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Queens Housekeeper: Buddhist Monk Kept Me As A Slave
By
Garth Johnston
Published Aug 8, 2011
Modified Aug 8, 2011
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By
Garth Johnston
Published Aug 8, 2011
Modified Aug 8, 2011
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Think your job is bad? A Korean Buddhist monk and his family have been accused of keeping an immigrant woman prisoner for 12 years in their homes in Queens and forcing her to be their "slave," the Times reports. 60-year-old Oak-Jin Oh says that the family patriarch, Soo Bok Choi, smuggled her into the country "under the cover of night" after finding her through an employment placement agency in South Korea, confiscated her passport, made her work 14-hour days without pay, deprived her of medical care and "'usually' refused to give her a bedroom or a bed to sleep on."
According to her lawyer, Oh was only able to escape the family's clutches after a friend of the family took pity on her. Before that, her recently filed suit claims she had spent the past 12 years shuttled between the family's houses around Queens, including in Elmhurst, Little Neck, Bayside, Flushing and Whitestone. She also says she was forced to work at the family's Buddhist temple, which they operated out of their Little Neck house until about 2001. According to the suit, the Choi family kept Oh in line by "taking her passport, withholding her pay, limiting her contact with others, monitoring her telephone calls and generally isolating her from the rest of society." In addition, the Choi patriarch allegedly threatened to report her to immigration or have her killed if she didn't behave.
Sadly this is not the only case of forced servitude in the area in recent memory—and we aren't even talking about the kinky kind. Earlier this year a Brooklyn man was accused of raping and imprisoning a 27-year-old woman he met online, a priest in Queens sued last year over "slave wages" he was paid at an ashram there, and in 2007 a Long Island couple was found guilty of enslaving and torturing two Indonesian woman who they had helped smuggle into the country.
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Garth Johnston
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