R.i.p Choi Jin Shil

[Guest Wo.He.Ni]

It will certainly be the last scandal of your life Choi Jin Shil ...

May you rest in peace and keep looking from heavens on those you loved

I'm still shocked, it's hard to believe but that's how life goes on ...

I wish you well Choi Jin Shil ...

[Guest hearty06]

omo..

honestly, i don't know her but the way she dies..so sad..

suicide?.gosh..

and she has a son?.poor boy..

so many deaths..

may she rest in peace..

[888888888]

This is the most up-to-date and precise news coverage of Choi Jin Shil.

KBS Entertainment Relay 연예가중계 (10-04-2008) News Coverage on Choi Jin Shil:

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

It's still so hard to believe that she's gone

This is from MC Mong's cyworld post about Choi Jin Shil. A lot of people are expressing their condolences to MC Mong.

The title of his cyworld and of the post are the same "내 가슴속의 진실" which says "the Jin Shil in my heart." I'm assuming that Jin Shil probably refers to both: (1) Choi Jin Shil, and (2) truth - since Jin Shil means 'truth' in Korean.

This is a rough translation into English that I quickly made. Some parts could be off.

진경이 누나에게 지금 막 전화가 걸려왔다

Jin Kyung nuna (Hong Jin Kyung) just gave me a call right now.

진실이 누나가 죽기전날 진경이누나 라디오에 내노래를 신청했다고 한다 i love you oh thank you

"The day before Jin Shil died she made a request for your song 'i love you oh thank you' on my (Hong Jin Kyung) radio program"

그러면서 한마디 더한다

And then she (Hong Jin Kyung) said one more thing

몽아 진실이 누나가 너 많이 생각하고 얼마나 이뻐했니 !

"Mong, you know how much Jin Shil nuna thought of you and treated you well ! "

머리가 멍해진다

My mind is going blank

앞이 보이지않는다 ...

I can't see anything in front of me ...

숨이 막힌다

I can't breathe

거지같은 나는 ...

A good-for-nothing person like me ...

누나에게 한번도가지못했다 ...

I didn't even go to see nuna once (at the funeral) ...

우리 할아버지 마지막 가는날도 대충 병원에서 슬퍼하다

When my grandfather died too, I just roughly went to the hospital and was sad

마지막 영결식에는 나 엠씨몽 방송했다 ...

During his final funeral ceremy, I, MC Mong, did a show program ...

할아버지 보낸날도 쇼프로에나가 웃음을 팔았다

The day that my grandfather was supposed to leave too, I just went on a show program and sold my laughter

내가슴속에 한이 또하나 생겼다 ..

Inside my heart, I now have another 'han' (unresolved resentment/lament) ..

우리누나 보내는날 거지같은 나는 무대에서 공연 하고

The day that my nuna was to be sent off, a good-for-nothing me just went on stage and performed

이틀 꼬박 새면서 방송촬영 했다

Staying up two days straight, I just went on (show) programs

이것이 내 일이다

This is my work

이것은 내 꿈이며

This is my dream

이것이 결국 내인생이다

This is after all my life

결국 난 연예인 인가보다 ..

In the end, I guess I'm just another entertainer ..

방송은 대중들과에 약속이고

A broadcast is a promise with the masses

공연은 관객들과에 약속이다

A performance is a promise with the audiences

그약속때문에 병신같은 나는 누날 못만났다

Because of that promise, a fool like me did not get to see you (Jin shil) nuna

평생을 국민들을 위해 연기해온 당신은

You who always acted for the people of the nation

평생을 수많은 대중들에게 꿈을 심어준 당신은

You who always gave (planted) dreams to the countless masses of people

1%도 안돼는 사람들때문에 힘들어 가는군요

But because of the people who don't even make up 1% you have been struggling

이것은 반칙입니다 ..

This is a violation ..

전 어쩌죠 ..

What about me? ...

이 무거운 죄 누구에게 묻죠.

