Columbia University Graduate Who Fled North Korea Says She Sees Similarities in America

Yeonmi Park speaks onstage during The Tory Burch Foundation 2018 Embrace Ambition Summit at Alice Tully Hall in New York City on April 24, 2018. Slaven Vlasic/Getty Images for Tory Burch Foundation

A North Korean defector who graduated from New York’s Columbia University drew an alarming similarity between what is being taught on the American campus and the propaganda of the Kim regime.

In 2007, 13-year-old Yeonmi Park and her mother fled across the border to China, where they were sold into slavery by sex traffickers. Two years later, with the help of Christian missionaries, they escaped to Mongolia across the Gobi desert before settling in South Korea.