Choi Tae-min

Choi Tae-min attached himself to a grieving president's daughter in 1974 and his family was still shaping South Korean government forty years later. He was born under Japanese rule, used several names, and moved between Buddhism, Catholicism and Protestantism before founding his own body, the Church of Eternal Life, which blended elements of all of them. He had six wives across his life. In 1974, after Park Chung-hee's wife was killed by a gunman aiming at the president, Choi wrote to their daughter Park Geun-hye, then twenty-two, saying her mother had appeared to him and asked him to help her; she received him, and he became her closest adviser and the head of a volunteer corps she chaired. The Korean intelligence service investigated him repeatedly for using that access to extort money from businessmen and officials, and Park Chung-hee is recorded as having questioned him personally and then allowed the relationship to continue. A United States diplomatic cable, later published, described him as a Rasputin figure with complete control over the young woman's body and soul. He died in 1994, and his fifth daughter Choi Soon-sil inherited the relationship. When Park Geun-hye became president in 2013, Choi Soon-sil was editing her speeches and pressuring conglomerates for money, and the scandal that followed removed a president from office in 2017. The family's influence spanned two Park presidencies and forty-three years. He was investigated at least six times without charge. His church survived him in reduced form. Korean reporting after 2016 established that his family had received money and favours across four decades, and the affair is the reason South Korea tightened its rules on unofficial advisers to the presidency.

• Lived: 1912 CE – 1994 CE
• Nationality: South Korean
• Roles: other