From the first days of her husband’s presidency, Kim Keon Hee was unlike other South Korean first ladies, who stayed in their husbands’ shadows.
Her high profile – and her comments like she was “the man” of her household – rattled the country’s patriarchal society. A prominent dog lover, she accomplished what animal rights groups had tried but could not for decades: make South Korea ban dog meat for food. At the same time, she was prone to scandals and was accused of overstepping her role, leading to many misogynistic attacks against her.
Now, Kim, 53, who tried to style herself after Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, is the country’s first former first lady to be imprisoned.
On Wednesday, a three-judge panel in Seoul found her guilty of accepting a $43,000 (€35,940) necklace, plus a Chanel handbag, from the Unification Church, which prosecutors said sought government favours in return. Kim was sentenced to 20 months in prison, in the first ruling for the three criminal trials she is facing.
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Her downfall came alongside that of her husband, former president Yoon Suk Yeol, after he attempted to declare martial law in late 2024. He was driven, special prosecutors have said, in part by his desperate attempt to shield her, as well as himself, from criminal investigations.
“She played a leading role from the moment Yoon Suk Yeol entered politics and went on to form a ‘political partnership’ with him,” said Oh Jeong-hee, a special prosecutor. “She held no official position, but enjoyed a status rivalling the president’s.”
After his martial law collapsed, Yoon was expelled from office and arrested on insurrection charges. Kim is not accused of being involved in Yoon’s decree. But she was arrested last August and has been indicted on criminal charges, including accepting expensive gifts – such as luxury handbags or diamond necklaces – from people who special prosecutors said secured government jobs and other favours with her help.
Yoon called his marriage to Kim in 2012 his “happiest memory”. He was a prosecutor at the time and Kim, his junior by 12 years, was an art exhibition organiser.
In South Korea’s cut-throat politics, Kim became a favourite target of Yoon’s enemies. On social media, critics claimed she had changed her appearance with plastic surgery and interviewed men who claimed they met her when they said she worked as a hostess in a Seoul nightclub. She denied that and other lurid rumours about her past, including shamanism. Songs went viral that belittled her as a woman who used sex as a tool for climbing the social ladder.
[ South Korea’s former first lady sentenced to 20 months in bribery caseOpens in new window ]
“For Yoon’s detractors, it was not enough to criticise him for his martial law and other mishandling of state affairs,” said Park Jia, vice chair at the Seoul Women’s Association. “They wanted to humiliate him by digging up his wife’s past,” she said, and depict him as “a man who cannot even control his wife”.
During the election campaign, Kim apologised for inflating her resume – two universities in Seoul later retracted her degrees citing plagiarism – and promised a humble wife’s role if Yoon was elected.
But she also seemed to set the tone for what was to come. In comments to a reporter that were secretly recorded, she said that if she “took power” officials would go after journalists who had been digging up dirt on her.
In her public actions, critics saw a sense of entitlement. When she attended a government event with her pet dog, Kim handed its leash over to Yoon’s chief of presidential staff, according to Youn Kun Young, a lawmaker who disclosed the episode in a parliamentary hearing. When Kim once visited Gyeongbok Palace in central Seoul, she sat on the royal throne, according to witnesses who testified in parliament.
Kim seldom spoke in public. But she curated her public image by releasing a flood of handout photos of her accompanying Yoon on trips abroad, visiting military barracks, meeting poor children and cuddling pet dogs.
That image began crumbling when spycam footage of Kim accepting a $2,200 Dior pouch from a visitor months after Yoon’s inauguration was made public in late 2023. More scandals involving her unfolded, but Yoon called them “fake news” spread by his enemies to “demonise” his wife.
Many critics began likening Kim to a “sorceress” manipulating the “blind” man they said Yoon was. Even the country’s conservative news media, which had supported Yoon, became exasperated.
“There is only one person – President Yoon Suk Yeol – who can clarify that Kim Keon Hee is not the president of South Korea,” Kim Sun Duk, an editorial writer at Dong-A Ilbo, a major conservative newspaper, wrote in October 2024. “We all know that he cannot. Therein lies the tragedy.”
By late 2024, most South Koreans supported the opposition’s demand for a special prosecutor to investigate allegations against Kim, according to surveys. Yoon had repeatedly opposed such bills, even as his approval ratings nosedived below 20 per cent.
Yoon and Han Dong-hoon – the leader of the People Power Party, to which Yoon also belonged – became sworn enemies over their differences over Kim.
“Drag Han Dong-hoon to me so I can shoot him dead,” Yoon said when he discussed martial law with military generals over heavy drinking in October 2024, according to one of the officers there, lieutenant general Kwak Jong-geun.
But investigators said that Kim appeared unaware of Yoon’s martial law plans. She visited a plastic surgeon the evening that Yoon declared martial law. After it failed, Kim screamed at Yoon for “ruining everything,” according to prosecutors.
This month, a court sentenced Yoon to five years in prison in a case related to his martial law decree. A ruling in his insurrection case, in which prosecutors have sought the death sentence, is expected next month.
When Kim first appeared for questioning by investigators in August, she called herself “a nobody”. But the list of gifts they said she hoarded in return for favours included a gold turtle figurine, a luxury clutch bag, a $27,700 wristwatch, a $97,000 painting and another $43,000 necklace.
Kim’s lawyers vowed to protect her from “exaggerations and political framing” by prosecutors. – This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
