Police Say the Chat Records That Accused Kim Soo-hyun Were Forged

The chat records had been the heart of the case: messages from 2016 that appeared to show the actor Kim Soo-hyun in a relationship with Kim Sae-ron while she was still a minor. On October 13, forensic findings by South Korean police, relayed in detail by Chinese outlets, said those records were not what they seemed. The original sender was a different celebrity, identified in the reporting only as A — and someone had renamed the conversation "Kim Soo-hyun" before it was made public. Sina Hot Point's account of the forensics, posted mid-afternoon Beijing time, drew more than 80,000 likes within hours.

The comparison that unravelled the records was painstaking. Investigators recovered data from the four iPhones Kim Sae-ron had used over the years — an iPhone 7, an 8, an SE and a 13 mini — and matched the disputed screenshots against records in which real names were left intact. In the originals, Kim Sae-ron addressed A by name at least twice. The writing habits diverged, too: A generally observed standard Korean spelling and spacing, while Kim Soo-hyun's typing is habitually irregular, and the two used different shorthand for onomatopoeia. The colleagues A mentioned in other chats had no connection to Kim Soo-hyun's circle at all.

How the relabelling happened is now its own criminal matter. According to the findings as reported, Kim Sae-ron's bereaved family released the records with A's name removed; the operator of the social-media channel that published them then instructed an employee to change the sender from "unknown user" to "Kim Soo-hyun", and that employee has given a statement to police. The blogger who first aired the recordings faces an arrest-warrant application, and the family's lawyer has been named in the inquiry.

Dispatch, the Korean outlet whose October 13 report Chinese posts quoted at length, went further: across the recovered phones there was, it reported, no evidence the two dated at all. In the year Kim Sae-ron joined Kim Soo-hyun's agency, her records show three contacts with him; she was in close contact with at least four other men in the same period; and she never mentioned Kim Soo-hyun to family or friends. The disputed 2016 chats had sat in her cloud storage under a contact saved as "No member" — and someone had edited the sender's name.

On Weibo, where the case has charted through more reversals than either fandom can track, the reaction was less triumph than a shudder. One widely liked post put it plainly: "You have to stay alive. Once you're gone, you can't even wipe off the dirt people throw at you" (人一定要活着，不然走了之后，别人往你身上泼的脏水，你连擦的机会都没有). A coarser version of the same proverb ran through the comments: 好死不如赖活着 — a bad life is better than a good death. Others had reached the opposite conclusion: as one put it, the truth matters less now, because Kim Soo-hyun's career cannot return to what it was, and those who still like him will like him anyway.

The detail that travelled furthest on Chinese social media was the claim that some of the case's audio evidence was AI-synthesized, with timelines deliberately misaligned. "AI can fabricate a voice, a screenshot can be renamed, and the dead cannot speak," the same post noted — an observation that has less to do with K-pop than with the era both countries now share. Kim Sae-ron died last year at 25. What actually happened between her and Kim Soo-hyun may now be settled less by witnesses than by the forensic trail she left on four phones — and the criminal process in Seoul is only beginning.