Consequences

An international hunt leads to a national police investigation. As the truth is finally revealed, the investigation takes an unexpected turn.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Did you ever read the tug forums? Did you ever
go there yourself? A little bit? But I tried not
to read too much because it was Taboo's friend from Stanford,
Sean Limb, was living in Korea when the Tajing forums
started accusing Tableau of lying. He remembers what it felt
like at the height of the scandal. But what what
was it like when it was really happening? What was
going on there? Like you ever been in a room

(00:24):
of crazy people, Like there's just the energy of it,
like that weird electricity of people who are volatile and
you don't know, like if they're going to break things
or hit you or you're going to get paunched. It
felt like that in there, Like these people were so
angry from vice and I heart I'm Dexter Thomas and

(00:51):
this is authentic. Episode five Consequences. In just three months,
the tai Jano forum had exploded to more than a
hundred thousand members. Users were posting daily, sometimes hourly, and

(01:16):
the crusade had moved offline. Members were finding anyone even
remotely connected to Tableau and harassing them, trying to find
information that might prove the Tableau was lying. Tableau's family
and friends were being docked, and Tableau himself was under
intense scrutiny, not just from the forum members, but from
the public. A lot of people, even some of the

(01:37):
same people who probably enjoyed seeing Tableau on TV. We're
starting to buy into the theory the Tableau was lying
about his past. On August two, what becomes Tajanio's Day
facto leader by this point, wrote this post saying Tableau
and his family now cannot run away and they are
broken down. Now we need to strike and smash on

(02:00):
the back of their heads with a bird stick. Tableau
says that his label offered to introduce him to a lawyer,
but he'd have to pay for it himself. He decided
to leave the label altogether. So now with no backing,
no manager, no pr rep, Tableau was on his own,
up against tens of thousands of anonymous forum members who

(02:22):
were determined to take him down. But it wasn't just
the Internet. You couldn't even turn on the evening news
without seeing his name flash across the screen, and people
were starting to wonder if Tijano was right. It was
starting to look like an all out war. But it's
hard to call what Tableau was doing fighting. It was
more like complying. When Tajo demanded his school documents, he

(02:46):
released them. When a major news channel said they were
going to do an investigative documentary and they wanted to
interview him, he agreed. When the documentary aired in October,
people watched him cry and try to explain that he
really did go to Stanford. They also watched Tajeno members
explain what it was like investigating Tableau. It's like a game.

(03:10):
It's addictive, it's fun, like being a detective in a
mystery novel. Some members started calling themselves online players, like
this whole thing was a video game and the objective
was to catch Tableau. The media had given Tableau a
forum to defend himself, but that just added fuel to

(03:31):
the fire. After that documentary aired, Tajanio membership doubled to
almost two hundred thousand. Later that same October, the Prosecutor
General in Korea pushed for the national police to finally
get answers. But the thing is, the police had already
been aware of this. Tajen you know members have been
spamming government websites since August, pushing for law enforcement to

(03:53):
get involved. This, combined with the growing pressure from the
public at large, finally got the police to start asking questions.
So Tableau went and got himself that lawyer because it
was clear that this was about to get very serious.
It wasn't about his fame or his music anymore. Tableau
was now being investigated by the National police for forgery

(04:17):
of a private document, and Korean law's interpretation of forgery
is important here because it's not just about, say, the
financial harm you do to someone if you forge his
signature on a check. Korean law is extremely concerned about
the public's ability to trust private documents like contracts or
bank statements or diplomas. So even if Tableau hadn't used

(04:38):
his credentials for a job application or anything, the act
of flaunting a fake diploma around on national television in
the Korean government size is causing harm to society's trust
that is punishable by law. If Tableau was found guilty,
that could land him in prison for up to seven
and a half years. This is not this is not

(05:00):
see killer, This is just a cyber deformation. This is
so in He was an officer in the cyber crime
unit in South Korea's National police force. He says the
decision to investigate Tableau was unprecedented in Korea. There had
been times when the national police got involved in forgery cases,
but this time the police were intervening in a private

(05:21):
citizen's life at the behest of an online mob. But
I got a call from Brugal House at the time,
so everybody watching these cases. Officers got a call from
the Blue House, which is the official residence of the
President of South Korea, kind of like the White House
in the United States. They let him know that this
thing needed to be done by the book, no favoritism

