Report: Rev. Sun Myung Moon Made Washington Times Editor Raise Secret Love Child

The Rev. Sun Myung Moon, who founded the Unification Church and Washington Times, had a love child and made the man who would become the Times’s founding editor and publisher raise the boy, according to a report today by Mother Jones.

Mother Jones reports that, Moon, who died in 2012 after decades of preaching celibacy and performing mass weddings, was hardly the model practicioner of his own sermons. In the 1960s, the magazine reports, Annie Choi, a woman with whom Moon was having an affair, became pregnant. Moon then arranged to have his deputy, Bo Hi Pak and Pak’s wife take custody of the child and raise it as their own, with the Paks taking rather extensive measures to pull off the scheme:

Mrs. Pak stuffed her midsection with an expanding mound of cloth diapers to mimic pregnancy. When Choi went into labor, Pak drove her to a Washington, DC, hospital and passed her off as his wife. The Paks were even listed as the child’s parents on his birth certificate.

The article also contains other steamy details about the early days of the Unification Church, including allegations that it becan as an “erotic cult” that required female acolytes to have sex with Moon several times before being inducted into the faith. Choi, who met Moon in Korea before moving to Washington in 1964 to attend Georgetown University, also says she was one of a group of concubines known as the “Six Marys.”

The son, Sam Park, is now 47 years old and lives with Choi in Phoenix. He has known that Moon was his father since he was 13, but is only know going public about it. Park and Choi also happen to be suing Moon’s estate for $20 million because when Moon was carving up his religious and media empires upon his retirement, he did not appoint Park to a senior leadership position in the Unification Church, as he allegedly promised to do.

Benjamin Freed

Staff Writer

Benjamin Freed joined Washingtonian in August 2013 and covers politics, business, and media. He was previously the editor of DCist and has also written for Washington City Paper, the New York Times, the New Republic, Slate, and BuzzFeed. He lives in Adams Morgan.