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Court upholds prison sentence over doxxing of Miryang rape case perpetrators

Published: 10 Feb. 2026, 19:32

[KOREA JOONGANG DAILY]

A man who doxxed perpetrators of the Miryang gang rape case on social media was sentenced to prison as an appeals court upheld an eight-month jail term and a fine for spreading unverified personal information online.

The Seoul Southern District Court’s Criminal Appeals Division rejected the man’s appeal and affirmed the lower court’s ruling, which sentenced him to eight months in prison and fined him three million won ($2,056) for violating the Information and Communications Network Act, including defamation, according to legal sources on Tuesday.

The court said the defendant doxxed individuals using information “as if it were definitive facts without making any effort to verify the information,” even though the content was merely taken from a video uploaded by a YouTuber with a large subscriber base.

It also said that it took into account that the defendant continued posting false information even after being summarily indicted, and that victims again submitted petitions calling for severe punishment during the appeal process.

Prosecutors said the man copied and edited videos from the YouTube channel “Narak Archive,” which claimed to reveal the names, photographs, home addresses and workplaces of perpetrators in the Miryang case, and reposted the edited material on social media.

The operator of the “Narak Archive ” channel was separately sentenced in January to one year and six months in prison in a first trial for similar violations of the Information and Communications Network Act, including defamation.

The Miryang gang rape case refers to the 2004 incident in which 44 male high school students lured a middle school girl from Ulsan through online chat and sexually assaulted her over the course of a year. Public outrage grew after most of the perpetrators received lenient punishments, and last year several YouTubers published what they claimed were current addresses and photos of those involved.

This article was originally written in Korean and translated by a bilingual reporter with the help of generative AI tools. It was then edited by a native English-speaking editor. All AI-assisted translations are reviewed and refined by our newsroom.
BY JANG GU-SEUL [[email protected]]