Within the Burning Sun scandal, there are very few known testimonies from rape victims. The only known victim to directly come forward to tell her story is Lee Minjung [pseudonym]. Ms. Lee reported her story to the police and also gave exclusive interviews to both MBC’s ‘Straight’ in 2019 and to the BBC, whose 2024 documentary she featured in. For both interviews, Ms. Lee gives the consistent story that she met a Thai man, referred to as ‘Mr. Bob’ in the MBC ‘Straight’ interview, at Burning Sun. After drinking only a small amount of alcohol with him, she claims to have lost consciousness. After waking up later, Mr. Bob attempted to have sex with her. She resisted and he physically attacked her. She claims Mr. Bob forced her to take a picture with him, which he later showed to police as proof that the intercourse was consensual. In Ms. Lee’s reports to the police, she stated that she had no memory of leaving Burning Sun with Mr. Bob and that she suspected she had been drugged with GHB.
Included in the MBC ‘Straight’ interview is Ms. Lee’s statement that she believed Mr. Bob to be connected to YG and Seungri. This was due to the fact that, according to her, Mr. Bob had been accompanied by a Korean man who Ms. Lee identified as a director from YGX, a subsidiary of YGEntertainment that’s run by Seungri. She stated that she believed that the director had provided the drugs to Mr. Bob. However, Ms. Lee did not provide any evidence that this director was present, nor provided context for how she knew who the director was.
Following the incident, Mr. Bob had returned to Thailand. According to the Koreaboo article that reported on the MBC interview, it was stated that “When the news reached Mr. Bob in Thailand, he went on the local news to deny that he had any connections to Seungri. He claimed that he didn’t know Seungri at all.”
What’s not included in the article is that, in the same news segment, Mr. Bob (who’s real name is Chabanos Ratakul, known to be a young, wealthy man from a family of influential politicians) had explained that the charges against him had been dropped due to the uncovering of hotel CCTV footage that showed Ms. Lee walking into the hotel with him. Ms. Lee did not appear to be inebriated in any way. While MBC [PD Notebook] released an article posted in 2022 entitled ‘Sudden Amnesia, the Dangers of GHB That Deprives People of Free Will” which addressed these claims, explaining how consumers of GHB can lose their memory and all free will whilst inebriated on the drug, it does not explain the intoxicated nature consumers exhibit after being dosed.
As noted by Narconon.org and “What You Should Know About Date Rape Drugs”, an academic article written by Zawn Villines and posted by MedicalNewsToday, both explain is that GHB slows activity in the central nervous system, making users feel groggy, sleepy, and potentially confused. Other symptoms include communicating incoherently and engaging in wild body motions, falling repeatedly, or flailing their arms and legs. Facial expressions may be a frantic series of grimaces and eye-rolling. I could find no medical research paper or medical study that states that someone dosed with GHB is capable of walking and talking as though not intoxicated.
These details create significant evidentiary questions around the public framing of Ms. Lee’s case. According to the MBC [PD Notebook] article, the police had issued an Interpol Red Notice for Ratakul after Kim Seunchu, Head of the Department of Forensic Toxicology at the National Forensic Service explained to police that “It is possible for people to black out with a small amount of GHB”. The article goes onto say that PD Notebook asked the relevant police station why they chose not to indict Ratakul and they had responded that it was due to the suspect’s whereabouts being unknown and that, once the suspect is apprehended, they will make a decision after comprehensively reviewing various statements and the footage as evidence.
There has been no news on Ratakul since Prestige Thailand’s “40 Under 40” published their 2022 list recognizing notable young professionals and entrepreneurs, which included Ratakul. It has been reported that Ratakul is a prominent Thai entrepreneur, food and wine connoisseur, and CEO of Origin Food. He is the owner of several highly-regarded F&B establishments in Bangkok. Whether investigators later pursued the case further is unclear from publicly available sources. What remains is not proof that Ms. Lee fabricated her account, but a troubling gap between her testimony, the CCTV defense reportedly raised by Ratakul, and the way media coverage framed GHB as an explanation without fully addressing whether the visible behavior described in the footage aligned with known symptoms of GHB intoxication.
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