Exposing the Abuse (5)
Abuse scandals by chaebol families were hardly rare in South Korea. If this had happened at any other time, even if it had made the news, it would have been dismissed as nothing more than another routine case of a rich third-generation heir throwing his weight around.
But it had happened at the worst possible moment, right before the merger. Once News Trigger ran the story first, the other outlets had no choice but to follow, and even foreign media picked it up as a major headline.
BREAKING: Hanjeong Group Director Ju Hyeon-jin Caught Abusing His Chauffeur
EXCLUSIVE: Mr. Kim, the Victim, Endured Verbal Abuse and Assault for More Than a Year
SHOCKING RECORDING: What Is Hanjeong Group’s Explanation?
A Never-Ending Chaebol Abuse Scandal: Is the Hanjeong Family Really Fit to Keep Running the Group?
What Will This Incident Mean for the Succession Battle?
Every outlet and portal updated in real time, and the internet exploded in an instant.
While driving to the company, Ju Hyeon-jin read every article and every comment that kept popping up.
The recording had been released online with the article. He hadn’t realized how ugly it sounded when he was saying it, but hearing it played back was shocking in a way that almost made it impossible to believe those words had come out of his own mouth. Could a human being really say that to another human being?
It was so unbelievable that he could hardly accept it had been his voice at all. But instead of shame, what surged up in him was fury at the chauffeur who had exposed him.
“That fucking bastard! I fed him all these years, and now he has the nerve to stab me in the back?”
His hands and feet shook with boiling rage. If the chauffeur had been standing in front of him, he would have thrown the first punch without thinking about what came after.
I should have stepped on him until he couldn’t even think about trying this.
And then a text came in.
The sender was none other than the man who had blown the whole thing open.
Seeing that single line, Ju Hyeon-jin finally lost whatever restraint he had left and screamed like a madman.
“Argh! You fucking son of a bitch!”
Ju Min-jae’s family home in Hannam-dong.
By the time Ju Hyeon-jin got there and stepped inside, Ju Cheol-jin, the eldest son and vice chairman, and his sister Ju Hye-jin were already seated in the living room.
Ju Hyeon-jin bowed his head at once. “I’m sorry, brother.”
Before he could even finish the sentence, a fist came flying at him.
Thud!
“You crazy bastard! I told you to keep your head down until the shareholder meeting was over, and you still had to go and cause trouble!”
Ju Hye-jin watched without lifting a finger to stop it.
Ju Hyeon-jin was usually a wild dog whenever he got worked up, eyes rolling and temper flying loose, but in front of his older brother he was nothing more than a tame lamb. Ju Cheol-jin seized him by the collar and hauled him upright, and only then did a voice speak up from behind them.
“Enough.”
At that, Ju Cheol-jin stopped.
Ju Min-jae looked at his youngest son and said, “You couldn’t even manage one underling properly, and now you’ve created this mess?”
“I-I’m sorry.”
From Ju Hyeon-jin’s point of view, it was absurd. The chauffeur had always been someone who couldn’t even meet his eyes properly. He had never once imagined that man would go to the press and expose him like this.
“Why did you do that to the chauffeur?”
What was he supposed to say to that?
There wasn’t any grand reason for a person to abuse another person. Sometimes the answer was as ugly as the act itself.
“I just... didn’t like the way he looked, or the way he behaved.”
If he tried to pass that off as an explanation, it would only make the backlash worse.
Ju Min-jae let out a slow sigh. “Whatever the reason, the damage is done. We need to start cleaning it up.”
They were deep in the middle of discussing countermeasures when Park Myeong-hoon came into the living room.
Ju Cheol-jin immediately grabbed the cup on the table and hurled it. Park Myeong-hoon saw it coming, but he didn’t dodge; the cup struck him squarely in the forehead.
“What the hell are you doing? You were supposed to keep Hyeon-jin from screwing up in the first place!”
Without even bothering to wipe away the blood running down his face, Park Myeong-hoon bent deeply at the waist.
“I’m sorry. It was my failure.”
Ju Min-jae asked, “It was News Trigger, was it? What are they saying?”
“Nothing particularly unusual.”
“Who’s the reporter?”
“A man named Min Hong-soo. He used to work for the Jungheung Economic Daily, but he moved to News Trigger about a month ago. He and the outlet’s CEO, Ahn Hyeon-cheol, were seniors and juniors in the School of Media and Information at Korea University.”
Ju Min-jae frowned.
When a major media outlet planned to attack a chaebol, the usual practice was to give the company’s PR team a heads-up first. They were given time to prepare a response before the article ran. Depending on the situation, the reporting would even be toned down.
If this had been one of the major papers, they would have done it that way, and then Hanjeong Group could have blocked the story or prepared some other response. But because it had broken all at once, there hadn’t been time to do anything.
