BBC Stop Trawling Asian Entertainment for Scandal Challenge Failed—Burning Sun: Exposing the secret K-Pop chat groups (2024)
Chat groups? We only hear about one.
My thoughts on the BBC’s documentary on Johnny Kitagawa (Predator: The Secret Scandal of Jpop (2023)) are no secret. Not only did I think it was very poorly done and exploitative but it was also missing the context of broader problems in the idol industry. Anybody really paying attention to Johnny’s & Associates and the history of the agency would have encountered the stories of Johnny Kitagawa (allegedly) abusing young men and boys. What I did not anticipate was the response in the Japanese media to the documentary. Seeing the charges laid out by a reporter with the backing of the venerable BBC seemed to unlock something in the Japanese media. Whether it was embarrassment that Johnny’s (alleged) crimes were making international news and painting Japan as a country that encourages child rape or just decades of pent up hostility towards an agency that had built up a lot of power within the entertainment world, Japan responded so strongly and forcefully to the documentary that only a year later, Johnny’s & Associates no longer exists.
Although it’s only been out a week, the BBC’s new Asian entertainment scandal doc—Burning Sun: Exposing the secret K-pop chat groups—does not appear to have sparked a similarly strong response in Korea. Online there was maybe 36 hours when Burning Sun was the hottest topic among K-Pop fans but the conversation quickly turned back to the on-going Hybe/Ador showdown. Possibly the Burning Sun scandal is much fresher in fans’ memories than the late Johnny Kitagawa’s scandals and there isn’t that much new information revealed. The idols associated with the scandal were sentenced to prison and have served their time and the details of Burning Sun have been explored quite thoroughly in K-Pop media in English, as well as in the Korean entertainment press. Unlike the Johnny Kitagawa story where there had been an unspoken seal on his (alleged) crimes thanks to the influence he and his agency had built up over the years, there was no such block on Seungri or Jung Joon-Young or their agencies and much, much dirt has been spilled already.
So, because of my experience with the documentary on Johnny Kitagawa I did not have high hopes for Burning Sun and because the subject is so grim I wasn’t exactly eager to revisit the scandal. But after watching the documentary today… I stand with my initial reaction. This is a poorly done documentary and I think it offers little more than gawking at trauma porn.
Although the BBC would have you believe the documentary is the story of the two female journalists who worked to expose the crimes of Jung Joon-Young and friends, there are actually two additional narratives given much more time in Burning Sun: one is digging through the texts in the disgusting chat group of Jung Joon-Young and the other is building up Seungri as this criminal mastermind of a huge business “empire.”
Let me state right now that, yes, of course the group chat was disgusting and the rape and abuse of women is disgusting and wrong and the men that participated should be punished. I’m not a Burning Sun truther. The fact that these women were harassed for outing male idols as disgusting creeps is awful.
Okay?
That said, I also don’t think that the Burning Sun scandal itself is anything more than a sordid entertainment world scandal unless you look at it in the broader cultural context. Yes, the consequences for the handful of idols caught up in it were huge for them and their companies and their groups but what actually changed as a result? What deep truths were revealed that cannot be unseen? What makes the men at the center of the molka chat exposed via Burning Sun anything other than a low rent Pussy Posse? What makes their crimes more worthy of dramatic hour long BBC documentary with copious footage of men being abusive towards women than, say, the Hockey Canada sexual assault case?
I’ll tell you my theory: K-Pop idols are glamorous and drive metrics.
Burning Sun opens with clips from Seungri’s 2011 solo song “V.V.I.P” and then spends the next hour gassing him up as this glittering Great Gatsby type character who is essentially Leonardo DiCaprio with the champagne in that meme. (You know that meme.) At the same time, the other idols of the Jamji Posse are depicted as completely bamboozling their fans with uwu soft boi images.
Where to even begin with this. For one thing, K-Pop fans, generally, were well aware of the reputations of these guys even if their hard core fans refused to believe it. Seungri was alleged to be into very rough sex by Japanese tabloid Friday all the way back in 2012 (a story that made its way not just to Korean K-pop fans but to English-speaking ones as well). And something that is not raised in the documentary but that I’ve found as I dug into BigBang’s history for my MADE series is that Seungri was exposed to a lot of things at a very young age. Not that it excuses his behavior towards women—which again I do not agree with or approve of—but I think you cannot understand Seungri’s behavior without understanding where he came from. Don’t forget his first solo song—the very sexually charged “Strong Baby”—was done while he was just 17 years old. It’s not just female idols who are sexualized from a young age and these things leave a mark. Seungri did not emerge from a vacuum; he was created by the industry.
