Joong-Do remains one of the most straight-edge characters in Trolley until he doesn’t, with every other layer that’s peeled off of him revealing another hideous corner of his persona.
Nam Joong-Do is an Assemblyman and a proactive social worker, always lobbying for better rights and better social schemes. On top of that, he’s also one of the best politicians out there, using not just his oratory skills, but also his cunning, to gain an upper hand in whatever circumstances he has to contend with.
He also has a wife, Kim Hye-Joo, who is just as much of a sincere social worker as him, with a reserved and extremely camera-shy personality. However, as the story progresses, she finds herself in the spotlight more and more frequently, every time against her own will or choice.
The various reasons why she has to make public appearances connect to her husband, a seemingly perfect husband and the greatest politician out there who harbors some truly ugly and horrifying secrets of the past.
Seemingly ideal
Hye-Joo isn’t Joong-Do’s first wife, but the second. His first marriage brought Ji-Hoon into the world, whose mother would later on pass away.
He later married Hye-Joo, who was new to the city and had no family. They had a short romantic fling replete with exchanging looks and smiling cutely.
Over the years, Hye-Joo would come to trust her husband immensely, with him being the only constant in her life. Where others would doubt her or distrust her for once, Joong-Do always takes her side without ‘ifs’ or ‘buts.’
They had two kids, one of whom would go on to die by drowning. His death would later on lead to more dirt and allegations surfacing about him, bringing the family into the spotlight.
Actually hideous
Joong-Do, the seemingly perfect husband, committed a horrible crime in the past. Hye-Joo’s past entailed a similar dark event as well, where she was sexually molested by her classmate who later committed suicide, and any legal action against him was not pursued further.
Meanwhile, Joong-Do has committed rape himself. Yeo-Jin, the woman who lives with Hye-Joo’s family as almost another member, and who was helped by Joong-Do in her daughter’s murder case in the past, was raped by the Assemblyman inside his study room.
This horrible event was witnessed by Ji-Hoon, who misinterpreted it as a sexual affair, but the reality was way worse. It’s when Hye-Joo confronts Yeo-Jin and Joong-Do about their affair that Yeo-Jin falsely confesses to it.
However, when she attempts suicide and is hospitalized, eventually failing to take her life, she confesses the truth to Hye-Joo. She reveals the truth of what her husband did to her.
Post-traumatic suffering & revelations
Joong-Do, it’s shown, had gone to apologize to Yeo-Jin the day after he raped her. And while she was ready to report him, he prevented her from doing so, mentioning how it was just a mistake and that the truth would devastate Hye-Joo.
Yeo-Jin would go on to repress her trauma and compromise with her truth to save Hye-Joo from the trouble of contending with the shocking reality while living under the same roof and near the same room where she was violated.
Joong-Do would go on to beg her to keep quiet about it, and while Yeo-Jin does do so, while also deciding to not pursue anything against him since he’s fighting for a bill that can do wonders for the greater good, Hye-Joo can’t bear it any longer when she learns the truth.
She tries to make a compromise as well, but later on decides to make the hard choice, revealing her husband’s crime to the media and the public, as well as her daughter Yoon-Seo.
Also Read: Ji-Hoon’s death in ‘Trolley’ explained