(05:42):
and no delays. I mean, is there any pay just
to ask me to investigate correctly and finish quickly. I mean,
just to put it into perspective, picture the White House
telling the FBI to investigate whether Kanye West really went
to Chicago University because a bunch of people I read
it said he didn't, and then personally calling the lead

(06:04):
investigator to say, hey, you better do this right. It
wouldn't happen, not just because he's a private citizen. But well,
like I said in the last episode, who cares if
a rapper lied about their diploma? Well, in Korea, a
lot of people cared and like I mentioned, lying about
your diploma is a crime there. And now it was

(06:26):
officers suze job to get the answers that the whole
country was waiting for. Why do you think you were
chosen for the case? Our producer Stephanie talked to officers,
so my my bost think I'm the smartest because at
the time I'm the only one who has a cybersecurity

(06:47):
degrete and certification. Officers first got into computers in the nineties.
At first, it was mostly a hobby. He did get
himself a gig making websites for K pop fan magazines,
but that wasn't satisfying to him. What he really liked
was cybersecurity, so we started studying that and in the
mid two thousands, when Korea's National Police Force announced they

(07:08):
were looking for cybersecurity experts, he applied and got the job.
By the time the agency picked up Tableau's case in
twenty he'd been there for a couple of years and
he had the most experience in the entire cyber crime unit,
so it was only natural that the case would go
to him. On an early September morning, Tableau arrived for
his scheduled interrogation at the National Police Agency headquarters in Seoul.

(07:32):
Officers subb spent weeks doing research. He'd collected every document
he could get his hands on, and he knew he'd
be able to catch Tableau in any lie. He also
knew that Taijuanyo and the press would be watching, so
he had Tableau come on a Sunday when the front
office was mostly empty and the press was less likely
to be snooping around, And even then they had him

(07:55):
come in the rear entrance just in case. Officers saw
and a couple other investor gators walk Tableau and his
lawyer into a small office. They all sat down, Tableau
on one side, Officers on the other. They got right
into it, no small talk. Officers started off with the
first line of interrogation pick Korean, English, Chinese, and he's

(08:24):
one of the biggest parts of Tagos conspiracy hinge on
how smart Tableau is or isn't. This meant the officers
would have to test his intelligence, and he figured the
easiest way to do this would be to compare Tableau's
actual abilities to the things he'd done on TV. And
officers had a particular baseline in mind all right, now,

(08:44):
this is one of the funniest shows. In two thousand seven,
Tableau went on a variety show where the hosts had
him play a game It's It's a it's a Korean
food with Scott. He was pretty simple. The hosts would
write down some phrases in Korean and then they'd have
Tableoo described that phrase in all the different languages that

(09:05):
he said he knew. He does English a lot of
stuff in it, and French in l a moon or more,
and Chinese, and on the panel their native English, French
and Chinese speakers to judge how well he's doing. His

(09:28):
Chinese is okay and his French is not so hot.
But everyone sort of makes a joke about it, because,
after all, this is a game show. The guy who's
judging Tableau is English. Is this Australian comedian and he's
got this kind of dry humor and he starts critiquing Tableau.
There he gives his caveat, saying that lots of Koreans

(09:53):
who hang out with foreigners probably have the same ability,
but that all things considered, Tableau speaks pretty good English.
So he's obviously joking here, and people start laughing because well,
Tableau speaks perfect English. This wasn't a particularly notable appearance.
People had seen Tableau speak English before, and he was
now a regular on TV. A couple of years later, though,

(10:15):
as the scandal was in full swing, Tajanio had gone
back to any recording they could find to scrutinize everything
Tableau said on TV, including this show, searching for any
evidence of lies. And they didn't think any of this
language stuff was funny at all. A post by Truth
is out there on October fift said, overall, his English

(10:39):
skills are really not good, and it's logical to doubt
whether he really was able to finish his graduate level
education and major in English lit. There was so much
talk on the Tajano forums about Tableau's language skills that
officers decided this might be an opportunity to catch him
in a lie. The thing was, tablet was very confident

(11:02):
about his English ability, but French and Chinese he hadn't
used those in forever. So they actually had me speak miraculously.
I just like like speaking in tongues. It came back
to me for that moment. He looked very smart. I
mean he didn't probably if his I one up, but

