[Different bottles of Soju, a Korean alcohol, are depicted in a bar. Photo Credit to Unsplash]

On May 19th, BBC released a documentary on the Burning Sun scandal titled “Burning Sun: Exposing the Secret K-pop chat groups,” which elicited over 2 million views in just two days.

The Burning Sun scandal is one of the most conspicuous scandals in the Korean entertainment industry, and BBC has brought attention to the 2019 scandal once again.

With infamous names including Big Bang’s Seungri, Choi Jong-hoon, and Jung Joon-young, the scandal began at a nightclub in Gangnam, Burning Sun, where members of the club all worked together to commit several crimes such as prostitution, drug trafficking, and police corruption.

By communicating through a group chat on KakaoTalk, members of the club would find “prostitutes” and women within the club to bring up to “VIP guests,” often using drugs and physical force to bring these women into regions of the club where nothing could be heard.

Initially, Jung Joon-young was charged with distributing illegal footage in 2016, but his and Burning Sun’s close ties with a member of the police department led to a speedy dismissal of Jung’s charges.

However, copies of Jung’s media were exposed to the public, revealing the sickening videos of the activities within the club.

Despite the well-known offenses, the court ruled for relatively short prison terms: Seungri was sentenced to three years, Choi Jong-hoon to two years, and Jung Joon-young to five years.

Furthermore, the police officer who helped release and obscure earlier indictments was acquitted of all charges.

The BBC documentary disclosed a video where Seungri can be seen pulling a woman’s arm, and several conversations within the KakaoTalk group dehumanizing women were also displayed.

With the increasing public documentation of the Burning Sun Scandal, the public has mixed reactions to the documentary: some were angry with the short imprisonment terms as opposed to the mental damage the victims experienced, and some are frustrated that a foreign country brought more attention to the issue than the Korean government.

Further fueling abhorrence is the active rumor that Seungri is opening a club in Cambodia after information was released that he had signed agreements to start these clubs.

It has been reported that Seungri, upon his release in 2023, went to Cambodia and Malaysia carousing, seeming indifferent towards the damage he had caused and the sentence he had received.

This has brought fans of diverse K-pop groups to question whether their idols truly portray their personalities to the public or if everything they reveal is fake.

The individuals related to the issue were seen as “innocent” or “wholesome” towards their fans, but they would regularly go to the Gangnam Club and commit crimes that their fans wouldn’t even suspect them of committing.

Regardless, the BBC documentary and the attitudes displayed by the individuals involved after the incident have revealed the “Dark Side” of K-pop.

In addition, it moved society’s attention towards the lack of justice and attention that the Korean government has given to the issue, especially concerning the women who were victimized, emphasizing the continued struggle women face in Korea.