To whom will I rest this heavy burden (sin)

하나님은 아실까요?

Will God know this?

우리누나 너무많은 사람들에게 행복을 주셔서

My (Jin Shil) nuna gave so many people happiness

하나님이 우리누나 용서하시겠죠?

God, you will forgive my nuna right?

전 매일 매일 홈피에올려진 누나 사진 보면서

Every day as I look at the pictures of you (Jin Shil nuna) on your homepage,

누날 위해기도할께요 .

I will pray for you nuna.

이무거운 죄값 반성하며 다 치룰께요.

I will repent for this heavy sin and solve it.

결국 전 딴따라 삼류 연예인이라

In the end, I'm just (?) a third-class (not top class) entertainer

누나 떠난 내일도 방송에선 웃겠죠 !

and tomorrow, when you're no longer with us, I will probably laugh on a program !

그1%에대중들은 알까요 ?

Will those 1% of people know?

삼류연예인에 슬픔을

the sorrows of a third-class (not top class) entertainer

대중들과 똑같이 아프고 슬프고 그모든걸 느낄줄 아는

Just the same as regular people who can be hurt and feel sad

그저 평범하고 부족한 인간이란걸을 ?

that we're just ordinary, lacking people too?

거지같은 엠씨몽

Good-for-nothing MC Mong

누날 위해서라도 더열씸히 일할께요

I will work more hard if it's just for you nuna

미친듯이 곡쓰고 미친듯이 방송할께요 ...

I will write songs like crazy, I will go on programs like crazy ...

이것이 결국 누나도 저도

This is after all, for you (nuna) and for me,

하나님이 선택하신 일이니깐 ........

the work that God has chosen for us .......

source: http://www.cyworld.com/mongsclub

translation credits: kikki

that really made me tear up. poor Mong. he feels so bad. he couldnt even go to her funeral! because of his schedule! i can feel his sense of remorse and sorrow. now he has to go on with his job and laugh and make jokes on programs even though he is hurting inside. his job is to smile and be happy! they arent allowed to show anger or frustration or sadness! they aren't allowed to be human! wow....really would be hard to be an entertainer.

[Guest Ostepop]

Oh my...

I just found this out right now. RIP.

I feel so sorry for her poor children. This is just too horrible...

[Guest V A L XD]

Choi Jin Shil Funeral and short look at her life English Subbed.

part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uL5CWpeygk

part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2aND6d6f4A

part 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHBkLj-k63U...feature=related

Credit: Boosaysimback

Miss her soo much.

[Guest FLY HIGHHH]

wow the post of mc mong's iss soooooo sadd T.T

[xxtine_21]

RIP

it's so sad when things ilke this happen

omigosh, and how their kids thing she's an angel picking stars right now!!

wahhh.

[Guest BROKEN SHORE]

I can see the pain and sorrow in Choi Jin Shil's eyes in those recent photos. Her smile doesn't seem real...she must have struggled a lot to keep smiling like that.

[Guest V A L XD]

I'm so angry at the Baek Girl who caused CJS's death!

She's basically getting away with murder!

It's absurd how the police and government is trying to cover it up!

Choi Jin Young has the right to be angry!

If you read his recent CYworld blog of Coolsmurf's you'd know what I mean!

[Guest kikki]

CJS's younger brother on Baek

[Guest ttris]

omg.. this is reallie sad...

r.i.p. choi jin shil!

[Guest [Deleted User]]

The user and all related content has been deleted.

[Guest marrie_mandy]

"Could somebody sub choi jin shil good morning show. PLEASEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

[Guest BROKEN SHORE]

That Baek girl looks evil. Words can kill. How could she feel no remorse? She's a devil! She needs to be punished.

[Guest kikki]

When Words Kill

Suicide spurs bid to regulate the net in South Korea.

