Accused of Bullying And Facing Backlash
An Woo-jin, 23, is one of the top pitchers in South Korea. In 2022, he led the Korea Baseball Organization, the country’s top league, in earned run average and strikeouts. But the K.B.O. did not invite him to play in the World Baseball Classic, an international tournament this month featuring Major League Baseball stars.
The K.B.O. has said it excluded Mr. An, who has been followed by accusations that he assaulted his high school teammates, because it considers him a reputational liability. He also was not considered for an award for the K.B.O.’s best pitcher. No charges have ever been filed, and Mr. An has said that reports about his bullying, for which he apologized at the time, were exaggerated. Yet many South Koreans support his exclusion.
Over the last two decades, accusations of school bullying and violence have played an increasingly prominent role in South Korean culture — Netflix even has a hit show on the subject, “The Glory.” Entertainment agencies vet wouldbe pop stars for evidence of past bullying. And President Yoon Suk Yeol recently withdrew the appointment of Jung Soon-shin as chief of the National Office of Investigation after reports that Mr. Jung’s son had harassed a classmate in 2017, and that Mr. Jung had defended him instead of holding him accountable.
Many South Koreans believe that bullies damage victims’ lives in an irreversible way, said Jihoon Kim, a criminologist at the University of Alabama who has studied bullying in South Korea. “The idea of damaging the career of a bully is not seen as problematic, as they are seen as deserving it,” he said.
Takedowns of accused bullies are popular, despite concerns about credibility, given that many accusations are anonymous. Critics have also questioned whether the harm done to reputations is disproportionate to the offenses.
A national conversation around school bullying began in the 1990s, after several targets of such abuse died by suicide. A 2004 law to prevent bullying was considered a moment of reckoning, but a lack of mental health services for bullies and their victims has persisted, said Jun Sung Hong, a professor of social work at Wayne State University in Michigan who has written about bullying in South Korea.
In 2021, two professional volleyball players, the twin sisters Lee Jae-yeong and Lee Da-yeong, then 24 years old, were cut from their Korean clubs after they admitted to having verbally abused their teammates in middle school. That prompted a spate of bullying accusations against other athletes and a plea by then-President Moon Jae-in for the Culture Ministry to “make special efforts to eradicate the problem.”
But after the comedian Hong Hyun-hee was accused two years ago in an online post of having been a bully, former classmates of hers denied the accusation, and she filed a defamation lawsuit. Her accuser later withdrew the post and apologized for having a “memory lapse,” Ms. Hong’s agency said.
Mr. An’s troubles began in 2017, when a TV network reported that he had assaulted younger players on his high school team. The police determined that Mr. An, then 17, had hit four younger students, according to police records. The students decided not to file charges, saying that his behavior had not been severe. The same year, the Kiwoom Heroes signed Mr. An for 600 million won, or about $470,000. No new accusations have emerged. But the claims still shadow him.
This year’s World Baseball Classic team was selected with an eye toward “the symbolic meaning, responsibility and price that comes with representing the country,” Lee Kyong-ho, the K.B.O. spokesman, said. “Is it right to select players based only on their skills?”