The woman accused of founding the largest and most notorious porn site in South Korea, a country where making and distributing pornography is illegal, is under arrest this week, after hiding from law enforcement authorities “for years” in New Zealand, according to a report by The Straits Times newspaper.
Identified in the press only by her family name, Song, the woman reportedly founded the site in 1999 with three partners, including her husband, who remains in Australia along with the other couple said to be involved in creating the site, Sora.net, and operating it until taking it down in 2016, according to a report by The Korea Herald.
The other three founders are believed to be Australian nationals or legal residents. Authorities believe they fled the Republic of Korea—the official name of South Korea—in 2015 when authorities began investigating the site. Until then, Sora.net had been able to say one step ahead of investigators by switching its online domain address on a weekly basis, according to a paper on the site’s activities published in the Columbia Journal of Transnational Law.
The 45-year-old Korean woman, however, returned to that country’s capital city of Seoul on June 18, The Korea Herald reports.
The site became the center of a massive controversy in South Korea because not only was it home to conventional porn videos, but reportedly the site also became “a forum for encouraging criminal activities of sexual nature, posing a serious challenge to law enforcement and public safety in general,” wrote Hannah Cho in her Columbia Journal article.
Those activities included “revenge porn” reportedly posted by the site's members, who were overwhelmingly male and who numbered around 1 million. In one particularly shocking instance, reported by Cho, a user posted that his girlfriend had passed out from drinking, and he invited other users to go to her location, which he gave out by direct message, to rape her.
The site also housed thousands of “upskirt” videos, filmed without the knowledge of the women involved, and hidden camera videos of women in public bathrooms. But Song reportedly told authorities that she and her partners never produced or uploaded any such content, which she said was completely the work of users on the site.
According to a BBC report, a number of the women who appeared against their will on the site later committed suicide.
So-called “revenge porn,” and “spy cam” videos have become an “epidemic” in South Korea, according to a report by Britain’s Telegraph newspaper. Last month an estimated 12,000 women demonstrated in Seoul to protest what they said were the lax attitude of law enforcement toward the spread of non-consensual porn—reportedly the largest women’s protest in South Korea’s history.
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