The Legacy of Burning Sun: How K-Pop Peels Back the Realities of Gender-Based Violence in South Korea
Media piece by Prospect Comic Illustrator Heeyoung Hwang
Scandals have rocked South Korea recently, impacting regular citizens and K-pop idols alike. What is the thread that connects these two? Gender-based violence against women. In a country with the worst gender pay gap out of all the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) nations for the 27th year in a row, South Koreans have grappled with the reality of systemic misogyny. Its impacts not only reach their daily lives, but also appear on the screens of their phones and televisions. From online community forums to national news, sexual violence has long been a hot topic of debate. This issue has only gotten hotter as the discussion has shifted from regular people, whose identities are usually—and controversially—protected under anonymity laws, to celebrities involved in the very fabric of the booming entertainment industry. Untangling the web of these scandals reveals a more sinister truth about how the music industry and the culture of misogyny intersect in South Korea.
From Stadium Tours to Behind Bars
On August 28, K-pop powerhouse agency SM Entertainment issued a brief statement saying that one of their artists, Moon Taeil, was under investigation for sexual assault. He was promptly removed from his group, NCT moving forward. Taeil debuted as part of one of South Korea’s most prominent boy bands. Of NCT’s many subunits, NCT 127 in particular has made significant contributions to the expansion of K-pop overseas, from selling out stadiums across Japan to gearing up for a North American tour in 2025.
SM Entertainment’s swift decision to immediately terminate its contract with Taeil at the height of NCT’s popularity raised alarms about the severity of the situation. Taeil would later be investigated for quasi-rape, where one is accused of taking advantage of another who is either unconscious or in a situation in which they are unable to resist sexual advances. He was not alone in this crime—two other non-celebrity acquaintances were also implicated. The case remains under investigation, but some experts believe Taeil will serve time in prison, with predictions ranging from three to seven years.
Taeil’s case is a recent development in the long history of K-pop’s reckoning with violence towards women. The Burning Sun scandal is yet another example that reveals the cracks in this highly curated industry. This particular scandal involved top male stars across various sectors who created an exclusive circle amongst themselves to share videos of their sexual exploits and discuss their criminal behavior. One of the several K-pop idols present in the group was Seungri, former member of Big Bang. Heralded as one of the most culturally significant K-pop acts of the late 2000s and early 2010s, Big Bang was deemed both a trendsetting and money-making force. In 2016 alone, the band raked in a whopping $44 million. Seungri took his fame and wealth and opened up a club in the heart of Seoul, known as Burning Sun.
Flying Too Close to the (Burning) Sun
Seungri’s club would not live to see past the age of two, closing just a year after opening in the midst of police investigations. What began as a general probe into Burning Sun’s participation in allegedly illicit activities, such as assault, prostitution, and tax evasion revealed all that—and more. The investigation leaked messages from a private group chat where famous K-pop singers illegally shared videos of their engagement in sexual intercourse with various women. These women were neither aware nor did they provide consent to be filmed. Members of this group chat included Seungri, singer Jung Joon-young, FT Island’s Choi Jong-hoon, Highlight’s Yong Jun-hyung, and CNBLUE’s Lee Jong-hyun. In one instance, the group chat erupted in laughter in response to one of the members filming a sex tape with a woman who was allegedly unconscious during the affair. Jung Joon-young responded to the video with “You raped her, lol.”
National outrage quickly followed these revelations. Engulfed in public fury, each member withdrew from their respective bands and terminated their relationship with the entertainment industry. Jung was sentenced to five years in prison, with Choi sentenced to two years for the same crimes: rape and secretly filming their sexual escapades by using molka (hidden cameras). Seungri was found guilty on nine different charges in relation to his personal involvement with Burning Sun, ultimately serving only 18 months of his original three-year sentence.
