Intern Commits Suicide After Suffering From Workplace Bullying at Korean Company

A young woman who worked as an intern at LF Corp in South Korea committed suicide after allegedly suffering from bullying by her co-workers.

Won So Yeon, 29, was working as an intern designer at the apparel company when she told a friend she was “getting ostracized at the company” and “wanted to kill herself,” reports Allkpop.

On Feb. 26 at approximately 8:30 a.m, Won was founded hanged in her bedroom apartment in Gaepodong by her younger brother, who lived with her.

The day before her death, Won wrote to her friend Song on Kakao messenger: “I’m being bullied. It must mean that I should just stop working at the company. This time they’re all saying so. I’m so sick of it. I just want to kill myself. It must mean that I should just die. If I just disappear it will be over.”

The National Forensic Service said they saw no signs of forced entry and determined her cause of death as suicide

Won’s mother, Park Geon Rim, told media outlet Insight: “My daughter killed herself because she was ostracized while she was working as an intern.”

Song told the media, “I thought she was just saying it because she was having a hard time as an intern but I could tell that So Yeon was really going through a tough time [at the company].”

Won’s family described her as bright and cheerful and were reportedly shocked when they found out she had been a victim of workplace bullying.

“If it’s true that So Yeon committed suicide because she was ostracized at the company, then we must expose what really happened so that a tragedy like this won’t occur again. We will try our best until the truth is revealed,” her family said in a statement.

Gathering evidence will be tough as Won did not leave a suicide note and her cell phone, which may contain critical information, has a passcode on it. A policeman said in the statement: “We haven’t received any documents from prosecution. If there is no legal evidence, then investigating [the case] is a bit hard.”

A representative from LF Corp said in a statement: “It hasn’t even been a month since [So Yeon] started working, and because she was an intern, we never gave any difficult work. From what we’ve gathered so far, there were no issues with her life at the company, and we’re currently looking carefully into the incident.”

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