With everything having gone retro of late, so too have the scandals, apparently.
Yes, the headline is right, 12 years after the initial T-ara bullying controversy and seven years after evidence emerged that T-ara were apparently the victims of a netizen witch hunt, we’re now right back to relitigating the mess thanks to their former CEO Kim Kwang Soo, Hwayoung, and Hyoyoung.
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This all started, of course, with Kim Kwang Soo. The former CEO of Core Contents Media went on the MBN show Let’s Go and brought up the T-ara mess for whatever reason. On the show, he claimed to have fought for the T-ara members behind the scenes but decided against telling people the truth that there was no bullying with Hwayoung and the other members on his mind.
I had been so dumbfounded by the rumors surrounding T-ARA at that time and I was so angry that I decided on doing an interim announcement. This is the first time that I am speaking up about this, but I told Hwayoung and Hyoyoung to bring their contracts over and I ripped them up. I told them to get out, and that I would release them from their contracts without any conditions. I told them to go and do their own thing. After that, rumors about them being ostracized began to spread online, claiming that they had no one to depend on but each other. They spread ceaselessly. T-ARA’s parents came to the company. They said they would open a press conference and publish all the KakaoTalk conversations and more. But then, I was worried about the T-ARA members’ lives, so I quelled them. It was the case where the victims became the perpetrators. Although she was in the wrong, I was worried for Hwayoung’s future as she was still young. I thought that T-ARA did nothing wrong, so I pressed on with their broadcast promotions. But the public saw it as me having enough authority in the industry for them to continue their activities. For me, I didn’t think we were in the wrong. I told them that it was okay for me to be cursed out, but if they stop here, they would never be able to make a come back. I would be the one to shoulder everything. They needed to go on.
So the other members/their parents apparently had evidence, but Kim Kwang Soo thought it would be best to just continue on like nothing happened. That basically tracks with what he and they ended up doing, tanking their popularity and taking grief for years until 2017.
That was when the twins of Hwayoung and Hyoyoung seemed to push their apparent victim act too far, as they tried to milk the situation on television without actually directly addressing it for the umpteenth time. As a result, T-ara manager and staff opened up on her, saying they were in fact the problem in the group. Most relevantly, they had evidence in the form of a message logs showing Hyoyoung threatening Areum. The only response the side of the twins could muster was that derisively calling a staff member “shampoo” was trying to be cute and not dehumanizing as the staff felt, which the staff later refuted. Later on, in 2018, Kim Kwang Soo confirmed all this directly, saying they even got T-ara anti groups to back off by showing them chat logs and giving similar reason as to why he didn’t go public with it years ago.
And, well … honestly that’s where the situation has been for about six or seven years now.
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Now though, in response to Kim Kwang Soo talking about it on a show, Hwayoung has taken to Instagram. In her post, she changes her tune, notably for the first time directly saying that she was bullied in T-ara. She also explains the injury at the center of the controversy and the nails mess.
Firstly, the fact that I was bullied is true. The claim that I did not experience bullying and merely pretended to be a “victim” is false. As the new member of T-ARA, I worked hard with the determination not to burden the original members and to blend in. However, the original members often subjected me to violence and constant verbal abuse. The reason I endured was that I believed things would improve if I tried harder.
Second, after I injured my ankle, I apologized to the members multiple times. Even when I sprained my ankle and couldn’t perform on stage in Japan, I begged the director to let me sing just one song. This was because I felt immense guilt toward the members who had to work much harder due to me, and I thought singing even one song would help.
Third, it is true that I received nail care at the hotel. However, it was common practice for T-ARA to call nail technicians to our hotel for maintenance during Japanese activities. Getting my nails done was in the same context. Portraying this as if I received nail care solely for my own pleasure before a performance felt like an unjust attack on me.
Like the other side, Hwayoung claims to have evidence that she wanted to expose. However, she says Kim Kwang Soo threatened that he would terminate her sister’s contract.
When my contract with T-ARA ended, I had plenty of evidence to prove that I was bullied and planned to express my side through a press conference. However, CEO Kim Kwang Soo proposed that if I kept quiet without holding a press conference, he would terminate the contract of my older sister, who was also under the same agency at the time. At just 20 years old, I thought that was the best option. In the end, I left without even receiving an apology, and I have kept silent for 12 years.
After that, the T-ARA members appeared on various shows, claiming they had never bullied me, and settled the bullying issue among themselves with statements that were far from the truth. Watching those broadcasts, my parents and I felt helpless, shedding tears as we realized there was nothing we could do.
Later, her sister Hyoyoung spoke up, basically confirming the bullying and explaining her threats were in response to the bullying.
We were around 20 years old then. We left our hometown for Seoul alone. We thought that there were no adults around us that we could rely on, and we could only rely on each other as sisters. In that situation, I heard shocking things from my sister. She claimed that she had been outcasted by the T-ARA members, and told me that ‘things were hard,’ and that she ‘missed me.’ I had tried to stop them from bullying my sister, resulting in my messages.
I do think that having sent the messages was rather foolish and immature of me, and still regret it to this day. I apologized to Areum for the messages I sent her previously, but I am still sorry.
Admittedly, I’m not the most objective party at this point, though to be fair a big part of that is because she had effectively no rebuttal to the manager and staff dragging her name through the mud and let it settle on that reality for seven years. I’m mostly skeptical that she’s had evidence that proves her case for 12 years and never mentioned it, even back when she had a blossoming acting career and was losing jobs because of the reversal in bullying scandal perception. If there ever was a time to ult, it was then, as her sister was long out of the company … yet nothing.
And quite frankly, I think Hyoyoung’s explanation for why she was threatening violence against Areum to do the opposite of helping. If it were true that the core T-ara members were bullying Hwayoung because she was a recent addition to the team, why was Areum even involved in this when she was basically a brand new member of one month? Her assertion is essentially that the T-ara members bullied her sister for being new but welcomed Areum in on the bullying immediately to the point where she had to lash out at Areum? It doesn’t track to me.
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Anyway, while I have my biases and beliefs due to literally over a decade of nonsense involving this controversy, I’m open to any new evidence that emerges from this. And that is the important part, because the only reason anybody believed the staff years ago to begin with is because they provided evidence and the other side couldn’t even muster a denial.
Still, the worst part about this is seeing everybody re-litigate the controversy, many of whom are operating with little to no knowledge of what happened. Long debunked incidents and stories are being rehashed as a result, making it a rather maddening experience as people basically repeat history. I’m probably not going to since this has literally been done a decade ago, but if anybody has anything actually new to add, then we can really reopen things.