By B. J. Lee | Newsweek Web Exclusive

Oct 15, 2008 | Updated: 11:24  a.m. ET Oct 15, 2008

Choi Jin Sil had a lot to live for. She was one of South Korea's hottest movie stars, and the mother of two young children. But the tides of public opinion can turn quickly and mercilessly—especially in cyberspace. In late September, an employee at a Seoul securities house began posting rumors about Choi in an online chat room. She accused Choi of being a ruthless loan shark responsible for the suicide of a down-on-his-luck actor who had amassed more than $2 million in debts. Within days, the rumors had spread to hundreds of thousands of chat-room users who posted vicious attacks on Choi's morals and character. Although the rumors were completely fabricated, the chat-room condemnation was more than Choi could take. "I am lonely and I am ostracized," she wrote in her suicide note found on Oct. 2. "I cannot even breathe."

Unfortunately, Choi's suicide is not an isolated incident, but rather a symptom of South Korea's growing problem with insidious chat-room activity. Considered the world's most wired nation, almost every South Korean household is equipped with broadband Internet service. It has long boasted a vibrant Internet culture where information and opinions are exchanged freely. But this freedom combined with a staunch cultural emphasis on "saving face" has proven a dangerous mix. Nearly 200,000 cyberviolence cases were reported last year, up almost 50 percent from a year earlier. Choi's death, in addition to several other high-profile cases, has sparked a heated debate over whether cyberspace should be regulated to prevent libel and protect privacy—even if it means imposing limits on freedom of speech.

Choi is the most well-known victim of chat-room violence in South Korea, but she was not the first. Last year popular singer, Yoo Nee, took her own life after accusations that she had gotten cosmetic surgery went viral. Early this month, immediately after Choi's death, two more celebrities committed suicide. They had been blasted in cyberspace because of their alleged homosexuality, which is still frowned upon by mainstream Korean society. Cyberattacks can spread like wildfire, bringing down an entire career in mere days. Those who depend on public support for their livelihoods—such as actors and politicians—are particularly vulnerable. "Our Internet culture is more violent and vicious than most other countries," says Yun Young Chul, a communication professor at Seoul's Yonsei University. "People don't respect each other in cyberspace."

Even ordinary people can fall prey to cyberattacks. In 2005, a young male was attacked for allegedly ditching his pregnant girlfriend who later killed herself. The Internet attacks against him turned into an angry witch hunt. Through Korea's well-developed social-networking Web sites, attackers found out every detail about his life—his name, address, employer and even the name of the college he was attending at night. They called him a "shameless criminal," waged a campaign to boycott the products of his company and staged candlelight vigils at his college campus. He had to quit his job and live in self-imposed exile for months. He later sued the instigators and the portals that carried the information on libel charges and won in an appeals court in July.

Ironically, Korea's growing Internet problems stem from its strength in information technology. Local portal sites such as Daum and Naver exert enormous influence on society as they nearly monopolize forums for public debates. Most Koreans get firsthand information from portals rather than media companies as the former attracts users through powerful search engines and deep data and news archives. But portals in Korea are generally lax about regulating the content and length of user comments in a bid to promote more lively debates. As a result, portals often touch off hot public controversies that affect the entire society. In spring, a portal debate site named Agora helped instigate months of huge street protests in downtown Seoul against a government decision to resume imports of U.S. beef that critics claimed were prone to mad-cow disease. When the protests grew into a public campaign to impeach President Lee Myung-bak, he scaled down his plan for U.S. beef imports and emphatically apologized to the public.

Against this backdrop, Korea's ruling Grand National Party is spearheading a move to toughen laws on Internet chat room abuses. Backed broadly by conservative older lawmakers who are increasingly wary of growing Internet abuses by technology-savvy youngsters, the ruling party is currently proposing a new measure requiring real names in more chat-room postings and replies—an idea designed to track and punish malicious cyberattackers. Under current law, Web sites with more than 300,000 visits per day are required to demand real names, but smaller sites are exempt, leading to frequent abuses there under pseudonyms. The ruling party is also moving to enact a new law allowing prosecutors to press online-libel charges without the consent of victims. Hong Jun-pyo, floor leader of the Grand National Party describes the initiatives as an attempt to "keep cyberspace from becoming a public toilet wall."

