One of the most common arguments surrounding the Burning Sun scandal is that the official record should be trusted. Seungri was convicted, therefore he is guilty. Jung Joonyoung was convicted, therefore he is guilty. Choi Jonghoon was convicted, therefore he is guilty. Pointing out weaknesses in reporting, disputing crimes that were never charged, or questioning how certain allegations became attached to specific people is frequently dismissed with the same response: the police investigated it, prosecutors charged it, the courts ruled on it, and therefore the matter is settled.

That standard is not inherently unreasonable. Criminal convictions should obviously carry considerably more weight than rumors circulating online. The problem is that this respect for official investigations and court decisions has a strange tendency to disappear as soon as those same institutions reach conclusions that conflict with the popular Burning Sun narrative. Police findings are treated as trustworthy when they support the accusation being made, while conclusions that weaken the accusation are dismissed as the product of corruption, incompetence, or a cover-up.

The contradiction is particularly obvious when comparing the treatment of Seungri’s conviction to the treatment of Kim Sangkyo’s conviction. Seungri’s guilty verdict is regularly treated as definitive evidence that the accusations against him are true, sometimes even when the accusation being discussed was not one of his charges at all. Kim Sangkyo, however, was ultimately convicted of sexually molesting one woman and obstructing Burning Sun’s business, with that judgment surviving both appeal and review by the Supreme Court. Yet his conviction is regularly dismissed as retaliation by corrupt police or an attempt by Burning Sun to discredit the man who exposed them.

That creates an obvious question: why does a conviction prove guilt in one case but become evidence of corruption in another? The answer often depends less on the evidence than on whether the ruling supports the story someone already believes.

Kim Sangkyo’s case is particularly useful because the actual record is far more complicated than either extreme allows. Kim was assaulted by Burning Sun personnel. The handling of his arrest by police was also criticized, creating legitimate reason to question the way law enforcement treated him. Those facts do not disappear simply because Kim was later convicted of other crimes. At the same time, Kim being mistreated by police does not automatically make every accusation against him fabricated. Courts ultimately found sufficient evidence that he had molested one woman and obstructed the club’s business, while finding insufficient evidence regarding two other alleged molestations.

That is what evaluating evidence is supposed to look like. Some accusations were supported while others were not. Kim could have been assaulted by Burning Sun staff, improperly handled by police, and still have committed an offense himself. None of those facts are mutually exclusive, yet Burning Sun discourse rarely allows that kind of complexity. Institutional corruption is instead frequently used as a switch that can be turned on and off depending on which conclusion needs to be defended.

The VIP room allegations provide one of the clearest examples. In July 2019, National Police Agency Commissioner General Min Gap-ryong publicly addressed the investigation into allegations surrounding Burning Sun’s VIP rooms. Police had identified and investigated the people connected to the widely circulated VIP room video and ultimately stated that the investigation had not confirmed the reported allegations of rape or drug administration connected to it. Police simultaneously announced arrests connected to the illegal filming and distribution of sexual material. In other words, investigators did identify crimes connected to the material they examined; they simply did not substantiate the specific rape and drugging claims that had become attached to it.

This was not a statement that nothing illegal ever happened inside Burning Sun, nor was it a declaration that every woman who reported suspected drugging or sexual assault in Gangnam was lying. It meant that a specific collection of extremely serious allegations had been investigated and investigators said they could not substantiate what had been publicly claimed.

For some reason, this conclusion is treated very differently from other findings produced during the same broader investigation. Police can apparently be trusted to investigate drug offenses, prostitution, embezzlement, illegal filming, sexual assault, and numerous other crimes connected to Burning Sun, but when investigators fail to confirm the specific allegation people expected them to confirm, corruption suddenly becomes the explanation.

There is no question that legitimate reasons existed to scrutinize the police. The investigation itself uncovered police officers connected to collusion allegations, and Min Gap-ryong acknowledged the public distrust created by those findings. The existence of police misconduct, however, does not establish that every unfavorable investigative conclusion was the product of corruption. “Some police officers were corrupt” and “any police conclusion contradicting the popular version of Burning Sun must therefore be false” are two completely different arguments.

More importantly, if police corruption is going to be raised as a possibility, it is strange how narrowly that possibility is usually imagined.

Seungri is routinely described online as the owner of Burning Sun, the mastermind behind Burning Sun, or even the “leader of the trafficking ring,” despite neither serving as Burning Sun’s CEO nor personally being one of its major shareholders. Burning Sun’s reported ownership structure placed Junwon Industry as the largest shareholder at approximately 42 percent, while Yuri Holdings and Madam Lin each held 20 percent. Burning Sun’s co-CEOs held additional shares.

Seungri himself reportedly owned 40 percent of Yuri Holdings, alongside Yoo Inseok’s 40 percent and another executive’s 20 percent. Because Yuri Holdings owned 20 percent of Burning Sun, Seungri’s proportional indirect financial interest in the club would equate to roughly 8 percent. That does not make his connection to Burning Sun irrelevant. He helped establish Yuri Holdings, supported the investment in Burning Sun, publicly promoted the club, and held an executive-director position. It does, however, make the portrayal of him as the singular owner sitting at the top of Burning Sun’s corporate hierarchy difficult to reconcile with the actual ownership structure.