(11:27):
we know, we knew if he's very smart. They was
just incredible that they had put in so much time.
It spanned every like it spanned everything from my transcript,
my degree, to each member of my family, um, my
mom's childhood, my dad's childhood, every place they worked at

(11:50):
moved to every conspiracy theory involving anybody they know, my siblings,
with my friends I had to verify like kids I
went to school with, gave dug into like my ex
girlfriends and stuff like just it was just incredible the
sheer amount of things I had to talk to the

(12:13):
police about. The interrogation went on for hours. I think
it was very deep cold to sit sit a long
time in those kind of chair, and then I think
his tires. So sometimes around lunchtime, officers called for a break.
Everyone stood up and walked out of the room to
get lunch. Tableau excused himself to go to the bathroom,

(12:35):
so also had to go, so he followed him. It
was a tiny bathroom, so it was a little awkward,
but the interrogation was officially paused until this break was over.
So opposite, I wasn't gonna say anything to Tableau. He
was just gonna do his thing and leave. But then
Tableau looked at him. He told me in the bathroom,

(12:55):
doesn't this and if I to a side, he has
the officers. So with this end, if I commit suicide,
he has kind of intention that you want to commits
outside to finish the order of stuff. I said that,
That's what he said, Really, who I remember that? Really?

(13:22):
Do you remember was there in a point where you
were thinking about that. It's quite possible that there's uh
certain things I may have like compartmentalized. I may have
hidden it away somewhere. I don't know, but I'm genuinely
shocked that that happened, or that I said that two

(13:45):
the police. I don't remember like trying to kill myself
for or like planning it. I don't remember it. I
just I don't. I mean, like I truly don't remember it.
Tableau and I hadn't really talked about this time period

(14:06):
until this point. This was the time that Tableau had
told me that he was barely leaving his house. Whenever
I pressed him for more details about his daily life
back then, what kind of things he was thinking and doing,
he'd give me this caveat that he doesn't really know
that anything he's telling me is second hand. And my
wife tries not to talk about this because this is

(14:27):
a this is like pain for her as well. She
did say to me that it wasn't like I was
completely broken down or anything. It just at times felt
like I didn't have a soul, almost like that I
was just I had been hollowed out and I was

(14:50):
there but not really. She said that, yeah, like it
was on this stiff my soul had like just disappeared,
and I was just sort of like doing things like
on autopilot. I gotta tell you the truth. And honestly,
at times like I was confused whether or not I
had dementia. Like I I literally said to myself, did

(15:13):
I imagine going to Stanford? Like? Did I imagine my
life before all of this? You seriously thought that, yeah,
because if the entire world is saying that that's what happened, like,
how am I supposed to make sense of that? I

(15:37):
gotta say here that when Tableau first told me he
didn't remember this period of his life, I was a
little skeptical. Maybe he didn't want to talk about it,
or more specifically, maybe he just didn't want to talk
about it with me. But when I told Tableau about
him asking the cops for advice about killing himself, the
look on his face told me immediately that this man

(15:57):
was not faking. His face dropped. He was shocked. One
of the few things Tableau had through this entire process
was the sense of who he was, his sense of self.
Even as he started to lose his grip on basic
things like where he lived and what he'd accomplished, he'd
never lost hold of his core. Not Tableau the rapper

(16:20):
or Dan the Stanford graduate, but Tableau Daniel Lee, the son,
the friend, the father, the person who would never ever
waver in that duty. He'd convinced his family this, and
maybe more importantly, he'd convinced himself. But in that room
with me, he found out it wasn't true. He wasn't

(16:43):
as brave as he told himself he was. And for
a few seconds, it was like he wasn't looking at
me anymore. He was kind of looking past me, like
there was a mirror on the other side of the room,
and and looking at it, he was realizing how much
closer to the edge he was then he'd been willing
to admit to himself in the bathroom. He looks like

(17:07):
he wanted to cry. Yeah, I charged him because I
don't know it. You only have to tell me the trust.
After they took a break, officers said he didn't really
notice any other sign of emotion from Tableau. When they
got back to the room and started the questioning again,
Tableau seemed to snap back into focus. He straight faced

