- I don't know what I did.
I don't know why he got this idea,
and I don't know why he decided that he could do this to me.
Did I somehow seem so vulnerable
so that a person saw me
and thought they could get away with this?
(gentle music)
My name is Eunbi Kim and I was born in Seoul, South Korea.
And I was raised in Maryland.
I'm a concert pianist, and I perform all over the country.
And I also co-founded a mentorship program
for women in music called 'Be Spoken'.
When I was 19, I spent a year off
between high school and college.
And during this time I had a job
at a phone store, working retail called Cingular.
And while I was working there,
I met a customer who was an executive
at a major tech company.
And through our conversation, he mentioned
that his company offers scholarship opportunities for women.
My first instinct was a little skeptical.
I looked it up on online.
I looked up who he was,
verifying that he did work at this company,
verified that there was a scholarship program
at this company.
And so my coworker, Donna,
who was like my work mom, she said, you know,
why don't you just meet him for a coffee,
and learn more about this opportunity.
You don't have anything to lose.
And so I did.
And he told me more about the program,
and the program entailed meeting with him,
who would serve as my mentor, and through our meetings,
we would work on my presentation
to bring in front of a panel who will decide
whether or not they would give me this scholarship.
But he said, you know, by meeting together,
and preparing this presentation together,
I think you have a really good chance
of getting this scholarship.
And so I met with him a few times,
and they were always
under the guise of working on the presentation,
and we did work on the presentation,
but I increasingly felt very uncomfortable.
I believe in our third or fourth meeting,
we met at the cafe inside a Nordstrom.
And he just finished looking at my resume
and making comments about things to fix.
And I felt very uncomfortable.
Like I felt maybe in that moment, I should tell him,
you know, I don't know how I feel anymore about this,
this mentorship program or, I was a little bit tense.
And...
at one point he said, he looked at me and he said,
you know, Eunbi, I like you.
This is how naive I was.
I thought, I was actually relieved,
because I thought he meant like, I like you as a person.
So that's what I, that's how I responded.
I like you too.
I'm glad that, you know, we're working together
on this mentorship, I'm really grateful
that you're helping me with this presentation,
and that you're so supportive
of me getting this scholarship.
So, that's how I responded.
But then later that day I got this email from him.
He wrote, I'm so glad that we told each other
we like each other because I'm ready for the next step.
And I want all of you.
So I just, I remember just reading, I want all of you.
And then it became very, very clear,
like, my intuition was correct
in how uncomfortable I was feeling,
but I was too scared to think they could be true.
I wasn't quite sure, I was very inexperienced.
So I wasn't certain.
And I remember telling my friend about it,
and he was outraged,
and he said, this is really wrong.
What he's trying to do is wrong.
And I remember saying, I think he's just lonely.
And I think he thought that I liked him.
And I think if I just tell him that I'm not interested
in the scholarship, then it'll be fine.
So I was hanging out with the same friend one night and,
the person from the tech company,
I'll call him Anthony, Anthony called.
And he called a few times and I didn't answer.
And my friend said,
you really have to just tell him straight up
that you're not interested in seeing him anymore
about anything or talking with him, or, you know,
just say that you don't want any more contact,
because he doesn't know.
And so I picked up the phone and I remember saying,
you know, I feel really uncomfortable,
and I'm not interested in, you know, communicating anymore.
And he said something like,
what do you mean?
And I said, well, I think there's been a misunderstanding.
And he said, what misunderstanding?
And I said, well,
I think from our last meeting and your email,
I realize now that you think I'm interested sexually,
but I'm not.
And you know, I'm sure it was just a misunderstanding,
but I just don't wanna talk to you anymore.
And I don't, I'm not interested.
And he said, well, you know,
this means that you're not gonna get the scholarship.
And I said, that's fine, that's all fine.
And I can just forget about this and it'll be fine.
I just don't want any more contact.
So, please don't contact me anymore.
And after we hung up, he called back,
and I picked up and he started saying things like,
you know, you were all over me.
You were flirting with me.
You knew exactly what was happening.
And then my friend took the phone.
He left the car.
I don't know what exactly he said, I didn't hear it.
But I think it was like, you better leave my friend alone.
She said she doesn't wanna talk to you.
You better leave her alone.
And then he didn't call me after that.
But then later that night he kept calling,
and this was back then where I think voicemails
didn't have like a limit.
