Band producer’s remarks spark online stir
SEOUL: The creative director behind the girl band Newjeans has found online fame after a tearful, profanity-laced news conference in which she slammed some of K-pop’s most powerful executives as “middle-aged jerks.”
HYBE, the South Korean agency behind Kpop sensation BTS, filed a legal complaint on Thursday against Min Hee-jin, the head of its powerhouse subsidiary label ADOR, for breach of trust in business.
That followed an announcement three days earlier that it had launched an audit of ADOR and demanded that Min resign. HYBE’S share price fell close to 10 per cent after the audit was announced and closed on Friday down 4.95 per cent.
Min, 44, hit back in a news conference on Thursday that drew empathy online from young working men and women who compared her story with their own experiences with unreasonable and jealous bosses who either took credit for their work or failed to acknowledge it fairly.
Others, however, said she had acted inappropriately and unprofessionally by occasionally lapsing into profanity.
She denied HYBE’S accusations and claimed it was trying to dismiss her unfairly after she accused another of its subsidiaries, BELIFT LAB, of imitating Newjeans with a girl group of its own called ILLIT.
Min, speaking off the cuff and often breaking down in tears, candidly shared her frustrations for more than two hours.
She referred to HYBE’S leaders, including chairman Bang Si-hyuk, the man behind BTS, as “gaejeossi,” which translates roughly to a “middleaged or old male jerk.”
“I feel betrayed by HYBE... they used me until I was no longer of use to them,” she said.
The live-streamed event, during which even her lawyers appeared embarrassed, had millions of views and drew an explosive public response.
One parody Youtube video seen by 2.5 million viewers combined a clip of Min speaking passionately with hip-hop music. The t-shirt and baseball cap she was wearing sold out on several online platforms and many others said they had suffered similar experiences.
“Women who have truly worked (hard) and experienced being undermined by men, along with the dirty side of office politics, could never speak ill of Min Hee-jin,” a South Korean woman said on social media platform X.
But Lee Moon-won, a culture critic who watched the news conference, said Min sidestepped the real allegations against her.
“No figure as influential as Min in the entertainment industry has ever used curse words during an official press conference, people have really never seen anything like it, so this obviously has attracted enormous attention,” he told reporters.