On the 2nd of December a New Jeans fan uploaded a blurred still from a video of someone masturbating with a K-Pop light stick. This post quickly gained comments (at time of writing it has amassed 5.9k likes and 222k views after 18 hours), with many New Jeans fans saying the person was “disgusting” and “nasty [sic]”.
However, not long after BTS fans found out about the tweet and started alerting the poster that what they had shared was actually a still from a video of a minor and, being sexual in nature, could constitute child pornography.
Some also alluded to the long-standing rumours surrounding ex-Ador employee Min Hee Jin, who may have been revealed to possibly have explicit and sexually posed photos of an adult actress in a film portraying a mentally disabled child (I’ll Take Her Like A Father, 1974), as well as previously having similar photos of actresses portraying children (such as a still from 1968’s Romeo and Juliet, starring 15 year old Olivia Hussey and 16 year old Leonard Whiting) on her Instagram ( https://www.sportskeeda.com/pop-culture/news-newjeans-ceo-min-hee-jin-s-instagram-causes-concern-among-fans ).
Screenshots that seem to show the subject of the video confirming it was them and asking others to stop sharing the video from 2020 were also posted in the comments under the tweet.
Again, as of writing this article, the tweet has been up for 18 hours, gained 5.9k likes and 222k views, and the poster has been informed multiple times that they could potentially be borderline distributing child pornography but has chosen to keep the post up.
Other New Jeans fans in the comments are defending the post, reasoning that nobody definitively knows whether the subject in the picture is truly a minor or not and that Armys are only claiming so to get the picture taken down.
One fan even claims they want to see the masturbation video and lament it is no longer available.
Uploading a nude of someone without their permission can be considered revenge porn (this picture is blurred but enough skin is shown for this to be a morally grey area), however one must question whether the chance that this may not be a minor outweighs the risk of putting a minor in harms way when spreading sexual photos of them online, and in turn whether posting blurred photos of someone in a sexual manner goes too far for a “fan war”.
This is not the first time a fan of New Jeans has shared originally sexual blurred photos, as one claimed earlier in 2024 that a girl group member had participated in soft core pornography when they were a minor.