Backed generally by younger voters, the opposition Democratic Party and liberal civic organizations are against the idea of imposing new regulations on self-expression in cyberspace. They claim that libel can be prevented using the existing criminal laws, and argue that additional regulations will discourage free speech. "There is a limit on using law to make the Internet space more civil," Suh Gap-won, an opposition lawmaker, said during last week's parliamentary meeting. "It cannot be done without a rise in citizens' ethics." The opposition camp also argues the government move toward additional regulations is politically motivated. Roh Eun-ha, a vice spokesperson of the Democratic Party, said the move is designed to suppress "the Internet public opinion critical of the government," adding that it will face "an online revolt."

The death of Korea's "national star" has tipped public opinion in favor of instituting tougher regulations against cyberviolence and libel. In a recent survey by a local broadcasting station, 63 percent welcomed the real-name system for Internet postings and replies, while only 24 percent opposed it. In the same survey, 55 percent supported the enactment of a cyber-insult law. As Koreans flood chat rooms to mourn Choi and discuss how to prevent cyber violence in the future, perhaps they will discover that words not only have the power to harm, but sometimes they also have the power to heal.

Source: http://www.newsweek.com/id/164013

Korean Star’s Suicide Reignites Debate on Web Regulation

By CHOE SANG-HUN

Published: October 12, 2008

SEOUL — Choi Jin-sil, a movie star, was the closest thing South Korea had to a national sweetheart.

Seo Kyung-Ri/Newsis, via Reuters

Choi Jin-sil, an actress, was the subject of online attacks.

So when Ms. Choi, 39, was found dead in her apartment on Oct. 2 in what the police concluded was a suicide, her grief-stricken homeland sought an answer to why the actress had chosen to end her life.

The police, the media and members of Parliament immediately pointed fingers at the Internet. Malicious online rumors led to Ms. Choi’s suicide, the police said, after studying memos found at her home and interviewing friends and relatives.

Those online accusations claimed that Ms. Choi, who once won a government medal for her savings habits, was a loan shark. They asserted that a fellow actor, Ahn Jae-hwan, was driven to suicide because Ms. Choi had relentlessly pressed him to repay a $2 million debt.

Public outrage over Ms. Choi’s suicide gave ammunition to the government of President Lee Myung-bak, which has long sought to regulate cyberspace, a major avenue for antigovernment protests in South Korea.

Earlier this year, the Lee government was reeling after weeks of protests against beef imports from the United States. Vicious antigovernment postings and online rumors on the dangers of lifting the ban on American beef fueled the political upheaval, which forced the entire cabinet to resign.

In a monthlong crackdown on online defamation, 900 agents from the government’s Cyber Terror Response Center are scouring blogs and online discussion boards to identify and arrest those who “habitually post slander and instigate cyber bullying.”

Hong Joon-pyo, floor leader of the governing Grand National Party, commented, “Internet space in our country has become the wall of a public toilet.”

In the National Assembly, Ms. Choi’s suicide set the country’s rival parties on a collision course over how to regulate the Web. The governing party is promoting a law to punish online insults; the opposition parties accuse the government of trying to “rule cyberspace with martial law.”

The opposition says that cyberspace violence is already dealt with under existing laws against slander and public insults. But the government says that a tougher, separate law is necessary to punish online abuse, which inflicts quicker and wider damage on victims.

To battle online harassment, the government’s Communications Commission last year ordered Web portals with more than 300,000 visitors a day to require its users to submit their names and matching Social Security numbers before posting comments.

The police reported 10,028 cases of online libel last year, up from 3,667 reported in 2004.

