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Her passport was gone. So was her laptop. And when Lee Seo-yeon called the police asking them to collect her from a religious commune in Fiji, someone inside reportedly called the police back, said the first call had been a prank, and ripped the landline from the wall.
In December 2014, Seo-yeon was trying to leave the Grace Road Church community near Navua, Fiji. She had witnessed disturbing sermons and heard whispers of violence inside the commune. Eventually, she ran down the road in pajamas and flip-flops, found police, and made it to the Korean embassy, where she received an emergency passport home.
Seo-yeon would not be the only person to leave with disturbing allegations. Former members later described confiscated passports, families housed separately, exhausting unpaid work, restricted contact with the outside world, and a practice known as the “threshing floor,” in which congregants were struck as part of what Grace Road described as a biblical ritual.
Join Megan as she retraces Seo-yeon’s escape, examines the beliefs that brought hundreds of Grace Road followers to Fiji, and follows the arrests, convictions, deportation battles, and investigations that stretched across multiple countries.
Because Shin Ok-ju eventually went to prison—but Grace Road didn’t disappear. So what actually changed?
Podcast: Dark Asia with Megan