out that he made a whole other private forum and it's not that big, maybe ten thousand members, but he is still posting on it to this day. Yeah. Yeah. The ones that I've seen are the ones where he's posting about these different education credentials cases that are more current. Right.

There was a big one that happened actually when we were in Korea, when the Senior Secretary's daughter, Chill Men, was accused of gaming the education system also to get into this elite school. Yeah, he's still really into this stuff. He's also done some media, like when Officer So was investigating taj. In two thousand and ten, Kim did a two day in person interview with the June On Daily.

In that interview, he seems to have accepted that Tablo did graduate from Stanford, but he really wouldn't admit that he was wrong, adding that he thinks other people are protecting Tablo in a wider conspiracy to cover up fake degrees. He also asked Tablow to drop the charges against him. He mentioned that he was getting letters from people threatening to come to Chicago and kill his family, adding that his family was having a really hard time with the situation.

I think the closest that will ever get to understanding why what becomes lad this crusade is through this sentence that he says in the article quote, I did this out of justice. Yeah, justice this This is tricky, right, because I mean what does justice mean in this scenario? And and that brings me back to the original question we had, right which is why does he and you know thirty five current Taijano members, why do they still

believe that Tableau is lying. And I mean Mr Kim did at least partially come around and say that, okay, Tableau did graduate from Stanford. But what is it that taj is trying to prove now, right? And this is when we loop back to Tajnyo again to look at the current online forum to see if someone could help. Our vice colleagues in South Korea started contacting people too. Not surprisingly, a lot of people didn't want to talk

about this. People have gone to jail who are a part of Tajano, So of course any member might be nervous about speaking out. But I guess if you put all that aside, someone responded, yeah, whatever the case might have been, we had somebody from Tajano who is willing to speak publicly. And so we flew to Korea and all sat down with the Tajano member. Yeah, my conversation with him after the break. So today we're in a taxi and we're headed over to meet up with the moderator,

the leader of the taj forums. It took us about twenty minutes to get to Damiel. It's arts district of Seoul. It's hilly and it has these narrow winding roads, these different colored houses, and these little boutique shops everywhere. Okay, yeah, we all met in this coffee shop that the owner let us use during some off hours. We all sat down, said our hellos and agreed to keep our masks on.

You're doing. Tong Chong Jung was wearing a polo shirt and khakis, and he seemed like the kind of guy that you smile at when you passed him on the street. He smiled a lot, actually, you could see it in his eyes even over the mask, and he was really calm and polite. Joan works in e commerce and mostly lives in Korea, but he travels abroad for work sometimes. It turns out we have a few things in common.

We're both into technology, and he really liked studying foreign languages, and so do I. And when he heard that I'm a professor, he kind of got excited because like me, he believes that education is really important. Chung joined the original tajanio forum about twelve years ago around the time when it started. He was a really active member, and when the original forum was shut down by neighbor, he became the manager of Taijano two we'll have a voice

actor read the translation of what he told us. What made you want to actually join TAJO instead of just reading the post. Ever since I was a child, I've been interested in history and just his Jong is fifty four years old and he grew up in Seoul. He's around the same age as what becomes. I can't really say how similar the two of them are since I've only met Jung, but they did both grow up in a really turbulent time in Korea. He was the oldest of six kids. Having six kids was common in Korea

at the time. Back then, child John had to wear black school uniforms and have a first cut. Korea was developing very fast. Students lived in a strict society and who had to study really hard. Everyone who was focused on Cheung and Yo Chung is basically about loyalty. In the past, it might have referred to loyalty to a king, but nowadays it could be interpreted as loyalty to your superiors at the company you work for, or even your patriotism to your nation. Here is deference that a child

should show to their parents. So both of them are essentially about respecting hierarchy and when Chung was growing up in the seventies, that's just what you were expected to do respect the hierarchy. But times were changing through the

eighties and nineties. As Korea went through protests and violent military action against its own citizens and blatant government corruption, a lot of younger people, including Chung, were starting to question whether some of the people at the hierarchical top were really worth that respect and to technology was bringing people together in ways that let them communicate that frustration. At first, junk style technology as a career opportunity and

