SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — South Korean opposition leader Lee Jae-myung was acquitted on Monday on charges that he persuaded a witness to lie in court to understate Lee’s past criminal conviction, in a rare moment of relief from broad legal troubles that threaten to derail his political career.
Lee, a firebrand lawmaker and chairperson of the liberal Democratic Party, thanked the Seoul Central District Court judge after the ruling for “bringing back truth and justice.” The prosecution didn’t immediately say whether it would appeal.
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Supporters of South Korea's main opposition Democratic Party leader Lee Jae-myung react upon his arrival at a court in Seoul, South Korea, Monday, Nov. 25, 2024. (Kim Hong-ji/Pool Photo via AP)
South Korea's main opposition Democratic Party leader Lee Jae-myung arrives at a court in Seoul, South Korea, Monday, Nov. 25, 2024. (Kim Hong-ji/Pool Photo via AP)
South Korea's main opposition Democratic Party leader Lee Jae-myung, center, arrives at a court in Seoul, South Korea, Monday, Nov. 25, 2024. (Kim Hong-ji/Pool Photo via AP)
South Korea's main opposition Democratic Party leader Lee Jae-myung arrives at a court in Seoul, South Korea, Monday, Nov. 25, 2024. (Kim Hong-ji/Pool Photo via AP)
The same court earlier this month sentenced Lee to a suspended prison term for violating election law by making false public statements while running for president in the 2022 election, which he narrowly lost to conservative rival Yoon Suk Yeol.
If that conviction stands, Lee would be unseated as a lawmaker and barred from running for president in the next election, for which polls now show him to be the favorite. But Lee, who is facing five different trials over corruption and other charges, will likely challenge any guilty verdict he receives, and it’s uncertain whether the Supreme Court would decide on any of the cases before the vote in March 2027.
The more serious charges against Lee are allegations that he provided unlawful favors to private investors that reaped huge profits from two dubious development projects in the city of Seongnam, where he had been mayor. He is also indicted on charges that he pressured a local businessman into sending millions of dollars in illegal payments to North Korea while attempting to set up a visit to the country that never materialized.
The ruling Monday at the Seoul court was about whether Lee pressured a former employee of Seongnam into giving false testimony in court in 2019. The testimony was meant to downplay Lee’s 2002 conviction that, as a lawyer, he had helped a journalist of KBS television to impersonate a prosecutor to secure an interview with then-Seongnam Mayor Kim Byung-ryang over corruption suspicions regarding the allocation of new apartments.
Lee was later elected as Seongnam’s mayor in 2010 and held the job until 2018. While running for Gyeonggi provincial governor in 2018, Lee said he had been wrongly accused over the incident, prompting prosecutors to indict him on charges of violating election laws by making false statements during a campaigning period.
Lee was acquitted in 2019, partially based on the testimony of Kim Jin-sung, a Seongnam city employee, who had worked as Kim’s secretary and said the former mayor contemplated dropping charges against KBS to establish Lee as the main culprit in the incident.
Prosecutors indicted Lee on charges of instigating perjury in October last year, presenting transcripts of telephone conversations that they said showed him persuading the Seongnam city employee to testify in court that Lee was framed.
In acquitting Lee, the court ruled that evidence presented by prosecutors, including two telephone conversations between Lee and the Seongnam city employee in December 2018, was insufficient to prove that Lee had the intent to instigate perjury or knowledge about what the employee was planning to testify.
It said Lee’s conversation with the Seongnam employee was part of a normal process of checking what a witness remembers or knows, and that his request for a favorable testimony fell within a reasonable exercise of his right as a defendant as he fought charges of election law violations.
However, the court handed out a 5 million won ($3,560) fine to the Seongnam city employee, saying that he admitted to having no memory or knowledge of discussions between the former mayor and KBS over dropping charges. Han Dong-hoon, leader of Yoon's conservative People Power Party, posted on Facebook that he respects the court's ruling but questioned how “only the person who committed perjury is guilty and the person who suborned perjury is not guilty.”
Supporters of South Korea's main opposition Democratic Party leader Lee Jae-myung react upon his arrival at a court in Seoul, South Korea, Monday, Nov. 25, 2024. (Kim Hong-ji/Pool Photo via AP)
South Korea's main opposition Democratic Party leader Lee Jae-myung arrives at a court in Seoul, South Korea, Monday, Nov. 25, 2024. (Kim Hong-ji/Pool Photo via AP)
South Korea's main opposition Democratic Party leader Lee Jae-myung, center, arrives at a court in Seoul, South Korea, Monday, Nov. 25, 2024. (Kim Hong-ji/Pool Photo via AP)
South Korea's main opposition Democratic Party leader Lee Jae-myung arrives at a court in Seoul, South Korea, Monday, Nov. 25, 2024. (Kim Hong-ji/Pool Photo via AP)
WASHINGTON (AP) — Becky Pepper-Jackson finished third in the discus throw in West Virginia last year though she was in just her first year of high school. Now a 15-year-old sophomore, Pepper-Jackson is aware that her upcoming season could be her last.
West Virginia has banned transgender girls like Pepper-Jackson from competing in girls and women's sports, and is among the more than two dozen states with similar laws. Though the West Virginia law has been blocked by lower courts, the outcome could be different at the conservative-dominated Supreme Court, which has allowed multiple restrictions on transgender people to be enforced in the past year.
