A North Korean defector has claimed that Kim Jong Un takes time each year to select 25 virgin girls to entertain him personally in a disturbing ‘pleasure squad.’
According to The Star, Yeonmi Park, 30, alleged that officials ‘visit every classroom and even go to school-yards in case they missed someone that was pretty’ in their horrifying searches for young women.
After undergoing medical examinations to check they are still virgins, the women then ‘have to learn how to please these men—that’s their only goal,’ she said.
According to the outspoken YouTuber, Kim’s officials select women based on social status and attractiveness, reserving those deemed the most attractive for the despot himself, with ‘less stunning members… ordered to cater to the needs of lower-ranking generals and politicians’.
With rare insight, she claimed the ‘Pleasure Squad’ is broken into three divisions: one specialising in giving massages, another in entertaining through song and dance, and a third prepared to be ‘sexually intimate with the dictator, and other men’.
Ms Park fled the regime as a teenager and was allegedly human trafficked in China before ‘escaping hell’ to reach America, where she has found success through her memoir and podcast appearances, often comparing life in the ‘Hermit Kingdom’ to the US.
Ms. Park claims she was fortunate to avoid selection for Kim’s harem due to her ‘family status’, suggesting ‘they eliminate any girls with family members that have escaped from North Korea or have relatives in South Korea or other countries’.
But she said for many, life in North Korea is so dire that parents will happily allow their daughters to be recruited in the hope they might enjoy a better quality of life.
The defector, who has amassed more than one million subscribers on YouTube with her tales of life inside the dictatorship, claimed that the luxury lifestyle is often short-lived, with women cast out when they reach their mid-twenties.
Some will be married off to Kim’s personal bodyguards, she claimed, adding that ‘there are rumours’ that the leader’s ‘wife was originally in the Pleasure Squad’.
Ms Park claimed the system had evolved as a family tradition, with the incumbent leader preferring more ‘slender’, taller and ‘western-looking’ women while his father, Kim Jong-Il had a penchant for round-faced women who would not dwarf him, standing at just 5ft 2″.
Kim Il-Sung, father to Jong-Il, ‘had a more traditional taste in women’, meanwhile, with his own group called the Pochonbo Electronic Ensemble, Ms. Park said.
In 2010, one defector told Marie Claire magazine that she was just 15 when two men in uniforms took her from her classroom at school without warning.
Mi-Hyang claimed they made a record of her background, in line with Ms Park’s account, and asked her if she had had sex before.
After passing their tests, she said she was expected to spend a decade with Kim Jong-Il as part of his Kippumjo, or Pleasure Squad.
She claimed she was not allowed to speak to her family during that time and knew that she would be executed if she tried to escape.
Mi-Hyang maintained that Kim Jong-Il never made sexual advances on her as a teenager, but would hold her hand.
She was convinced had she stayed in the role through to adulthood, he would have.