Harassment in cyberspace has been blamed for a string of highly publicized suicides. Ms. Choi made headlines when she married a baseball player, Cho Sung Min, in 2000. But tabloids and Web bloggers were relentless in criticizing her when the marriage soured and she fought for custody of her two children.

TV producers and commercial sponsors dropped her. The general sentiment was that her career was over.

But in 2005, she made a comeback with a hugely popular soap opera called “My Rosy Life.” In it, she dropped her cute-girl image and played a jilted wife who throws a kick at her errant husband, but reconciles with him when she learns she has terminal cancer.

This year, she broke another taboo by successfully petitioning a court to change the surname of her two children to her own.

But in an interview with MBC-TV in July, which was broadcast after her death, she said she “dreaded” the Internet, where posters had insulted her for being a single, divorced mother. The police said she had been taking antidepressants since her divorce.

In South Korea, volunteer counselors troll the Internet to discourage people from using the Web to trade tips on how to commit suicide and, in some cases, how to form suicide pacts.

“We have seen a sudden rise in copycat suicides following a celebrity death,” said Jeon Jun-hee, an official at the Seoul Metropolitan Mental Health Center, which runs a suicide prevention hot line. Mr. Jeon said the hot line had received 60 calls a day, or twice the usual number, since Ms. Choi’s suicide.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/13/technolo...ml?ref=internet

Korea's Internet Suicide Pandemic

Oh dear. Last week we told you about that actor who killed himself in Korea partly in response to some homophobic online attacks. And now, when looking at a larger trend of suicide in that country, it appears that Korea may have a dangerous internet bullying problem on their hands. The International Herald Tribune reported yesterday about the death of Choi Jin Sil, a Korean actress who committed suicide after a series of vicious internet attacks:

Those online accusations claimed that Choi - who once won a government medal for her saving habit and whose name, Jin Sil, means "truth" - was a loan shark. They claimed that an actor named Ahn Jae Hwan, who gassed himself in his car last month, was driven to suicide because Choi pressed him relentlessly to repay a $2 million debt.

Choi's death followed a string of high-profile suicides attributed to cyberspace harassment. Two young female celebrities, one a singer and the other an actress, killed themselves last year after insulting comments about their alleged plastic surgery flooded the Web.

Which, ugh, is just awful. Of course critics of the Korean government, which is seeking to regulate the internet to prevent future attacks, say that the online bile isn't the root of the problem. Which is probably true in a reductionist "guns don't kill people, people kill people" kind of way. But in the actual world, the role of the internet in flesh-and-blood happenings is so vague and inhabits such a depressingly gray area of causality that maybe, I don't know, the internet is partly to blame—if by the sole virtue that we can't prove that it isn't to blame. Either way, I don't think we've quite evolved to weather personal attacks like this. The technology is moving a lot faster than, well, our souls are.

Much has been made, over and over again, about the troubling viciousness of this modern web that we've woven, so it's hard to say anything new. Hell, Michael Arrington at TechCrunch has been expecting a Valleywag-related suicide for months now. But it still, every time something like this happens, makes us feel nauseous. That such a uniting thing—a free, open agora of ideas on its best days—can also be a conduit for what reduces down to sadistic cannibalism. Of, you know, the "e" varietal.

Source: http://gawker.com/5062582/koreas-internet-suicide-pandemic

[Guest kikki]

There's going to be an MBC Special on Choi Jin Sil (2008.10.17 @ 9:55pm). It's going to have interviews with other actors, people who were close to her, have worked with her over the years, and interviews with regular people. http://www.imbc.com/...ure/mbcspecial/

[marcs.lover]

OMG, another one gone. Is suicide becoming a trend among celebs??

[Babycremepuff]

It's horrible. It shows that sometimes the pressure and harsh words of other people and groups of people can really damage your spirit enough to make you not want to live anymore. Especially when you feel your own life has enough troubles, the added negative pressures of people can really drive us to a place we might not have really wanted to go.

I really hope the government does a thorough investigation of that business investment thing that went bad.