The members of K-pop group Omega X seemed to be in high spirits a few weeks ago when their first international tour ended with a hit show in Los Angeles.
But that sense of victory was short-lived.
After a performance in October, an executive from their management company shouted at the group at an LA hotel and pushed a member of the band to the ground, footage of the encounter seemingly screened. The band members then flew back to Seoul at their own expense and then took their entertainment company to court.
At a hearing on Wednesday, a South Korean judge will consider the 11 members’ requests to be released from their multi-year contracts with management agency Spire Entertainment. The band’s lawyers said the Los Angeles executive’s conduct was the latest in a year-long pattern of verbal, physical and sexual abuse. The chief executive officer, Kang Seong-hee, resigned last month but denies any wrongdoing.
“I take care of them all like their mother,” Ms. Kang told The New York Times in a phone interview, adding that 27-year-old Kim Jaehan, the band member, fell at the park. hotel, collapsed on its own. She said that she hopes the band will resume normal activities with the company.
K-pop experts say the band’s allegations against their agency, if true, would be consistent with other stories from industry insiders and accusers. They say some agencies, especially smaller ones, regularly exploit young artists aspiring to become K-pop idols by imposing strict controls on behavior. behavior and, in some cases, they may be subjected to verbal and physical abuse.
Since the 1990s, “the level of exploitation has been systematized and also normalized as the K-pop industry has become dominant” and more ambitious young people have been attracted to it, Jin Lee, an Asian pop culture scholar and researcher, said. at Curtin University in Australia.
“Everybody wants to be an idol,” she said.
Good print
Workers in Korea, a deeply hierarchical society, are increasingly speaking out about abusive boss. But experts say that most working K-pop artists don’t openly criticize their agencies because they fear the consequences of breaching contracts.
Kim Youna, an entertainment lawyer in Seoul, said smaller agencies in particular tend to sign up-and-coming musicians with contracts that don’t define working hours or put limits on what artists do. physician may be reasonably required to do so.
Kim said the contract between artists and their management company only lasts about 25 years in Korea. Other industries in the country have strict labor laws. “In this context, it seems like idols, seen as less powerful parties, have no choice but to suffer a bit of loss,” she said.
Some of the losses are financial. For example, it is common for management companies to ask artists to return the costs of training they have received, such as dance lessons, vocal training, and other preparatory activities. Lee Jongim, a scholar of the Korean entertainment industry and the author of the book “Sweat and Tears of Idol Trainees,” said there are often questions about how transparent the idol trainees are. that debt.
She said, “Ambient K-pop stars “debut in their teens, but entertainment companies are adults. “So they start in a structure where it’s very difficult to establish an equal relationship.”
Speak out
Some K-pop musicians have waited until their contracts have ended to accuse their agencies of mistreating them.
In one example, Heo Min-sun, a member of the former group Crayon Pop, told the Asian Boss YouTube channel in 2019, the band’s management company withheld the band members’ salaries for a year and a half after their debut. She said they also forced them to go on a diet and banned them from socializing without agency permission.
“Our private lives are strictly controlled. Even if I wanted to make new friends, I couldn’t,” Ms. Heo said in the 2019 interview. Crayon Pop’s agency, Chrome Entertainment, did not respond to a request for comment.
In a 2019 criminal case, two K-pop musicians successfully sued their management company before their contracts expired.
Those musicians — Lee Seok-cheol, now 22, and Lee Seung-hyun, now 20 — were brothers who performed in boy band The East Light as teenagers. They accused their producer, agency and CEO of physically assaulting and verbally threatening them. A court fined Media Line Entertainment approximately $15,000 and sentenced the producer to 16 months in prison for child abuse. The CEO received eight months for aiding and abetting child abuse.
Another case, although technically successful, is considered a cautionary tale.
The three former members of group TVXQ have struggled for years to appear on television after ending their contracts with SM Entertainment, one of Korea’s most powerful companies. The country’s antitrust regulators eventually asked SM Entertainment to stop putting pressure on cable channels to blacklist the band’s members from appearing on TV.
The agency denied the committee’s findings. But CedarBough T. Saeji, an expert on the K-pop industry at Pusan National University, said that the band members were “unofficially blacklisted from the K-pop industry.” She added that the episode sent “a chilling message to young idols that overtaking a powerful company could be the end of their careers, even if they hit the mark.” legal”.
‘Lots of worry’
After Kim Jaehan’s scuffle with Ms. Kang at a hotel in Los Angeles on October 22, a Korean TV station posted blurred footage. the clip of the episode that an outsider filmed. When the band returned to Seoul, the members took the rare step of creating a Instagram account without authorization from their agency, as is often required. In another rare step, they made their abuse allegations public at a press conference.
“Each of us is going through a lot of anxiety,” Kim said at a press conference last month.
The band members say that a few months after Omega X debuted in June 2021, Ms. Kang, the chief executive officer of Spire Entertainment at the time, started making sexually explicit remarks, touching their thighs, hands, and face against their will and frequently forcing them to drink alcohol after a workout.
The band’s attorneys also said Spire, a small company founded in 2020, ordered each band member to pay the company about $300,000 in debt arising from his training. surname.
To date, the band’s attorneys have not filed a criminal complaint or presented any physical evidence to corroborate their allegations, citing concerns that doing so would expose them to is trying to influence civil proceedings that begin Wednesday. They said their current focus is on getting the band out of the contract, not charging it.
In an interview last week, Ms. Kang denied the band members’ allegations. She added that asking them to pay off her agency’s debts was justified and she believes the band members accused her of abuse to justify moving to a new company. bigger company.
“In their opinion, our company doesn’t have enough to nurture them,” Ms. Kang said, referring to the company’s financial resources. “So they’re conducting a witch hunt.”
look forward
Ms. Lee, a popular culture scholar, said the fate of Omega X may depend on how the Korean public reacts to the band’s story. She said, if the dispute escalates and its members can garner more public support, then Spire Entertainment may allow them to break the contract.
At least two companies that work with Spire abroad have severed ties since the scandal broke: Helix Publicity, the company responsible for Omega X’s public relations in the United States, and Skiyaki, the company. licensed for Omega X’s operations in Japan.
Several people who worked or volunteered at concert venues during a recent two-month 16-city tour in the United States and Latin America have also spoken out in support of Omega X.
Gigi Granados, 25, a beautician who attended a performance at Palladium Times Square in New York City, said she witnessed Ms. Kang screaming at band members at the concert hall. their hotel after the show. “No one deserves to be scolded like that,” she said.