a way to have fun. In the only nineties, when I was in the army, I worked with the computers. I was also posting a line because around the same time that many other people were enjoying and lawning about the Internet. When Neighbor first introduced their online forums, Jung signed up immediately. He spent a lot of his time on a forum about strategy games and sometimes you meet up with the other members to play in person. A couple of years later, in the two thousands, when Tabo

started to get famous, Sean noticed him. When you first heard about Tableau, where were you? I thought they were just a very normal music act. What what changed for you in your opinion about Epicai. One of the EPICAI members, Cobbler, was on a lot of variety shows. I felt it was surprising. I went the media for Kristian Tabbler and made him sounds like a very special person. Joan was pretty used to seeing Tableau on TV, but there's one show he remembers that stopped him in his tracks. It

was two thousand nine. Tableau was on this variety show and one of the hosts asked him if he was good at school when he was younger. Tableau said, no, I was bad in school. The host stops him and says, how the hell would you get into Stanford. Don't make it sound like it's so easy. Tableau replies that you just have to do well. At the last moment, I was very shocked. It was different from what I knew as a common sense. How could he say you can just study well at the end, How could you think

like that. Chung had worked hard to get where it was, and hearing this, it just didn't seem right. Jung told me that this was a big reason that he joined the Tajingo Forum when it first started in He also told me some of the things that he thinks Tableau is still lying about. The list is pretty long, but in general they're pretty familiar Tajingo talking points. He thinks

Tableau is faking his language abilities. He thinks he staged the graduation photos, and he finds Tableau's claim that he finished his degree in three and a half years to be suspicious. But the police cleared Tableau of lying about languages and degrees and all that. So I asked Jung what he thought about that. He said that he doesn't think South Korean police actually have the ability to properly

investigate such a complicated case. I still don't think it is Dawn correctly sending a document to the U S from Korea is not an investigation. Chung also is that even if police do investigate forgeries and they find something that they might falsify that report if they've been given orders to do so by some powerful superior. Talking to Chong No, he made it really clear that he respects

order and authority. So if the National police and a forensics lab publish their findings that Tableau's diploma was authentic, why wouldn't that be enough for him? Maybe for a lot of people listening to this who are not Korean, who don't live here, um, and who didn't experience firsthand. I didn't watch the scandal when it happened. This all probably sounds like just a misunderstanding and just let it go.

It sounds like it's much more significant for a lot of people, especially you can can you help me understand that? Hun Uh. People think this was a simple misunderstanding, but the truth is that it has a bigger impluence In Korea. Um you can get a job by forging your academic background and using that fact background um to get a hat in society. It's a problem that we need to fix. Chung here is talking about something that we've kind of

been circling around for a while now. The thing that really drove him to be a leader in the Tajeno Forum is bigger than table of the person. It's the idea that the rich and powerful can skip the line. Well, everyone else has to work hard. But to him, it's

more than just an idea. He'd seen the news about Shin jong A, the art curator who facured diploma and all the others who got caught afterwards, and he realized that there could be countless people living a good life thanks to their fake credentials, while others like him have to work hard for the same, if not less, John, this is not fair, and this was a way of doing something about it. It's not just a simple matter

of education. I think it's about inequality in Korea. And another thing that I want to talk about is like the cultural context in which this emerge. This is Professor hedging Lee again, who teaches communications at the University of Southern California. She helped me contextualize and understand what jo is getting at here. Back in, one of the things where one of the concepts that Koreans were really focused

on was justice. And I think it has to do with a lot of people's discontent with society because first of all, there was a widening gap between the halves and the half not so people were just not happy with what they were seeing and they felt like they were living in a society where justice wasn't being seen. But if you think about it, there a sense of justice was at a very personal level. They weren't thinking about justice is something that can be done through changing

the system for the collective good. For them, justice was at an individual level, meaning that, well, here's the system. We know it's broken, but look at all these individuals, the bad apples, the rotten apples, who are taking advantage of it. So they were going after who they deemed as the rotten apples instead of the system itself. Now he was just an easier target for these people to seek justice rather than the broken system, such as education system.

