Asian Junkie Asian pop. Without discretion.
While there’s been a relative dearth of news in the FIFTY FIFTY contract mess of late, a big update was posted today in the form of a lawsuit being filed by ATTRAKT, suing former FIFTY FIFTY members Aran, Saena, Sio, their parents, and The Givers (SIAHN & Baek Jin Sil) for ‘tens of billions of won’ (10 billion won is ~$7 million).
On December 19th, Attrakt (CEO Jeon Hong-joon) said, “We have filed a lawsuit against former FIFTY FIFTY members Saena, Sio and Aran to claim damages and demand penalties for breach of exclusive contracts. We also sued people The Givers Ahn Sung-il and Baek Jin-sil who were directly involved in the unfair exclusive contract termination as well as the parents of the three former members for damages caused by their joint illegal acts”.
The amount of damages compensation and penalties calculated by Attrakt amount to tens of billions of won. However, it has been reported that a specific partial claim method was employed at the initial stage of the suit as the possibility of potential damages expanding during the litigation was taken into account.
Lawyer Park Jae-hyun, Attrakt’s legal representative in this lawsuit, stated, “We will do our best to carry out the lawsuit while keeping in mind that this may be an important opportunity to establish a fair business order in the entertainment industry rather than a simple recovery of damage”.
I feel like this was always coming, especially after they lost their injunction lawsuit and the company terminated their contracts. It’s the reason why despite some FIFTY FIFTY fans on social media being mad at me for it, five months ago I suggested that perhaps the best thing would be for all of them to take the route that Keena eventually did.
I’ll go a step further now and say that sadly the move even a couple weeks ago might’ve just been apologizing and gutting it out for a bit just for the sake of their potential careers if they indeed want to continue. We know that establishing yourself and then going to get whatever you want is the way to go in these situations, and that’s what most who succeed in pulling moves like this off do. There’s idealism and pragmatism, after all.
Since then, their health issues have come to light, and obviously I don’t blame them for not wanting to continue under the company. However, it also opened themselves up to this kind of rebuttal from ATTRAKT, along with most of the public support for it.