So he left me like three or four voicemail messages
that went like at least five minutes long,
like hysterical screaming,
saying like, why did you have to do this?
What have you done?
You're gonna be sorry, all kinds of things.
But I still thought, I still thought
that by the next day it would just all blow over.
I thought it would be okay.
And then over the course of several days,
I got two calls from the police.
So the first call from the police,
it was a police officer saying, you know,
we received a complaint by Anthony
who said that you and your friend have been harassing him.
And I said, absolutely not.
I just told him to stop contacting me.
And we made no threats whatsoever.
I thought it cooled off.
And then I got another phone call
from a different police officer.
And it was a female police officer.
And she called me and asked, you know,
we've been getting several complaints
from this gentleman who claims
that you've been threatening him and harassing him.
And we just wanna talk with you
to hear your side of this story and hear what happened.
By this point, I told my mom what was happening.
The police officers,
there were two police police officers that came to our home
and asked me a lot of questions about what happened.
And you know, what this threat was,
what this private information was.
I showed him the business card he had given me.
And I said, you know, I did show my friend this.
And then the police officer said, yeah,
that's public information, you know?
And you know, and I told her everything that happened.
And I said, you know, I just, basically,
I just told him that he needs to leave me alone.
And that there's been a misunderstanding.
And you know, I'm not interested
in the scholarship opportunity or anything anymore.
And I showed her all the emails that he had sent me,
and I printed them and she's reading.
And she's like, who writes emails like this
to somebody they're offering a scholarship to?
I mean this is ridiculous.
When my mom and I told my dad what happened,
because this all sort of happened
in a very short period of time.
My dad was very, very angry,
and he said we need to contact the tech company
and report him because this is wrong.
He can't just keep harassing you
when you've said that you don't want
to have any further contact.
You're not interested in the scholarship.
With my dad kind of sitting next to me,
we called, I think the 1-800 number of this tech company.
And, like the number you call when you have like a problem
with your computer, because we just didn't know.
So I explained everything,
and they contacted his department,
and they opened up an internal investigation,
and their investigator contacted me.
I remember again, telling him everything,
forwarding all the emails,
explaining all the details of things that happened.
The last call I had with him,
he said something like Anthony denies all these claims.
I can't tell you what's gonna happen with him.
I'm not allowed to share anything, but, you know,
I think we're gonna close this case.
And I remember asking him, you know, do you have a daughter?
And he was quiet.
And then he said, yes.
And I said, well, I think you know I'm telling the truth.
And I think you know that he's done this before
and he's gotten away with it.
And this time he didn't get away with it.
And that's why he got so mad.
He didn't say anything, but we said bye.
And then that was that.
I obsessed a lot about what I did,
what I did to have caused this misunderstanding.
Because when I first confronted Anthony,
one of the first things he said was,
well, you were flirting with me and you were all over me.
And that made me extremely hyper aware
of my behavior for a long time.
And I think I carried a sense of guilt with that.
But this guilt came from feeling like I,
maybe I brought this upon myself,
like what this person did was wrong,
but maybe I should have known better
and I should have been clearer.
And I could have done this differently.
But the truth is, is that,
because you hear this kind of messaging a lot.
I mean, if you end up feeling this way,
after going through an experience such as this,
it's normal because you hear things in the media, like,
for the Atlanta Spa shootings, for example,
one of the early kind of narratives that were being formed
were, oh, these women were sex workers.
I think even if they were sex workers,
they did not deserve to be shot.
That's that shouldn't be the focal point.
And it took me a long time to realize, like,
even if I was, I wasn't flirting,
but even if I was, I can still say no,
and I can still refuse to have sex with somebody.
And I can tell somebody not to contact me anymore,
and I can set those boundaries freely,
and they should be respected.
Rather than feeling like
I need to make sure I behave a certain way
so that I don't invite this kind of rage
and violence towards me.
I feel a narrative
around these kinds of situations
is somehow, the woman did something wrong
or invited or tempted, or did something
to cause a kind of reaction from the man.
And certainly, I see this a lot
in the Korean American community,
especially sort of the religious community.
I grew up in a non-religious home,
but I think there's a lot of emphasis on women
having to behave a certain way, act a certain way,
be raised a certain way,
instead of focusing on men just behaving better.
So I guess my point is is that it's not,
the burden is not on you.
The burden should be on the person behaving badly,
and they should be held accountable.