Korean education system has been broken for so long, and this is the case with you know, the United States society as well, I think. But there there is a tendency to say all these things are broken. But here is somebody who is on TV. I'm familiar with them. They represent something or they seem to represent something I don't like. So it sounds like Table was almost in the right place at the right time, or the wrong place at the wrong time. He just caught caught the

crossfire exactly. So it wasn't really about him. It was just like what he symbolized at that moment. In the United States, a broken public education system can mean a lot of things, like how our elementary, middle and high schools are essentially racially segregated across the country, or how universities cost tens of thousands of dollars per year to attend, and they leave students with a lifetime's worth of debt. But in Korea, when someone says the education system is broken,

the nuance is a little different. They're more likely to be saying that it's unforgiving. If you test into a good college, whatever job you want to do, whatever your dreams are, you know that that diploma is going to open those doors for you. But if you fail, even once those doors start to close, no second chances. This is reinforced a pretty much all levels of society, even the government. On one of the biggest national exam days, planes are not allowed to fly so that they don't

distract the kids. If students are running late, then police will escort them to the testing center. There's no hammering on construction sites and absolutely no early stock market opening on that day. Even regular people do their best to help out by not honking their car horns. The upside of this is that this focus has given South Korea one of the highest rates of education in the world, but it also puts a lot of pressure on students,

even young woes. A recent survey found that one in three middle school students had thought of taking their own life. So when Chung and Hedge and Lee talk about things like the system and inequality, this is what they mean. And Tajno, in its own way, saw itself as trying to dismantle all this. It's just that their approach was hyper focused on the person that they saw as the symbol of everything that was wrong with Korea. We just want to pass on just society, iety to our children.

I don't know how long it's going to take, but I will not stop. I hope we can achieve justice. Tableau just recently released an album. He's got another one coming on the way. He's on TV. What do you feel when you see that? Um, I want Tabler to live a normal life. I'm totally okay with that. I think Tabler could have done wrong things when he was young, but there's no reason to think that he's a bad person. Maybe Tabler is a better person than me. I hope

he continues being a wonderful dad. But I also hope that he can't clear things up so that I can change my mind. If he would just be honest, then UM, I think we can settle this inevitable way. Maybe the strangest thing here was that Chung actually seems to think that he and Tableau could be on the same side, fighting for justice to fix the broken system all around them. But for that to happen, Chung wants more proof. But after all these documents more proof, will there ever be enough?

And for Tajano two point oh, the forum that's still to this day has over thirty five thousand members, what is fixing the system? Even? Look like, here's somebody who went to Stanford, has this amazing career, and and it's almost like you're you're a stand in for you you represent I think, something that a lot of people truly hate. Has it ever occurred to you that this isn't actually about you? Most certainly, of course it's ironic that I was a stand in for, um, you know, the social injustices,

you know, everything wrong about society. I think they they saw in in me. They wanted me standing there so that they could have some one to throw a punch at. And we all were all angry in our own ways. Um, but there's no one to really, you know, take the punch for it. There's no one to uh take the blame for it. Really, it's hard to find someone. And I think at that moment um. I was the perfect

face for it. Most of the kids that are going to be listening to my music and that are going to be looking up to me, I know they don't want to study like I don't like the education system. I don't like how I had to live. I don't like that I was put through this this thing. And I don't want my audience looking to me. And you know, having their parents say, see, be like him, study, go through the factory, be a machine, so you achieved like him. I want them to think that they have an album

mm hmm. And if that's a bad influence, I really honestly don't give a ship. Yes, it's the truth. Next time, Unauthentic, how did you feel knowing that there are family members who are being implicated in these attacks against you? To tell you the truth? I wasn't surprised. You weren't surprised because you know, like I didn't get to choose my relatives,

they didn't get to choose me. Authentic is a production of Vice Audio and I Heeart podcast Network, produced and reported by Stephanie Karayuki, Minji Cool, Kate Osbourne and myself with Janet Lee, Stephanie Brown, and Sam Egan. Sound design and original music composition by Kyle Murdoch with additional support from Natasha Jacobs. Our supervising producer is Janet Lee, editing from Lazy Roberts, fact checking by Minji Ku and Nikole Pasuka.

Our executive producer and VP Advice Audio is Kate Osbourne. Thanks also to our voice actor Chong Mo Young from I Heart Podcast Network. Executive producers Nikki e Tor and Lindsay Hoffman. I'm Dexter Thomas. Make sure to subscribe wherever you get your podcast so you don't miss an episode, and if you dig it, give us a rating and a review,