The justices are hearing arguments Tuesday in two cases over whether the sports bans violate the Constitution or the landmark federal law known as Title IX that prohibits sex discrimination in education. The second case comes from Idaho, where college student Lindsay Hecox challenged that state's law.
Decisions are expected by early summer.
President Donald Trump's Republican administration has targeted transgender Americans from the first day of his second term, including ousting transgender people from the military and declaring that gender is immutable and determined at birth.
Pepper-Jackson has become the face of the nationwide battle over the participation of transgender girls in athletics that has played out at both the state and federal levels as Republicans have leveraged the issue as a fight for athletic fairness for women and girls.
“I think it’s something that needs to be done,” Pepper-Jackson said in an interview with The Associated Press that was conducted over Zoom. “It’s something I’m here to do because ... this is important to me. I know it’s important to other people. So, like, I’m here for it.”
She sat alongside her mother, Heather Jackson, on a sofa in their home just outside Bridgeport, a rural West Virginia community about 40 miles southwest of Morgantown, to talk about a legal fight that began when she was a middle schooler who finished near the back of the pack in cross-country races.
Pepper-Jackson has grown into a competitive discus and shot put thrower. In addition to the bronze medal in the discus, she finished eighth among shot putters.
She attributes her success to hard work, practicing at school and in her backyard, and lifting weights. Pepper-Jackson has been taking puberty-blocking medication and has publicly identified as a girl since she was in the third grade, though the Supreme Court's decision in June upholding state bans on gender-affirming medical treatment for minors has forced her to go out of state for care.
Her very improvement as an athlete has been cited as a reason she should not be allowed to compete against girls.
“There are immutable physical and biological characteristic differences between men and women that make men bigger, stronger, and faster than women. And if we allow biological males to play sports against biological females, those differences will erode the ability and the places for women in these sports which we have fought so hard for over the last 50 years,” West Virginia's attorney general, JB McCuskey, said in an AP interview. McCuskey said he is not aware of any other transgender athlete in the state who has competed or is trying to compete in girls or women’s sports.
Despite the small numbers of transgender athletes, the issue has taken on outsize importance. The NCAA and the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committees banned transgender women from women's sports after Trump signed an executive order aimed at barring their participation.
The public generally is supportive of the limits. An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll conducted in October 2025 found that about 6 in 10 U.S. adults “strongly” or “somewhat” favored requiring transgender children and teenagers to only compete on sports teams that match the sex they were assigned at birth, not the gender they identify with, while about 2 in 10 were “strongly” or “somewhat” opposed and about one-quarter did not have an opinion.
About 2.1 million adults, or 0.8%, and 724,000 people age 13 to 17, or 3.3%, identify as transgender in the U.S., according to the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law.
Those allied with the administration on the issue paint it in broader terms than just sports, pointing to state laws, Trump administration policies and court rulings against transgender people.
"I think there are cultural, political, legal headwinds all supporting this notion that it’s just a lie that a man can be a woman," said John Bursch, a lawyer with the conservative Christian law firm Alliance Defending Freedom that has led the legal campaign against transgender people. “And if we want a society that respects women and girls, then we need to come to terms with that truth. And the sooner that we do that, the better it will be for women everywhere, whether that be in high school sports teams, high school locker rooms and showers, abused women’s shelters, women’s prisons.”
But Heather Jackson offered different terms to describe the effort to keep her daughter off West Virginia's playing fields.
“Hatred. It’s nothing but hatred,” she said. "This community is the community du jour. We have a long history of isolating marginalized parts of the community.”
Pepper-Jackson has seen some of the uglier side of the debate on display, including when a competitor wore a T-shirt at the championship meet that said, “Men Don't Belong in Women's Sports.”
“I wish these people would educate themselves. Just so they would know that I’m just there to have a good time. That’s it. But it just, it hurts sometimes, like, it gets to me sometimes, but I try to brush it off,” she said.
One schoolmate, identified as A.C. in court papers, said Pepper-Jackson has herself used graphic language in sexually bullying her teammates.
Asked whether she said any of what is alleged, Pepper-Jackson said, “I did not. And the school ruled that there was no evidence to prove that it was true.”
The legal fight will turn on whether the Constitution's equal protection clause or the Title IX anti-discrimination law protects transgender people.
The court ruled in 2020 that workplace discrimination against transgender people is sex discrimination, but refused to extend the logic of that decision to the case over health care for transgender minors.
The court has been deluged by dueling legal briefs from Republican- and Democratic-led states, members of Congress, athletes, doctors, scientists and scholars.
The outcome also could influence separate legal efforts seeking to bar transgender athletes in states that have continued to allow them to compete.
If Pepper-Jackson is forced to stop competing, she said she will still be able to lift weights and continue playing trumpet in the school concert and jazz bands.
“It will hurt a lot, and I know it will, but that’s what I’ll have to do,” she said.
Heather Jackson, left, and Becky Pepper-Jackson pose for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
Heather Jackson, left, and Becky Pepper-Jackson pose for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
Becky Pepper-Jackson poses for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
The Supreme Court stands is Washington, Friday, Jan. 9, 2026. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
FILE - Protestors hold signs during a rally at the state capitol in Charleston, W.Va., on March 9, 2023. (AP Photo/Chris Jackson, file)