(17:28):
and just centered on getting through all the questions. In
the end, the interrogation took about eight hours. Once I
decided he had gotten everything he could from Tableau, everyone
went home for the night. The next day started making calls.
He had to take every statement Tableau made line by
line and verify if it was true or not. He

(17:49):
also collected more documents. We have to find if this
document is facal on us, so we sent this documents
to other organizations. They sent the important documents to government
forensics labs for verification. They were not going to let
anything slip to the cracks. Once they got them back,
they analyzed everything. The entire process took about a month,

(18:13):
then getting the finals, and then I kind of had
a confidence that he graduated the stampo APTI analyzing or
In October of the police were ready to announce their
findings at a press conference. They said the Tableau's paperwork
was all legit. The Tableau's claimed that he graduated from

(18:37):
Stanford in three and a half years with a bachelor's
and a master's degree was true. Tableau head never lied.
Tijanyo was wrong. It should have ended there, but it didn't.
That's after the break In October, the Korean National Police

(19:17):
Agency announced it after a thorough investigation, they had found
no evidence that Tableau had lied about his degree. For
a lot of people, this announcement was enough. If the
highest law enforcement agency in the country said he was innocent,
then maybe Tableau really was who he said he was.
But now tai Jano had a problem. They had pushed

(19:37):
hard for an investigation in the Tableau and this was
not the outcome they wanted. That wasn't the problem, though.
The police announced they were turning their focus away from
Tableau and toward the people who were making these posts
about Tableau. Taijano's request for an investigation backfired in the
worst possible way. Now they were the target. Why did

(19:59):
you decide to do that? Why did you decide to
pursue the Tajo Because we have to investigate every cases
we got, so I got the post cases from Tajanio side,
and then so of course I have to do my duty.
Tableau wanted the police to look into the people who

(20:19):
had been harassing him in his family for months, and
his words now held more weight given that he had
been officially cleared of what the police now considered to
be bogus charges. His lawyer had already printed out user
names and screenshots of what he considered to be the
worst offenders. He handed everything over the police and was
ready to sue for defamation. In Korea, defamation is a

(20:41):
crime that's punishable by up to seven years in prison,
about the same amount of time that Tableau had been
facing for forgery, and the police took this justice seriously,
and so this kicked off the investigation into ta Janyo.
Police had looked into online harassment cases before, but they
usually didn't go anywhere. Before this, things that happened online

(21:02):
still kind of felt like they were separate from the
real world. But Toujanyo was clearly very real, and this
had been a highly public case, so there was a
chance that this could go differently. Within hours of the
police announcing the investigation. Chajano responded on the forum not

(21:24):
to apologize, but to go on the offensive. On October nine,
someone with the user name ce dave Lee made a
new post with all sorts of new accusations against the police.
It read, the police didn't follow their operating procedure rules.
It seems suspicious. We urged the police to conduct the

(21:45):
fair investigation. We were already in the middle of hiring lawyers,
and we promised to actively react to the investigation. Even
they told us doing the investigation, we're going to have
lost against you guys. You guys, Detectiveical not go to Jay.
They asked cut the subillance coming out to Video Equity

(22:06):
so that they can use that evidence to fight a
la go against the police. Detective. So you're kind of
scared because they are threatened us. It seems like not
a good idea to harass the police when they're investigating you, right,
like kep, you kept investigating, Yeah, Officers. Began his investigation

(22:29):
by trying to track down some of the real names
of people posting on Tajanio. In order to do this,
he needed access to the data on Neighbor, the platform
Tajanio was on because to make an account on Neighbor,
you used to have to provide a government ID number
when you signed up, so even if you're publicly anonymous,
Neighbor knew who you were. But Neighbor wasn't willing to
just hand over all that personal data for every single member,

(22:52):
so officers so narrowed it down to a smaller list
of the really egregious posters and he got a warrant
for them. Were handed over those addresses and phone numbers,
and officers started calling people up and pretty quickly new
form threads started popping up with people nervously talking about
being called into the police station. Then, just days later,

(23:15):
tajen Your members logged into their accounts to find that
the entire tajen Your forum was gone. The police had
discovered that what becomes the Star of ta Janyo had
used a fake government I D to sign up for
his account, and in Korea that is illegal. At this point,

