A North Korean defector claims she was mugged by three black women outside Chicago’s Saks Fifth Avenue store last year – but white bystanders accused her of being racist when she tried to call police.
Yeonmi Park, 27, told Joe Rogan’s podcast that she was robbed of her wallet near the department store on Michigan Avenue during a wave of looting across the city last summer.
Park – who has been outspoken on ‘woke’ culture – claims she grabbed hold of one of the women and was trying to call police but bystanders intervened.
She claims about 20 people, many who she said were white, accused her of being racist for blaming the women for mugging her.
“They were telling me that the color of their skin doesn’t make them a thief,” Park said.
“Calling a black person a thief is racist.”
Park claims the woman she was trying to restrain started punching her.
“I tried to call the police and they prevented me from calling the police,” Park said.
“That’s when I was thinking, “This country lost it”.”
She added: “Anybody can become a murderer or a thief, but it just happened to be a black woman.”
Park claimed that if the same incident had happened in North Korea, the bystanders would have immediately helped the victim.“They’re not going to just, out of nowhere, scream: “You’re a racist’,” she said.
Park claimed in her interview with Rogan that authorities tracked down a suspect by reviewing surveillance footage and tracking her credit cards.
She suggested authorities would not prosecute them because there was so much crime in Chicago.
A report from CWB Chicago, however, said that Lecretia Harris, 29, was sentenced to two years in connection with the incident.
Harris pleaded guilty to unlawful restraint as part of a deal with prosecutors.
Park said that speaking out about such incidents had made her an ”enemy of the woke.”
Park says she was 13 when she and her family fled North Korea in 2007.
She lived in China and South Korea before coming to the US and attending New York’s Columbia University in 2016.
She has been outspoken of late regarding “woke” culture in the United States, saying it reminds her of the “censorship” of North Korea.
Park said in June she was shocked by the censorship Columbia University imposed on her by teaching her how to think.
“I literally crossed the Gobi Desert to be free and I realized I’m not free, America’s not free,” she told The Post at the time.
She also recently criticized Olympian Gwen Berry — accusing her of being spoiled for turning her back on the US flag.
*story by The New York Post
