Chung Yoo-ra

Chung Yoo-ra's university place brought down a president, a university and a conglomerate's heir. She was a competitive equestrian and the daughter of Choi Soon-sil, the confidante with no official position who was found to have been editing President Park Geun-hye's speeches and steering state decisions. In 2015 she was admitted to Ewha Womans University, one of the most competitive in South Korea, on an athletic route created for her; her grades were adjusted, her attendance waived, and she is reported to have written on social media that money is ability and to have told her critics to blame their parents. That sentence did more damage than the policy scandals. South Korean politics runs on the belief that the examination is fair - that the hierarchy of universities, and therefore of careers, is earned by children who study rather than inherited - and the admission was proof that it was not. The investigation widened from there. Samsung was found to have paid for her dressage horses and training in Germany, which is what turned a favour into bribery: Lee Jae-yong, the heir to the group, was convicted of it. Ewha's president resigned and its admissions staff were prosecuted. Park was impeached in December 2016 after weeks of candlelit demonstrations, removed by the constitutional court in March 2017 and later imprisoned; Choi was sentenced to eighteen years. Chung herself was extradited from Denmark in 2018 to give evidence and faced charges over the admission. She was a rider in her twenties, and the scandal that removed a head of state was built on where she went to college.

• Lived: 1996 CE – ?
• Nationality: South Korean
• Roles: other