Asian Junkie Asian pop. Without discretion.
The news of Lee Seung Gi not being paid for his music over his 18-year career with Hook Entertainment understandably left a lot of people shocked, but it’s now no longer all that surprising that a new Dispatch report revealed CEO Kim Jin Young threatened Lee Seung Gi after he requested certification of contents.
The audio recording starts with Kim Jin Young talking about how scary she is.
“I’m the type of person that when I get really mad, I become very calm and logical. I become very sharp. But I need to get very mad. If I’m not as mad, I just yell, “Hey, fucker! It’s to the point that even I frighten myself. That has been my disease since I was young. I would become so scary and callous that people would said I would become a murderer and that I would become a very evil human being. I become very (scary) like that, and I am now starting to become like that. Now that he’s not holding back and has asked for our accounting records, it seems he’s really not holding back.”
Cringe as fuck, to be honest.
Anyway, later she segues into swearing that she will kill Lee Seung Gi.
CEO: “I swear on my name that I will kill him. I’m going to spend the rest of my life trying to kill Lee Seung Gi. That mother fucker. I swear.”
Executive: “CEO Kwon”
CEO: “Shut up, stop what you’re doing. I’m going to spend the rest of my life trying to kill him.”
She then repeats the threat to Lee Seung Gi’s manager and blames the accounting department for all of this.
At some point Lee Seung Gi’s manager leaves and quits, then gets consoled by a Hook executive. Relevantly, he mentions the CEO was telling him that Lee Seung Gi’s was finished.
Manager: “What do you know? I was always picked on, and in front of everyone ( the CEO) would say Lee Seung Gi was finished. How can I work when she says, ‘Choose who you are going to be loyal to wisely,’ I was able to endure it then.”
I suppose knowing now that Hook has not only been defrauding Lee Seung Gi for almost two decades but manipulating him as well, these outbursts aren’t a shock. Thankfully, whoever is leaking this to Dispatch is helping Lee Seung Gi’s case in all this, and quite frankly, if Hook did it to him then I can only wonder what else they’re hiding.
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Also, in a different report, it was basically revealed that Lee Seung Gi’s apparent naivety to his status as a singer was indeed basically because he was paid for the rest of his career.
Lee Seung Gi has made a lot of money through his appearances in K-Dramas, variety shows, and endorsements. His appearance fee is very expensive. According to the Dispatch article, Lee Seung Gi was properly paid for these endeavors.
The article claims that Lee Seung Gi was happy with the amount he was paid, and because of this, he didn’t want to challenge the agency’s assertion that he wasn’t a profitable singer.
Makes sense.
Of course, it was still nuts that Kim Jin Young got away with it, telling him to think of singing as fanservice.
The CEO would always say, ‘You’re a minus singer. Your fans never spend money but ask for so much. You made a lot of money through other (acting, variety shows) projects. Just think of your singing career as fan service.’ She brainwashed him. If he had questioned her about the accounting, he would have been scolded. Lee Seung Gi chose not get cursed out rather than get paid.
There are also text messages where the CEO instructs the manager to basically avoid paying for any of Lee Seung Gi’s work expenses and to essentially cheap out on him.
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Nothing to really add as it speaks for itself. Unless everything about this is somehow fabricated, I hope he gets every penny he’s owed from them. Additionally, at the very minimum I assume this has to be fraud at some point, but I won’t hold my breath with the legal system against powerful companies.
