Did former President Yoon Suk Yeol cry with former First Lady Kim Kun Hee when the Constitutional Court upheld the impeachment motion against him? No, that's not true: The video is watermarked with "Kling AI 1.6," an AI-video generator. There was no evidence online to suggest that ex-President Yoon was crying when the Constitutional Court announced a unanimous decision to uphold the impeachment motion against him. Multiple news outlets reported that Yoon did not attend the trial in person when the Constitutional Court announced and watched the ruling from his official residence in Hannam-dong.
The claim appeared in a TikTok video (archived here) on April 4, 2025. The caption in the video reads, translated from Korean into English by Lead Stories staff:
I congratulate you on your dismissal. #YoonSukYeol #KimKunHee #Dismissal #President #ConstitutionalCourt
This is what the post looked like on TikTok at the time of writing:
(Source: TikTok screenshot taken on Wed Apr 9 01:15:06 2025 UTC)
A similar TikTok video (archived here) depicts an image of ex-President Yoon Suk Yeol wearing an orange prison uniform, crying next to the former First Lady Kim Kun Hee, who also wears the same outfit.
Both depictions were AI-generated videos and photos. The footage was watermarked with Kling AI 1.6 (archived here), a text-to-video AI model developed by Kuaishou, a Chinese short-video platform. A political humor bulletin board (archived here), found through a reverse Google image search, shows that the image of Yoon crying in an orange prison uniform, with the user describing the prompt they used on ChatGPT or Sora (OpenAI's video generation model) (archived here) to generate the image.
On April 4, 2025, the Constitutional Court unanimously upheld the impeachment motion (archived here) against President Yoon Suk Yeol, removing him from office. Yoon was not present during the announcement. In an article (archived here) by the Hankyoreh, Yoon reportedly "did not express his intention to 'accept defeat' until the very end."Former President Yoon stayed at his presidential residence (archived here) in Hannam-dong for several days after the Constitutional Court's decision, as there are no specific written regulations on when an impeached president must vacate the official residence. Yoon left the official residence and returned to his private apartment (archived here) in Seoul on April 11, 2025.
The Office of the President of the Republic of Korea website (archived here) was under maintenance after former President Yoon's impeachment. The website is now available, but there have been a few changes since the maintenance, as press release statements are no longer accessible.
