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Acting party leader Kim Sun-min and floor leader Seo Wang-jin of the Rebuilding Korea Party leave a meeting at the National Assembly in Seoul on September 7 after announcing their resignation over the sexual misconduct scandal. / Source: Yonhap News

The entire leadership of the Rebuilding Korea Party resigned on Sunday, taking responsibility for a sexual misconduct case within the party. But victims’ representatives criticized the move as unilateral and dismissive of their voices.

Kang Mi-sook, senior adviser to the party’s women’s committee who has represented the victims, said on CBS Radio’s Kim Hyun-jung’s News Show on Monday that the resignation was carried out “without asking what the victims wanted” and “felt violent.” She added that the decision left victims feeling as though they had “spit in the well they once drank from.”

Kang said the victims were never contacted before the announcement. “The first step should have been to ask what the victims wanted, but nothing was asked. To us, it was a unilateral act,” she said.

She also criticized comments by former Democratic Party lawmaker Choi Kang-wook, who had referred to the case as “trivial” and reportedly used words like “pigs and dogs.” Kang said such remarks were deeply inappropriate and would have “hurt the victims and members who stood with them.”

Kang revealed that during Cho Kuk’s imprisonment, she sent him a 10-page handwritten letter urging him to understand the case and help resolve it, but received no reply. After his release, she said she only received a message that he would “offer words of comfort,” but no substantive follow-up meeting took place.

She also pointed to problems in the party’s handling of the case. Although the party opened an investigation in April, she said it moved slowly, with then-leader Kim Sun-min insisting on outsourcing the probe to a law firm instead of following Ministry of Gender Equality guidelines — a process that took more than a month. “He should have offered a sincere apology to the victims first,” Kang said.

According to Kang, one victim has been undergoing psychiatric treatment while another has suffered from chronic insomnia for more than six months. Despite requests, she said, the party has yet to provide financial support for counseling or therapy.