(23:35):
police wanted all the data, and Neibor agreed to give
it to them. Sus says he was about to request
another warrant to get the site shut down, but Neighbor
did it for them. At this point, Neighbor figured that
it was in their best interest to comply with the investigation,
but it was never going to go that easy. A
few hours later, a new form showed up. This one

(23:58):
was called naturally ta Janyo two, and people started flooding
back in. Even some of the old posts were intact
because a forum member had saved them. This was not
a shutdown, this was a hiccup in the operation. Ta
Janyo was back on in full force, but the celebration

(24:21):
didn't last for long. The police were pulling in members
one by one for questioning, and of course, the word
got out if a four member went dark for too long,
people started wondering if they've been called in and what
happened to them and who was next. In the span
of days, the forms moved morphed for righteous euphoria into anger,

(24:45):
into a slow collective freak out, and they were struggling
to stay focused. How many user names do you think
you went through before you started to narrow into the
people who were worst? More than it took officers months

(25:08):
to go through all those user names, but by January
two thousand eleven, he finally narrowed it down to a
list of people he thought he could charge with an
actual crime, and how did you decide who was going
to be the worst of the people who you're going
to investor? I mean the frequency, how often they post

(25:28):
pedure and how sedos the contents for without posting, and
then if this is so to or not. At its height,
Tanjanio had had around two hundred thousand members, but after
the shift in public sentiment and the shutdown of the
original forum, and especially the investigation, the ranks were dropping.

(25:51):
Tajanio still had tens of thousands of members, but they
were fighting what was starting to look like a losing battle.
In January two tho eleven, after three months of interrogating
Tago members, the police announced the results. Hollow Eleven people

(26:16):
were being charged with defamation. This announcement happened in January,
but it would take more than a year to finalize
everything in court. But before I could go to trial,
two people came forward and apologized. One person even got
their family involved. It was a girl and her dad
showed up to my house. I was like, please, please,

(26:40):
don't come here. Since Tableau was the person who brought
the charges, he also had the power to rescind them,
and I kept telling him to leave and Eventually he did.
I had the security come up and you know, tell
him he can't be here. But then as he left,
you know, like this this father looked like he you know,

(27:00):
he wasn't doing well in life, you know, and this
was just another huge problem on his heart. I actually
ran out and he said that his daughter had been
struggling with like like skin problems, and um, this like
drove her crazy, and she like regrets it, but that

(27:23):
was the reason for her anger. It's just in that moment,
like the way that person looked, like the way that
person's father looked, I just you know, I'm fighting this,
like I'm I'm fighting this person. I let that person
off the hook. Another person also apologized to Tableau, and

(27:46):
he agreed to remove them from the prosecution list too.
The other nine people stood trial for defamation. All of
them were found guilty. The ones who posted about Tableau's
family got the harshest sentences. Most of them got probabed,
but three of them were sentenced to eight to ten
months in prison. This was a landmark case. Korea already

(28:08):
had laws on the books against defamation, but it was
difficult to bring that to an actual conviction. In part
because the justice system tended to air on the side
of caution when it came to freedom of speech. But
attitudes about online harassment had shifted, and Tableau's case was
extremely public. No other defamation case had gotten this kind

(28:30):
of attention. This wasn't exactly a win for officers, So
there was still some unfinished business important the guys. When
the original Tajanio forum was shut down, what becomes had
more or less disappeared, but officers so was still looking

(28:50):
for him. I still remember he used to living in
the Chicago. I found his name, and I found his
selfhone number, and I quart he from Korea And what
did he say? That's next time? Unauthentic. Authentic is a

(29:21):
production of Vice Audio and I Heeart podcast Network, produced
and reported by Stephanie Karayuki, Minjiko Hate Osbourne and myself
with Janet Lee, Stephanie Brown, and Sam Egan. Sound design
and original music composition by Kyle Murdoch, with additional support
from Natasha Jacobs. Our supervising producer is Janet Lee, editing

(29:44):
from Lacy Roberts, fact checking by Minji Ku and Nikole Pasuka.
Our Executive producer and VP Advice Audio is Kate Osbourne
from I Heeart Podcast Network, executive producers Nicky e. Tor
and Lindsay Hoffman. Thinks also to NBC for the documentary
Tablet Goes to Stanford and the show Hotel I'm Dexter Thomas.

(30:07):
Make sure to subscribe wherever you get your podcast so
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