It has only been five years since news of Burning Sun first exploded. As of November 2024, all members who have been implicated by the group chat have either been released from prison or have attempted to return to the entertainment industry. It remains too soon to tell whether or not these comebacks will end in success or failure. Regardless, many believe that justice was not adequately served. The Burning Sun scandal and Taeil’s quasi-rape case serve as scorching reminders of how women are often left unprotected by inadequate Korean sex crime laws. As of 2020, South Korea’s basic sentence for sexual violence ranges between two to five years. For comparison, the average U.S. sentence for convicted rapists stands at 16 years.
This stark disparity in the enforcement of punishment creates an environment in which women are less willing to speak up about their experiences. Some Korean women have been further dissuaded by the rising anti-feminist movement, while others have instead turned to embrace the 4B movement: a doctrine demanding that those who choose to participate must swear off sex, dating, marriage, and having children with men. Their aim is to entirely decenter men from their lives. In doing so, Korean feminists hope to reclaim the autonomy they believe South Korea’s patriarchal society is depriving them of.
The Gender Crisis Gripping Korea’s Soul
These K-pop scandals provide the international community with a glimpse into the pervasive problem of systemic misogyny that to this day grips South Korea with an iron fist. Gender-based violence sits at the forefront of many female celebrity scandals as well. Singer-turned-actress Sulli was found dead in her home by suicide back in 2019 after she faced a barrage of online harassment for her brazen and outspoken support of feminism. Mukbang Youtuber Tzuyang recently confessed she was a victim of dating violence, detailing her experience of being physically abused and extorted by her ex-boyfriend to her 11 million subscribers. These issues, involving high-profile individuals from the Korean entertainment industry, are not removed from reality. In fact, the reverse is true. Gender-based violence reverberates throughout Korean society on all levels, regardless of status, wealth, or fame.
Similarly, the concept of molka is not specific to the Burning Sun scandal. Hidden cameras have long been an epidemic in Korea, with hundreds of thousands of illegally filmed videos circling the internet and passing through highly encrypted messenger apps like Telegram. More than 60,000 South Koreans paid to gain access to these highly secretive chatrooms, culminating in another explosive scandal known as the Nth Room case. Not only were women captured on tape without their knowledge; many were also coerced and blackmailed into filming themselves acting out sexually humiliating “missions” demanded by the mastermind known as Cho Ju-bin, also known by his alias Baksa (“professor”). Cho was sentenced to 42 years in prison, a strong punishment by Korean standards but by no means a panacea for digital sex crimes. On this ruling, the Korea Cyber Sexual Violence Response Center lamented that “eradicating sexual exploitation, revising laws and institutions so that offenders pay for their crimes, and establishing the sort of social perceptions that allow the victims to recover are not things that can be resolved in the short term.”
The new wave of technological growth has also ushered in an era of more intricate cybersex crimes, allowing perpetrators–from curious elementary school children to fully functioning adults–to utilize AI to create deepfake porn of women. From celebrities, classmates, acquaintances, to even sisters, women from all walks of life have unwittingly become targets of digital sex crimes.
At its very core, South Korea is still struggling to tackle these problems on a systemic level. Given that even the most high-profile cases of gender-based violence have been inadequately addressed, it is difficult to imagine a future for Korea where these acts of violence will be punished and prevented effectively. That is not to say the country has failed in all its measures—South Korea has recently recognized misogyny as a legitimate motive for hate crimes, making strides in acknowledging the severity of gender-based violence towards Korean women. Furthermore, calls for reform, partly in reaction to the major inflammatory cases much like Burning Sun or Sulli’s death, have prompted conversations amongst legislators about what changes can be etched into the law.
K-pop scandals have unintentionally yet crucially peeled back the realities of sexual violence in Korea. However, the fight has only begun. Both Korean society and the government must move beyond a simple acknowledgment of these problems. Instead, the nation needs to figure out how it can stop reacting and begin proactively combating gender-based violence, first and foremost by systematically dismantling the culture of misogyny that allows for such brutality to flourish in the first place. Now that the cracks are appearing and systemic misogyny is becoming harder to ignore, it’s time that South Korea grapples with the consequences of looking away for so long.