'Agent Kim Reactivated Season 2' officially in talks
South Korean police have concluded that the allegations claiming actor Kim Soo Hyun (38) dated the late Kim Sae Ron (25 at the time of her death) while she was a minor were false. Police also applied for an arrest warrant for Kim Se Ui (47), the operator of the YouTube channel Garo Sero Research Institute (HoverLab), believing he continued the defamation despite knowing the claims were false.
Kim Se Ui
On May 21, the Seoul Gangnam Police Station applied for an arrest warrant on May 14 for Kim Se Ui on charges of defamation under the Information and Communications Network Act, and prosecutors subsequently requested the warrant from the court. In the warrant application, police stated, "Kim was aware that Kim Sae Ron had not dated Kim Soo Hyun while she was a minor, and that her death was not caused by Kim Soo Hyun, yet he still distributed false information with the intent to defame."
At a press conference held around March of last year, Kim Se Ui claimed that the two had been in a relationship and presented KakaoTalk conversations as evidence, but police determined that the materials had been manipulated. According to investigators, Kim received 11 screenshots of KakaoTalk messages from Kim Sae Ron's bereaved family last year, showing conversations from around June 2016 with a counterpart labeled "Unknown", and then altered the name to "Kim Soo Hyun" before making them public.
Police also believe that the audio file of Kim Sae Ron released by Kim Se Ui in May of last year had been manipulated using AI. The recording included claims such as "we dated since middle school," and became one of the key reasons many members of the public came to believe the allegations against Kim Soo Hyun were true.
However, police pointed out that "despite numerous indications that the core materials [behind the allegations] were false or manipulated, Kim disclosed them to the public without carrying out sufficient verification or cross-checking."
In response, Kim Se Ui claimed during a YouTube broadcast on May 20, "The National Forensic Service determined that the recording cannot be considered AI-manipulated," adding that "the police's warrant request is intended to block the exposure of a prominent politician's sexual crime case in Vietnam."
Kim's pre-arrest suspect questioning (warrant review hearing) is scheduled for 10:30 a.m. on May 26 at the Seoul Central District Court.
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