Yet the people and companies with greater direct ownership or operational authority receive remarkably little attention in the trafficking narrative. The club’s actual CEOs, the company holding approximately 42 percent of Burning Sun, the hotel interests connected to that company, and the other major investor are rarely assigned anything approaching the level of responsibility placed on Seungri. If Burning Sun had truly been operating an organized trafficking business, it would be reasonable to ask why public discussion focuses so overwhelmingly on someone whose indirect financial interest appears to have amounted to roughly 8 percent rather than the people who directly owned larger portions of the company or actually managed the club.

This becomes especially interesting once corruption is introduced into the argument. There is no evidence sufficient to state as fact that police intentionally used Seungri to protect Burning Sun’s owners or executives, and such a theory should not be presented as an established conclusion. However, if the premise is already that police corruption surrounding Burning Sun was extensive enough to manipulate investigations and protect powerful interests, then it is peculiar that the possibility is almost exclusively imagined in one direction.

Why is Seungri automatically assumed to have been the powerful interest receiving protection?

An internationally recognizable celebrity with a minority indirect ownership interest could just as easily have made an extremely convenient public face for the scandal while people with more direct ownership and operational control attracted considerably less lasting scrutiny. If corrupt police were attempting to protect someone, there is no inherent reason to assume the person being protected would have been Seungri rather than executives, shareholders, hotel interests, or other individuals with substantially greater control over Burning Sun itself.

Again, there is not sufficient evidence to state that this happened. The point is that the possibility exposes how selectively corruption is imagined. People are comfortable proposing corruption when it can explain why trafficking allegations were not substantiated, but rarely apply the same skepticism to the narrative placing Seungri at the center of everything. If the police were supposedly capable of manipulating an investigation to protect powerful people, then questioning whether the celebrity who absorbed the overwhelming majority of public blame was actually the person being protected should be just as legitimate as assuming he was the beneficiary of the corruption.

The same inconsistency appears throughout the case. When police investigations contribute to cases against Jung Joonyoung, Choi Jonghoon, Seungri, or other figures associated with the scandal, those findings are treated as authoritative. When investigators reach conclusions that weaken more sensational allegations surrounding Burning Sun, those same institutions suddenly become incapable of producing reliable findings.

The reasoning eventually becomes circular. If police confirm an allegation, the confirmation proves the allegation was true. If police fail to confirm it, the failure proves police were covering it up. Under that standard, there is literally no investigative outcome capable of disproving the original claim because every possible result becomes evidence that the claim was correct.

That is not skepticism. It is an unfalsifiable belief.

Corruption should absolutely be considered when evaluating Burning Sun. It should simply be considered consistently. If institutional corruption alone is enough to invalidate an unfavorable investigative conclusion, then that skepticism cannot only appear when authorities fail to substantiate trafficking allegations or when a court convicts Kim Sangkyo. The same institutions investigated evidence used against people the public already believes are guilty, and prosecutors and courts are also government institutions capable of mistakes, bias, misconduct, and institutional failure.

Almost nobody argues that Jung Joonyoung’s conviction should be ignored because the broader Burning Sun investigation exposed police corruption. Nor should they. His conviction should be evaluated based on the evidence against him and the judicial findings in his case. The same standard should apply everywhere else.

Kim Sangkyo provides an especially clear demonstration of why that standard matters. He was ultimately convicted of molesting one woman and obstructing Burning Sun’s business, while the courts acquitted him of molesting two other women because those allegations were not sufficiently proven. The Supreme Court allowed that judgment to stand in 2024. The result was not simply “believe Kim” or “believe Burning Sun.” Different allegations were evaluated separately and produced different conclusions based on the evidence available for each one.

The same approach should be taken with the scandal as a whole.

This does not require believing that South Korean police handled Burning Sun perfectly. They demonstrably did not. It does not require believing that every prosecutor made the correct decision, every investigation was exhaustive, or every court ruling throughout the scandal is beyond criticism. Institutions can be wrong, verdicts can be challenged, and investigations can fail. What matters is having an actual evidentiary reason for challenging a specific finding rather than simply rejecting it because it produced the wrong answer.

Evidence that investigators ignored witnesses would be a reason. Evidence that relevant records were destroyed would be a reason. Contradictory forensic evidence would be a reason. Demonstrated interference in a specific investigation would be a reason. Simply disliking the conclusion is not.

The same standard should apply to Seungri, Kim Sangkyo, Jung Joonyoung, Choi Jonghoon, Burning Sun employees, police officers, executives, and shareholders. A conviction should not become sacred merely because the defendant is disliked, and it should not become meaningless merely because the defendant is sympathetic. Police conclusions should not automatically be treated as truth, but neither should they automatically become evidence of a conspiracy whenever they undermine a popular theory.

Otherwise, the issue was never really about trusting the investigation. It was about trusting the investigation only when it gave the desired answer.

That selective skepticism has allowed the public version of Burning Sun to become nearly impossible to correct. Evidence supporting the established narrative is accepted immediately, while contradictory evidence is absorbed into the narrative as proof of corruption. A conviction proves guilt when it supports the story and proves corruption when it does not. Police findings are authoritative when they uncover crimes and suspicious when they fail to uncover the crimes people expected to find.

At that point, evidence no longer determines the conclusion. The conclusion determines which evidence is allowed to count.