Korean Americans Still Ponder Fate of Edward Cho : Culture: Some feel O.C. developer, who committed suicide after child-molestation conviction, was a victim.

The two-hour home video could have been a chronicle of any happy, suburban family over a 10-year period, a house full of proud parents and growing children on a number of joyous occasions.

They celebrate birthdays. They take family trips to American landmarks. In one culturally distinctive ceremony for this affluent Korean American family, the children come forward one by one and bow to their father, touching their foreheads to the floor in a gesture of obeisance and respect.

There is no hint of what was to ensue. The father, Kyung Mook (Edward) Cho, 54, a multimillionaire Orange County real estate developer, was accused of molesting four of his children. His eldest daughter and her boyfriend committed suicide soon afterward, another daughter denounced him in court as “possessed by Satan,” and a year ago this month he was convicted of 25 counts of sexual abuse and child molestation.

Cho’s 84-year prison sentence on Dec. 17, followed by his shocking Christmas Day suicide in the Orange County Jail, drew headlines throughout Southern California. But it was in the region’s Korean American community--where Cho was already something of a controversial figure--that the tragic saga provoked the most soul-searching and continues to puzzle many.

While the judge in the case called his behavior “despicable” and his children were devastated by what happened, Cho continued to assert his innocence in the days after his conviction.

In half a dozen open letters to Korean American newspapers, Cho suggested that he was the victim of scheming children and that an all-white Orange County jury didn’t understand authoritarian--but not abusive--Korean family practices.

The case was extensively covered in the Korean American press; Cho’s letters prompted much debate within the community, and his suicide added to it. Did he kill himself, overwhelmed by guilt, in the face of a long prison sentence? Or was his suicide a final declaration of innocence not to be ignored?

“People are confused because Mr. Cho killed himself,” said Dr. Injong Hong, executive director of the L.A. Korean Family Counseling and Legal Advice Center. “Some people believe he killed himself to prove he was innocent.”

Months after the suicide, Hong said recently, some Korean Americans are “still struggling with what happened.”

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To this day, there are many in the Korean American community who believe that Edward Cho was the victim of vindictive children who rebelled against his strict, traditional parenting by inventing unthinkable charges against their father, accusations believed by the jurors.

“Culture killed him,” said Chris Nam, vice president of the Korean Assn. of Orange County, who emigrated from the same Korean village as his friend Cho.

Cho strongly asserted the same point. In a letter to his minister--written from the Orange County Jail and later published in two Korean-language newspapers--Cho contended that “Orange County’s all-white jurors’ biases and their inability to understand other cultures brought about” his conviction.

Perhaps because child sexual abuse is virtually unheard of in the Korean American community, the case generated more than 50 articles in the Korean press, including the open letters from Cho.

“Many Koreans, more than half, don’t want to believe it,” said Brian Min, a reporter for the Korea Times’ Los Angeles Edition, who covered the case.

During a custody case and a criminal trial, and in documents filed for a civil lawsuit over Cho’s estate, Cho’s children argued that Cho’s behavior grew from his feudal notion that they were his property.

Cho’s son claimed at the criminal trial that his father sexually abused him because Cho appeared to believe that “he owned me or something. I was his property.” Cho lost custody of the boy and his sister, who were still living at home, in a Juvenile Court proceeding, but jurors in the criminal trial acquitted Cho of charges of fondling his son.

“Sometimes Korean fathers exert unreasonable discipline or exercise an authoritarian way of rearing children, which creates tremendous emotional turmoil in their children,” agreed Moon Ju Kim, education minister at Bethel Korean Church in Irvine.

“I am a Korean American female,” said Erica M. Kim, one of Edward Cho’s civil attorneys, “and I know the pressures. Korean parents feel that if there is no pressure, kids will go out and do what they want.”

The revelations that have poured out in the three court proceedings stand in stark contrast to the idyllic image of a successful, suburban American household that the Cho family offered to the world outside.

After immigrating to the U.S. in 1971, Cho prospered in Orange County, concentrating his real estate business in Garden Grove and amassing holdings that at one time were estimated at nearly $3.5 million. He lived in a large house in Fountain Valley and worked his way to prominence in the Korean American business community.

But even before allegations of sexual abuse were made against him in 1992, Edward Cho was a controversial figure.

“Some people in the Korean community didn’t like him because they thought he was like Scrooge,” said Myong Hwan (David) Son, one of Cho’s best and oldest friends. Cho was well-known for his reluctance to pick up a meal check, and he argued over bets at weekly, penny-ante poker games, he said.

At the same time, however, Cho made large donations to a variety of civic and cultural organizations, said Son, a frequent visitor to Cho’s home.

In 1986, just a few years after moving to the area from Northern California, Cho was elected president of the Korean Assn. of Orange County, largely because he was the only candidate that year willing to put up the $10,000 required to serve, according to Tom Kim, who was then the association’s vice president.

Cho’s tenure lasted only a few months and ended in acrimony when he changed his mind about serving and demanded his money back, Kim said. He filed suit against several of the association’s former presidents.

All of those who knew Cho--family members, business associates, attorneys and even his minister--agreed that he was a strict disciplinarian, an authoritarian father who inflicted corporal punishment when necessary. He tried to exert almost total control over his children’s lives, dictating everything from whom they could befriend to what colleges they would attend and what professions they would pursue, friends and family said.

“In the Korean household, the father is the dominant figure,” said Erica Kim, Cho’s civil attorney. “Everyone obeys everything that Dad says.

“Mr. Cho was an extreme example of that,” she added. “He was extremely stingy, very shrewd, very bright, very aggressive.”