“Where is the chauffeur now?”
“He’s staying away from home with his son. We haven’t been able to reach him.”
“Any chance he’s connected to KSGI or Elliant?”
“Not yet.”
When you suspected a hidden hand, you always had to look at who stood to gain. This was bad news for Hanjeong Group and a gift for the alliance on the other side. By now, they were probably cheering with both hands in the air.
Ju Cheol-jin gave another order. “First, dig up everything on the chauffeur. His living situation, his school, his family, relatives, friends, every post he’s ever put on social media. Pull out anything that can be used against him and send it to the media.”
Park Myeong-hoon answered at once. “We’ve already confirmed prior convictions for assault and drunk driving, and we’re drafting a press release around those points.”
Ju Cheol-jin nodded. “Drunk driving and assault, huh? That works. We can say he was driving recklessly while drunk on a regular basis. We warned him repeatedly because we feared for our safety, and that led to the cursing and violence. Attach every minor collision, speeding ticket, red-light violation, and parking violation he’s racked up.”
The minor collisions had happened because of Ju Hyeon-jin, and every traffic violation had been ordered by him as well. But now they would all be used as proof of the chauffeur’s reckless driving.
“And I’ll ask them to write that his wife left home because of his drinking and chronic abuse, and that child abuse is also suspected.”
“Good.”
Right now the public was sympathizing with the chauffeur and condemning Ju Hyeon-jin.
But if they made the chauffeur into a man who drove drunk every day and terrorized his family with violence, who would ever side with him? Sympathy would flip in an instant, and the public would turn on the chauffeur instead.
Ju Cheol-jin curled his lips in a cold smile. “A dog that bites its master has to pay for it. Make sure he’s crushed so thoroughly he never tries to crawl back up.”
It was the kind of chaebol abuse scandal that came and went now and then, but because it hit right before the merger, the fallout was far larger than anyone expected.
As public outrage surged, the other outlets rushed to publish their own versions, and the story ended up on the nine o’clock news headline crawl as well. News Trigger immediately uploaded another article.
EXCLUSIVE: Director Ju Hyeon-jin Called Minority Shareholders “Ants,” “Ant Swarms,” and “Insects,” Exposing His Contempt
The comments under the article and on stock-related message boards piled up with criticism of Ju Hyeon-jin.
It wasn’t just talk. Minority shareholders actually began to peel away. The number of proxies dropped sharply, and some shareholders who had already signed them even came forward to say they wanted to revoke them.
Sara couldn’t hide her surprise as she watched the articles and comments rolling in. “Did you really meet the chauffeur because you knew this would happen?”
I shrugged. “No way. If you looked at how they always acted, you could tell exactly how they’d treat a driver. I met him just in case, but even I didn’t expect things to go this smoothly.”
Personal insults and physical abuse against the chauffeur were bad enough, but the recording also contained remarks belittling minority shareholders. At this point, even the major outlets had a hard time writing anything that clearly favored Hanjeong Group, and Hanjeong Group itself had lost the ability to pressure people for proxies.
We had succeeded, at least to a degree, in shifting the votes of the minority shareholders.
Senior Dong-ho said, “Hanjeong Group isn’t going to sit still. They’ll probably start playing the media, pretending to apologize.”
I nodded. “Of course. This isn’t their first rodeo.”
No one knew better than I did what happened afterward.
The chauffeur was currently staying at another villa with his son. Sara had handled finding him a place to stay and lining up a lawyer.
“I-is this really going to be okay?”
I called Kim Seung-do.
His voice was shaking so badly it was almost hard to listen to. He was probably shocked at the scale of the blowback his own exposure had caused. But this was only the beginning.
“Like I said before, Hanjeong Group is going to try to turn public opinion by digging up your assault record and your drunk-driving history.”
They had probably already started researching him in the background. They would strip away every private stain they could find and build a frame that said, the whistleblower is a bad man too. They might even try to paint the man who snapped because he couldn’t stand the insults to his son as a child abuser.
“Wh-what should I do?”
Imagine waking up one morning to discover that the entire country was pointing fingers at you. For most people, that would be almost impossible to endure without losing their mind.
In South Korea, going up against a chaebol was never easy. That was why he had eventually signed the settlement Hanjeong Group put in front of him and kept his mouth shut about the matter afterward.
So how could he get out from under the blame now?
The answer was simpler than he expected.
“You don’t need to worry about a thing. I’ll make sure that doesn’t happen.”
“How?”
I put him at ease.
“No matter how loud the gunfire is, it always gets buried under the explosion.”
Once the next article hit, no one would care about the one that came before it.
In other words, Ju Hyeon-jin alone would be left standing there as the trash he was, and everyone’s attention would swing right back to the merger plan.