By CHOE SANG-HUNOCT. 27, 2016

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President Park Geun-hye of South Korea bowed after issuing a statement of apology in Seoul on Tuesday. Credit Yonhap, via Reuters

SEOUL, South Korea — South Koreans have been riveted for weeks by a scandal involving the president and a shadowy adviser accused of being a “shaman fortuneteller” by opposition politicians.

The elusive figure, Choi Soon-sil, is a private citizen with no security clearance, yet she had remarkable influence over President Park Geun-hye: She was allowed to edit some of Ms. Park’s most important speeches.

The news channel Chosun showed video of presidential aides kowtowing to her after she apparently gave them orders. She apparently had an advance copy of the president’s itinerary for an overseas trip, the TV station said.

She even had power over the president’s wardrobe, overseeing the design of her dresses and telling her what colors to wear on certain days.

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These may not seem like the makings of a major scandal. But as Ms. Park nears her last year in office, the revelations have sent her polling numbers to new lows, and a prominent member of her party has called on her to resign from it, while some South Koreans want her impeached.

In part, the accusations have resonated because they feed into longstanding criticism that the president is a disconnected leader who relies only on a trusted few.

But for most South Koreans, the real drama is that Ms. Choi is the daughter of a religious figure whose relationship with Ms. Park had long been the subject of lurid rumors. The figure, Choi Tae-min, was often compared to Rasputin here, and now critics say his daughter is playing the same role.

Mr. Choi was the founder of an obscure sect called the Church of Eternal Life. He befriended Ms. Park, 40 years his junior, soon after her mother was assassinated in 1974. According to a report by the Korean intelligence agency from the 1970s that was published by a South Korean newsmagazine in 2007, Mr. Choi initially approached Ms. Park by telling her that her mother had appeared in his dreams, asking him to help her.

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Choi Soon-sil, who Ms. Park described as an old friend, in a photo taken from an online news report. Credit Jeon Heon-Kyun/European Pressphoto Agency

Mr. Choi was a former police officer who had also been a Buddhist monk and a convert to Roman Catholicism. (He also used seven different names and was married six times by the time he died in 1994 at the age of 82.) He became a mentor to Ms. Park, helping her run a pro-government volunteer group called Movement for a New Mind. Ms. Choi became a youth leader in that group.

According to the report by the KCIA, as the country’s intelligence agency was then called, Mr. Choi was a “pseudo pastor” who had used his connection to Ms. Park to secure bribes.

Ms. Park’s father, Park Chung-hee, the former military dictator, was assassinated in 1979 by Kim Jae-gyu, the director of the KCIA. Mr. Kim told a court that one of the reasons he killed Mr. Park was what he called the president’s failure to stop Mr. Choi’s corrupt activities and keep him away from his daughter.

Ms. Park has said that her father once personally questioned her and Mr. Choi about the accusations of corruption but found no wrongdoing. Mr. Choi was never charged with a crime in connection with the allegations; in a newspaper interview in 2007, Ms. Park called him a patriot and said she was grateful for his counsel and comfort during “difficult times.”

But gossip about their relationship — vehemently denied by Ms. Park — has haunted her since. In a 2007 diplomatic cable made public through WikiLeaks, the American Embassy in Seoul reported rumors that Mr. Choi “had complete control over Park’s body and soul during her formative years and that his children accumulated enormous wealth as a result.” One such tale held that Ms. Park, who has never married, had his child. (She has denied that.)

In a televised address to the nation on Tuesday, Ms. Park acknowledged that she had let Ms. Choi edit some of her most important speeches.

“I deeply apologize to the people,” Ms. Park said. She described Ms. Choi as an old friend who had stood by her through painful times, like the years after the killings of her mother and father.

On Wednesday, prosecutors raided homes belonging to Ms. Choi and some of her associates, as well as the offices of two foundations she controls, in connection with allegations that she had used her ties with Ms. Park to pressure businesses into donating $69 million to the foundations.

Ms. Choi, who has not been charged with a crime, had traveled to Germany, where she told a journalist that she was innocent but that she would not come home to face investigators.

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When local news media first reported allegations that Ms. Choi had edited the president’s speeches, Ms. Park’s office dismissed them as “nonsense.” But those denials crumbled this week, after the cable channel JTBC reported that it had obtained a discarded tablet computer once owned by Ms. Choi.

Files discovered there included drafts of 44 speeches and other statements that Ms. Park had given from 2012 to 2014, as a presidential candidate and later as president. The computer’s log showed that Ms. Choi had received them hours or days before Ms. Park delivered the speeches. Many passages were marked in red.

Among the speeches was one that Ms. Park delivered in Dresden, Germany, in 2014. Widely billed as one of her most important policy statements, it set out her vision for eventual reunification with North Korea.

It is not clear how extensive Ms. Choi’s changes to Ms. Park’s speeches were. Ms. Park said Tuesday that Ms. Choi had offered “personal opinions and thoughts” and helped with “phrasing and other things.”

Ms. Choi’s close relationship with the president has long been suspected, as people close to her have worked in Ms. Park’s administration.

She and her ex-husband, who was Ms. Park’s chief of staff when she was a lawmaker, have been accused in the past of improperly profiting from their influence, allegations that Ms. Park dismissed as “slander” and attempts to “disrupt the national order.” Officials who investigated the allegations were fired. But none of that raised the kind of furor seen in recent weeks.

Barely a day has passed without someone accusing Ms. Choi of influence peddling, greed or simply arrogance. Last week, the president of Ewha Womans University in Seoul, a leading university in the nation, resigned amid accusations that the school had given Ms. Choi’s daughter, a student there, favorable treatment.

This week, a daily newspaper, Hankyoreh, quoted a former employee of one of Ms. Choi’s foundations, Lee Seong-han, as saying that copies of reports written for Ms. Park had been brought daily to Ms. Choi for review.

Mr. Lee said that Ms. Choi called Ms. Park “sister” and had her own teams of advisers who meddled in critical government decisions, including the appointment of cabinet ministers and the closing of the Kaesong industrial park, a joint project of North and South Korea, after the North’s nuclear test in January.

“Ms. Choi effectively told the president to do this and do that,” the newspaper quoted Mr. Lee as saying. “There was nothing the president could decide alone.” Ms. Park’s office did not comment on the report.

Correction: October 31, 2016

Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article misidentified the person killed by Kim Jae-gyu. He was Park Chung-hee, the South Korean military dictator, not Mr. Kim.