A week ago, Airdre Mattner mustered up the courage to come forward as a rape victim to the media in hopes of highlighting how Korea’s justice system had failed to protect her and mishandled her case.



Mattner said that she was drugged, abducted and raped in late September in Seoul.



She said that while the sexual assault haunted her, the botched investigation into her case by police further broke her down.





(Airdre Mattner)



After the story surfaced and consequent public attention was paid to the incident, the police station in charge of the investigation decided to post an open letter addressed to Mattner on Facebook on April 1, defending their position.



Amid allegations that the police had not properly investigated the crime, the Yongsan Police Station revealed details of the probe and refuted the victim’s statements in both Korean and English in the public letter.





An open letter posted by police on Facebook (Facebook)



“You are claiming that (the) police questioned contemptuously while questioning. The police recorded all of the process and has kept the record. We confirmed that there was no insulting question,” a part of the post read.



The police also said that they had no way to contact the victim apart from through the Australian Embassy because she had left the country and there were language barriers. They notified her of the investigation process, they claimed.



The police even added the link to the Facebook page on Mattner’s campaign on the GoFundMe site. She has shared her story about sexual assault and raised funds to pursue justice in England through the campaign.



“It made me feel shocked, unsafe and upset. They tried to harass me by engaging me in the public conversation on Facebook, though they knew formal channels to contact me regarding any information about me or my investigation,” Mattner told The Korea Herald in a phone interview.





(Airdre Mattner)



In earlier emails exchanged between Mattner and the Korean police, the police admitted that they had the direct email address to reach the victim.



According to Mattner, she had emailed the police initially through an email address provided to her, attaching photos of the suspected rapist. However, all the police did was acknowledge the email and then cease communication, she said.



Mattner said she had learned about the details of the investigation results regarding her DNA evidence only after the police responded to media about her case and posted the message on Facebook, all without her consent.



“They could have directly emailed me or contacted the embassy, but they chose to harass me publicly on Facebook,” she said. “And they had yet to provide evidence supporting any of their claims about the probe.”



The post on Facebook prompted outrage on the Internet, with many online commenters condemning the police for failing to protect the victim and publicly humiliating her in public to “save face.”



A comment written by a Facebook user Seolhee Park read: “The Yongsan police, you should be ashamed of yourselves to reveal all the details of the victim this way and defending yourselves by refuting the victim’s claims to save your reputation. It is a humiliation to show this badly translated police statement to foreigners. What police should do is to catch the suspect.”





(Facebook)



The Korea Herald learned that comments written by 12 different people had disappeared from the page. Police admitted to “hiding” the messages.



“The comments focused on how police were wrong about posting an open letter, but what we wanted to say to the public was that her claims were different from the truth,” another police officer, in charge of the Facebook page, told The Korea Herald. “We hid some of the messages from being shown, because we were worried that they were missing the point.”





(Facebook)