South Korean court orders agency to compensate adoptee over his mishandled adoption to US

SEOUL, South Korea — A South Korean court on Tuesday ordered the country’s biggest adoption agency to pay 100 million won in damages to a 48-year-old man for mishandling his adoption as a child to the United States, where he faced legal troubles after surviving an abusive childhood before being deported in 2016. However, the Seoul Central District Court dismissed Adam Crapser’s accusations against the South Korean government, which he saw as responsible for creating an aggressive, profit-driven adoption industry that carelessly removed thousands of children from their families during a child export frenzy in the 1970s and ‘80s. The civil case, tried for over four years, was the first in which a South Korean adoptee sued the country’s government and a domestic adoption agency over fraudulent paperwork and screening failures. Holt Children’s Service, which handled Crapser’s adoption to American parents in 1979, and South Korea’s Justice Ministry, which represents the government in lawsuits, did not immediately comment. Crapser’s lawyers have claimed that his case exposes how South Korea failed to protect its most vulnerable citizens from an adoption industry that sent thousands of children abroad every year to meet Western demands during its heyday, and how often those adoptions amounted to “child selling.” Crapser revealed his plans for his lawsuit during an interview with The Associated Press in 2019, in which he described being abused and abandoned by two different sets of U.S. parents and then being deported after run-ins with the law because none of his guardians filed citizenship papers for him.