The documentary says he threw the name BigBang around for clout and I fully believe that. But what the documentary leaves out is that by the time Burning Sun blows up in his face, he was fairly estranged from the other four members of the group and had by far the least successful solo career in entertainment—one of the reasons that he was so focused on his business interests! BigBang fans were well aware that the other members of the group had made pointed comments about not liking his friends. Despite what the documentary would have you believe, Seungri was not this glittering idol at the top of Korean show business able to command the elite of Seoul to do his bidding and I think it’s a huge blow to the documentary’s credibility to depict him like that. A shadowy business partner gets a passing mention but no more is said. We’re left to believe that Seungri just did all of this all on his own because he’s some kind of hugely influential business mogul. Who were the other investors tied to the club who were (allegedly) using it for money laundering among other things? No mention at all.
What empire?? We’re told of one (1) club.
On top of gassing up Seungri as this major mover and shaker in Korean business, the documentary depicts the actual Burning Sun club as this sinister and shadowy sex dungeon rather than a standard Seoul nightclub. We are treated to copious amounts of footage of the derelict building as it exists today just to make the narration seem that much more ominous. In my favorite bit of dramatic exaggeration, we’re told that when entering the building, customers would go down this long poorly lit hallway before entering… a room with dancing and a DJ and alcohol. Wow, I’m shocked and appalled that a nightclub didn’t have extremely bright lighting inside but did serve alcohol!! The narrator also ominously talks about the attractive women scouted to work there… yes, that thing which is completely unique to Burning Sun. No other nightclub on earth hires attractive women as staff. Every other nightclub in Seoul is brightly lit and staffed by unattractive women who offer no special services to VIP guests.
And that’s the part which the documentary conveniently leaves to a couple of throwaway sentences at the very, very end—the stuff that went on at Burning Sun and in the JJY group chat is not unique to these men. These are endemic problems for Korean women that were not stopped by parading a handful of contrite K-Pop idols around in handcuffs.
The documentary doesn’t bother to get into the fact that sex is an expected service for VIP guests. It’s a part of business culture. When trying to woo clients or investors, there is an expectation of “second round” services at a room salon or ten pro or something similar. The documentary even has a former Burning Sun employee say they provided VIP guests with sex… because the guests expected it! Yet the documentary leaves that expectation completely unexplored.
One of the things that’s been revealed in the Hybe/Ador drama are the Min Hee-Jin Kakao Chat leaks. A story came out about a female employee filing a complaint about a situation where that female employee was made to attend a business gathering with some senior staff—all male—and then when the men went for their “second round,” she was left alone, humiliated.
From the Allkpop article [emphasis added]:
“Lee Jin Ho also claimed there were issues with the harassment of female employees within ADOR, leading to internal issues at HYBE. At the time, co-CEO L suggested taking a young female employee to a drinking party for employees at ADOR and HYBE to foster a "friendly atmosphere." The YouTuber further alleged only the men left together somewhere after the party, leaving the woman alone and leading her to feel self-doubt and raise issues within HYBE. When an official investigation was conducted this past March within HYBE, the case was concluded to be a communication process issue and ended with a warning”
Gosh, how could all the men at Hybe leave for their “second round” when Burning Sun is closed!? It’s almost like this is a pervasive problem throughout Korean business culture and not something unique to Burning Sun.
And then there’s digital sex crimes (“molka”) which are still a huge problem in Korea. You can find article after article detailing the pervasiveness of spy cams and the paranoia and fear they cause in women. Here’s Human Rights Watch in 2021 (two years after the Burning Sun scandal broke) with a report titled, “My Life Is Not Your Porn”:
“Women and girls who have been the target of digital sex crimes face major barriers to justice. Police often refuse to accept their complaints and behave in abusive ways, including minimizing harm, blaming them, treating images insensitively, and engaging in inappropriate interrogation.
When cases move ahead, survivors struggle to obtain information about their cases and to have their voices heard by the court. Judges also frequently impose low sentences.”
To my eye, the documentary is less interested in this pervasive issue facing survivors than it is in detailing the disgusting chats and showing videos exposed in the chat. There is a segment on the late Goo Hara but again, rather than tie her struggles to the broader problem, the documentary seems a lot more interested in showing footage of the vulnerable young woman on her knees begging her boyfriend and in showing her in serious mental health crisis on Instagram live. There’s even a gratuitous mention of the late Sulli, tacitly implying that both her passing and Hara’s had something to do with Burning Sun. It’s a cheap tactic and a cynical one. By tying these two highly publicized suicides to Burning Sun, it makes the scandal that much bigger and more dramatic.
Burning Sun chose to focus on the celebrity scandal angle of Burning Sun rather than looking at what the Burning Sun scandal actually revealed; it only makes me distrust the BBC even more when it comes to this type of documentary.
BBC stop trawling Asian entertainment for cheap scandal bait challenge failed.