Episode 99:
The Geoje Ex-Girlfriend Assault & Manslaughter Case: Seung-jin Kim

On April 1, 2024, a mother living in Geoje received a disturbing phone call. "Mom... Please come. Hurry. Seung-jin beat me so bad and I got a problem." The voice, crying and begging for help, belonged to her twenty-one-year-old daughter, Hyo-jeong Lee.

As her mother's heart sank, another voice came on the line — Seung-jin Kim's, drunk and rambling. "Mrs. Lee. The left side of Hyo-jeong's face is... pretty swollen. I'm sorry." She drove straight to her daughter's studio and rushed her to the hospital.

Hyo-jeong's condition was critical: the left side of her face was swollen, blood vessels in her eye had burst, clear strangulation marks marked her neck, and her right leg was covered in bruises from knee to foot — injuries alone requiring six weeks to heal. The real danger was a traumatic subdural hemorrhage, bleeding inside her brain, severe enough that doctors considered the ICU. She briefly seemed to stabilize and even filed a police report, but the aftereffects of the brain injury soon took hold — hallucinations, seizures, dizziness — and on the night of April 10, nine days into her hospitalization, Hyo-jeong died. The cause was sepsis stemming from the head injury.

Three Years of Escalating Violence

Hyo-jeong and Seung-jin had been together since April 2022, after he pursued her relentlessly from high school. Early in the relationship he seemed devoted — carrying her bag, even cutting her nails for her — but he had a long history of impulsive aggression toward anyone he perceived as weaker, dating back to picking fights with strangers and cursing at security guards as a teenager. By December 2022, eight months into the relationship, he began hitting her, and the abuse quickly became near-daily: grabbing her by the hair, throwing her down, hitting her anywhere, stomping her if she fell. At 187cm and 73kg, he outweighed the 165cm, 52kg Hyo-jeong by a wide margin. He was once arrested after slapping her on a public street.

Friends begged her to leave, and she tried repeatedly, but each attempt was met with violent retaliation, and Kim would cry afterward and insist he only hurt her because he loved her so much — textbook gaslighting that kept her trapped. She changed her phone number to escape him, but their overlapping social circle made her easy to find, and he tracked her relentlessly, even deliberately enrolling at a lesser university just to follow her into the same major, then using that sacrifice to demand control over her life. When she eventually took a leave of absence and fled to her family's home on Geoje Island, he dropped out of school and followed her there too.

Twelve Reports, No Protection

Hyo-jeong had called police twelve times over the course of the relationship. Every report was closed the same day, and six were filed as mutual assault — including one night in September 2023 when, after Kim punched her repeatedly and kicked her while she was down, she finally fought back and split his lip, only for responding officers to record it as mutual combat rather than self-defense. The repeated dismissals eroded her trust in the system entirely, while each police visit only made Kim angrier afterward.

On March 31, 2024, the day before the fatal attack, Hyo-jeong had drinks with a friend she hadn't seen in a while. When Kim found out, he flew into a rage over their approaching three-year anniversary, demanding she meet him that night. She refused, telling a friend it would only end in another fight — a decision made harder by the fact that Kim grew more violent when drinking, which he had been doing that night too. Determined to finally end things for good, she told him she wanted to break up and blocked his number, then went out with a friend to a club before returning home and falling asleep.

The Final Assault

Kim spent the night calling and texting her obsessively, sending a threatening message at 3:43 a.m. — "You wanna see me now? So I can hit you again?" — before discovering she'd blocked him entirely. Enraged that she'd gone to a club, he called her fourteen times in one hour starting at 7 a.m., then, getting no answer, used the door passcode to let himself into her apartment and found her asleep, still wearing her club wristband.

He climbed on top of her, slapped her three times, choked her while screaming "Why did you lie?!", then slammed her head against the floor hard enough to knock her briefly unconscious — and continued anyway, kicking her legs and slapping her repeatedly. As she began to regain consciousness, he strangled her to the point of near-unconsciousness four separate times over roughly thirty minutes, demanding to know if she'd met a man at the club. Finally, he punched her right temple with his left fist, a blow that caused bleeding in her brain and immediate facial swelling. Only then, seeing her face swell, did he panic, break down crying, and beg her forgiveness — leaving her enough space to call her mother for help.

No Remorse, No Urgency

Kim showed no genuine remorse afterward. He returned to the scene of the assault and fell asleep in her apartment; four days later, while she was still hospitalized, he texted her asking if she was "interested in a settlement." His father called Hyo-jeong's mother at the hospital with an oddly casual tone, asking about visiting hours as though nothing serious had happened. He eventually offered a $13,000 settlement for medical costs, then cut off contact entirely.

Police made an emergency arrest the night Hyo-jeong died, but prosecutors released him just eight hours later, judging the case not urgent and Kim unlikely to flee — a decision reinforced by an initial autopsy that failed to directly link the assault to her death. While a corrected autopsy was pending, Kim spent weeks freely drinking, gaming, and going to karaoke, telling a friend just three days after Hyo-jeong's death that he planned to "find another girl" once he got into a better school. A second autopsy a month later corrected the cause of death to head trauma from the assault, and police finally arrested him on charges of manslaughter, stalking, and trespassing.

Final Thoughts

Prosecutors charged manslaughter rather than murder, reasoning that Kim's decision to stop the assault once he saw her face swelling, and his allowing her to call for help, indicated he lacked intent to kill — despite thirty minutes of sustained, targeted violence and repeated strangulation. At trial in November 2024, Kim first tried to blame Hyo-jeong's death on medical malpractice, then, once autopsy evidence closed that door, denied the stalking and trespassing charges, claiming "pure intentions" and disputing that the relationship had ended or that he'd trespassed in what he called their shared home — despite living with his own parents the entire time. The court rejected every argument and sentenced him to 12 years, plus 40 hours of mandatory stalking treatment, citing his expressions of remorse in court — though his written apologies, several of which he submitted, never once addressed Hyo-jeong or her family, focusing only on his own and his family's suffering. Hyo-jeong, who dreamed of becoming a nurse, will have been dead twelve years by the time Kim is released at age thirty-three.