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The fourth of eight children born to poor, uneducated parents in a rural Korean village, Edward Cho worked his way through a church college in Seoul. Upon his arrival in the United States, he worked as a Seventh-day Adventist minister in the Northern California community of San Lorenzo for eight years. After a short-lived marriage that produced two children, Cho remarried and had two more children.

Cho had increasing success in Northern California as a restaurateur and real estate developer. But his life as a conventional family man was interrupted in 1983, when he moved to Los Angeles and sent to Korea for two more of his daughters from a previous relationship, Young Sun Cho and her younger sister.

What happened between 1983 and 1992, in various residences in Los Angeles and Orange counties, is documented in police reports, in testimony at Cho’s eight-day criminal trial and in documents filed in connection with the civil suit brought by four of Edward Cho’s children. Despite Cho’s death, that suit will be tried against Cho’s estate and his widow.

Further documentation comes from a juvenile custody hearing during which the two youngest Cho children were removed from the home. Normally confidential, testimony and rulings from that hearing were printed in documents filed for the civil trial and in an appeals court decision upholding the removal of the children.

Shortly after her father brought her from Korea, Young Sun Cho later told authorities, her father began forcing her to have sex with him. She was 14 at the time.

“He just comes in, and I will be laying there,” Young Sun Cho testified at the preliminary hearing, “and he . . . will just have sex with me. . . .”

By acquiescing to her father, Young Sun Cho testified, “I always thought I was protecting my sister . . . from him having sex with her . . . him abusing her.”

But, the younger sister testified, Edward Cho also began to abuse her sexually at the age of 9 and continued to do so for nine years. Both daughters said they were unaware the other was being victimized.

“Afterwards he said, ‘Well, I’ll buy you a Rolls-Royce’ . . . I felt really cheap,” the younger daughter testified.

Young Sun Cho said in the preliminary hearing that her father had twice impregnated her and forced her to undergo abortions, a claim Edward Cho denied.

The children testified at Cho’s trial that their father also regularly kicked and beat them and his wife, sometimes with a stick and a tennis racquet. He threw bowls and furniture at them, they said. Cho’s widow acknowledged that her husband physically disciplined the children, but denied that he was brutal.

In early 1992, Young Sun Cho, then 23, moved out of the house. Several months later, on April 23, she contacted the Orange County Department of Social Services Child Abuse Registry, records show.

On May 6, Young Sun Cho and her younger sister repeated their charges to Fountain Valley police. On May 11, the Department of Social Services removed the two younger children from the home. The younger children also testified later about inappropriate touching by their father.

Edward Cho was arrested several days later.

Five months after bringing the sex abuse charges, Young Sun Cho and her boyfriend, who had encouraged her to come forward, killed themselves in their Los Angeles apartment.

“There is no doubt in my mind that Young Sun killed herself due to the abuse,” Detective Kim Brown of the Fountain Valley Police Department wrote in a report. “In talking with her, she was very disturbed about the sexual abuse and the methods of fear used by their father to make her submit. The torment he caused fueled her decision to take her own life.”

Edward Cho’s younger daughter testified in his subsequent criminal trial on rape and sexual molestation charges, and the testimony of Young Sun Cho at an earlier hearing was read to the jury. Both said that their father told them that such sexual activity was permitted by the Bible, and that they should pretend he was a movie star during sex.

During the custody proceedings, Edward Cho vigorously denied the abuse charges, and at his criminal trial said he had not forced his daughter to have the abortions. On the witness stand, he called the charges “unthinkable,” the accusations “gross, heinous things.”

Edward Cho steadfastly maintained that the crimes never occurred. Speaking through an interpreter, he said at his sentencing that sending him to prison would be “a sad miscarriage of justice.”

His younger daughter, Edward Cho said, was “imagining these things. . . . She wants to get back at me, to get her revenge. . . . I have tried to be a good father.”

Edward Cho’s attorney, John Barnett, invoked the Salem witch trials, telling the jury at Cho’s criminal trial that Cho’s older daughters were “sophisticated, and they (were) cunning, and they knew what they wanted. And what they wanted was not vindication . . . hat they wanted was money. . . . There was not any sex . . . that didn’t happen.”

When he was out on bail awaiting trial, Edward Cho had assembled the two-hour home video of happy family occasions spanning a decade. He put it together “because he thought if the jury had an opportunity to see it, it would basically convince everybody that they had a happy family life and everything was normal,” said Erica Kim, his civil attorney.

But Barnett said he did not attempt to introduce the tape at the criminal trial because he felt the sequences showing the Cho children bowing to him--in one case in exchange for money--might be misinterpreted by jurors and damage Cho’s case.

On May 5, 1993, a jury found Cho guilty of 25 counts of sexual abuse against three of his children. He was acquitted of molesting his son.

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The civil lawsuit was filed on behalf of four of Cho’s six children: the two minors, who are now in foster care, a daughter who is in college and Young Sun Cho, who committed suicide after the lawsuit was filed.

The lawsuit asks for $13 million or whatever remains of Edward Cho’s real estate holdings. The children also sued Edward Cho’s wife for allegedly allowing the molestation to occur. Depositions in the case are now being taken.

Attorneys for the Cho estate and his widow have responded by blaming his two older daughters for a plot to acquire his wealth--a charge they deny.

But money--even a great deal of money--would not have been enough temptation for the Cho children to expose themselves to the shame that is experienced by victims of incest and sexual abuse, experts say.

“Dragging your family in, bringing such a suit is a big disgrace,” said Dr. Eun Mee Kim, associate professor of sociology at USC. “No amount of money can restore their name.”

Yet, to the day he was found hanging in his jail cell from a noose of braided, torn bedsheets, Edward Cho maintained that what happened to him could happen to any stern Korean parent.

“If I were to go to jail as a criminal,” he wrote in a letter to the Orange County United Korea Student Assn., “then our 30 million Koreans should all go to prison.”