Kang Hyesu

Kang Hyesu is a colleague and friend of Kim Jiyoung whose experiences at their marketing company reveal how gender inequality shapes both workplace opportunity and the risks women face there. She is among the women who respond collectively when hidden cameras are discovered in the office restroom, helping notify staff, search for cameras, and report the case to police.

Workplace and friendship

Hyesu and Kim Jiyoung joined the company at the same time, along with two male colleagues. The four had become close, and both women had established good reputations. Older employees joked that the men had a steeper learning curve than the women, while the men were assigned easier clients. When the company created a planning team as a more proactive route to long-term client work, Jiyoung expressed interest, but the selected members were three capable managers and the two men from their cohort. Hyesu and Jiyoung, left behind despite their strong work, felt robbed.

The promotion changed the group’s daily rhythm. A busy group chat fell quiet; coffee breaks, lunches, and bar nights stopped; and encounters in the hallway narrowed to awkward nods. As the eldest of the four, Hyesu finally organized a night out to address the distance. The gathering began on a serious note when she disclosed that a brief office romance had ended and asked her friends for consolation, while also asking them not to identify the person or repeat what she had shared.

The restroom spy-camera scandal

After Kim Jiyoung had left the company, Kang Hyesu took a day off during the busy season and visited her, bringing baby clothes, diapers, and lip gloss. The gifts made the visit feel personal and ordinary, but Hyesu also carried news of a serious workplace scandal: cameras had been hidden in the cubicles of the women’s restroom. The suspected installer was a security agent in his twenties, employed after the building’s security company had replaced its older guards with younger staff about two years earlier. The cameras had been installed the previous summer, after Jiyoung’s departure, a detail that eased her immediate fear that she might have been recorded while still leaving her to imagine how easily any woman at work could have been targeted.

The discovery came through a chain of distribution and recognition rather than a prompt report to the women in the images. The security agent had uploaded pictures to a pornography website. A male section manager at Jiyoung’s company, who belonged to the site, recognized the restroom’s layout and the women’s clothing and understood that the pictures showed his colleagues. Instead of contacting police or warning the women, he shared the images with male coworkers. The number of people who circulated them, the length of time this continued, and the extent of their conversations about the pictures remained unknown.

One male employee who had seen the pictures urged a female coworker, with whom he was secretly involved, to use a restroom on another floor. His warning made her suspicious; she pressed him until he disclosed what had happened. Because their relationship was secret, she felt unable to report the case to the authorities and instead confided in her closest colleague, Hyesu. Hyesu responded by notifying every woman in the office. The women searched the restrooms together and reported the case to police, turning private warnings and uncertainty into collective action.

The police investigation involved both the security agent and employees who had circulated the images. For Hyesu, however, the consequences continued beyond the report. She told Jiyoung that she was seeing a therapist and that ordinary encounters could make her fear strangers had recognized her from the pictures. Many of the women at the company were taking medication or receiving therapy; one employee had overdosed on sleeping pills and required medical treatment, while two assistant section managers from General Affairs had left. Hyesu’s account made clear that the harm did not end when the cameras were found: the uncertainty over who had seen and shared the pictures persisted among the women.

Institutional response and collective resistance

Hyesu also described how the company’s response shifted attention from the women’s demands toward protecting its reputation. The accused employees argued that they had not installed cameras or taken the pictures, presenting their role as merely viewing material available online; Hyesu stressed that they had nevertheless circulated the images and failed to recognize their complicity. The company director resisted the victims’ requests for an official apology, preventive measures, and punishment, and urged that the matter be contained rather than allowed to damage the company’s standing.

Kim Eunsil, the team leader, sought advice from a women’s organization alongside victims prepared to challenge that response. She was also preparing to leave and start a business with some of the female staff. Hyesu’s account thus links the women’s collective action inside the office to a possible departure from an institution unwilling to meet their demands. Eunsil also pointed out that the company had not held the sexual-harassment training required for its staff, making the director’s wish to close the case quietly part of a broader failure to address workplace safety.

The Scandal’s Personal Aftermath

Kang Hyesu described trying to appear well by laughing with people while privately feeling that strangers might recognize her from the images. Even a stranger’s eye contact could prompt that fear, and a smile could seem like mockery. The violation therefore altered how she read ordinary social encounters, not only how she felt about the workplace. She said she did not think she could trust men again—a consequence sharpened by the accused employees’ insistence that they had merely viewed images online, as though circulating them carried no responsibility. Her account shows how the harm persisted in the gap between what the men claimed to have done and what the women had to live with afterward.