Cult leader gets jail for raping followers

A South Korean cult leader was convicted yesterday of the multiple rape of eight female followers -- some of whom believed he was God -- and jailed for 15 years. Pastor Lee Jaerock’s victims were “unable to resist as they were subject to the accused’s absolute religious authority”, judge Chung Moon-sung told the Seoul Central District Court.

Religious devotion is widespread in technologically advanced South Korea, with 44 per cent of people identifying themselves as believers. Lee set up the Manmin Central Church in Guro, once a poor area of Seoul, with just 12 followers in 1982. It has now grown to 130,000 members, with a spotlight-filled auditorium, sprawling headquarters, and a website replete with claims of miracle cures.

But three of Lee’s followers went public earlier this year, as South Korea was swept with a wave of #MeToo accusations, describing how he had summoned each of them to an apartment and raped them. “I was unable to turn him down,” one of them told South Korean television. “He was more than a king.

He was God,” added the woman, who had been a church member since childhood. Lee told another that she was now in Heaven, and to strip as Adam and Eve went naked in the Garden of Eden. “I cried as I hated to do it,” she told JTBC television. Eight women laid complaints, and the court found Lee raped and molested them “tens of times” over a long period.