Kim Soo-hyun’s KakaoTalk Analysis Firm ‘Trubaum’ Called Out for Lack of Credibility: Once Said “Cho Joo-bin is a 40s Intellectual”
On March 31, Kim Soo-hyun held an emergency press conference at a hotel in Sangam-dong, Mapo-gu, Seoul, firmly denying allegations that he had dated Kim Sae-ron when she was a minor.
Previously, Kim Sae-ron’s family claimed that she had dated Kim Soo-hyun starting in 2015, when she was 15 and he was 27, based on messages, letters and other personal documents. However, Kim Soo-hyun countered that the relationship began in 2019, after Kim Sae-ron had become an adult. This debate intensified when KakaoTalk messages from 2016 and 2018 between the two containing affectionate expressions like “When can I fall asleep holding you?” were revealed.
In response, Kim Soo-hyun stated, “On YouTube channels, people are using KakaoTalk messages from 2016 to frame me as a pedophile and accuse me of grooming a minor. But the individuals conversing with the deceased in the 2016 and 2018 chats are different people. To prove this, I submitted the 2016 and 2018 messages provided by the bereaved family, as well as KakaoTalk messages I exchanged with acquaintances this year, to a professional linguistic analysis agency. As you can see, the agency concluded that the individuals in the 2016 and 2018 messages are not the same.”
He added, “The bereaved family manipulated the KakaoTalk logs. Not everything that is claimed becomes truth. Just as I went through a verification process for the messages, I will thoroughly verify every piece of evidence the family presents through an investigative body. If the family’s evidence is indeed truthful, I request that they submit all materials to the authorities and verify them through legal procedures.”
Despite presenting this so-called “scientific evidence”, public reaction was chilly. The verification agency cited by Kim Soo-hyun lacks established credibility. The agency is a private statement analysis center named Trubaum, led by Dr. Kim Mi-young, who holds a Ph.D. in criminal psychology and has served as a special investigative advisor for the Prosecutors’ Office and an expert in sexual crimes for the Supreme Prosecutors’ Office.
However, Dr. Kim Mi-young previously appeared on SBS’s “Unanswered Questions“, where she analyzed messages from Cho Joo-bin, the main perpetrator in the “Nth Room” case, and described him as “an intellectual man in his mid-40s”—an analysis that was widely criticized after Cho’s true identity was revealed.
In the KakaoTalk report presented by Kim Soo-hyun, it was written that there is a “92% confidence level” that the sender in the 2016 and 2018 chats was not Kim Soo-hyun. It also noted that “there is an 8% chance the conclusion could be wrong”.
Because Trubaum is a private company, not a national institution like the National Forensic Service, public trust in Kim Soo-hyun’s “KakaoTalk report” remains limited.