Asian Junkie Asian pop. Without discretion.
Model turned actor Lee Chul Woo currently has a role on the popular drama Lovely Runner, but an incident from his past currently has him under fire. Back in 2016, he was on a show called Hitmaker with Jung Joon Young, which led to the cast being scrutinized due to Jung Joon Young’s connection to the Burning Sun scandal.
Due to the recent BBC documentary on Burning Sun, rumors surfaced that Lee Chul Woo was a member of the molka group chats, and he issued a statement vehemently denying this.
Lee uploaded a post on his social media account on Monday, stating, “I would like to reiterate that I was not included in the chat room as I had stated through my agency at the time.”
Lee said he was in an online chat room with Jung, but only for professional reasons.
“The chat room I’m referred to as having been in during the incident was specifically for sharing the schedule and content needed for filming when I appeared on the JTBC show ‘Hitmaker’ in 2016,” Lee said.
“We didn’t talk about anything private other than what was related to the program, and the chatroom ended after the program was over.”
“It is not just me, but also my family and acquaintances who are suffering from years of false information and malicious comments,” Lee said. “We sincerely ask you to refrain from making reckless speculations, and we will strongly respond to malicious comments and sharing of false information from here on.”
It’s true that he was not in the molka chats with BIGBANG‘s Seungri and FTISLAND‘s Choi Jong Hoon and the rest of them. However, as he mentions, he was in a group chat with the Hitmaker cast that included Jung Joon Young. Thus, five years ago he had to make a statement denying involvement that’s very similar to his most recent statement.
The problem is that according to a follow-up report by SBS Morning Wide at the time, Jung Joon Young did share inappropriate photos of a flight attendant in that Hitmaker chat, and people in that chat responded with laughter and sexual convos.
According to SBS Morning Wide, police confirmed that Jung Joon Young distributed photos of the body of a flight attendant to two group chats back in 2016. Among the people in the chat were Kangin, Jung Jinwoon, and model Lee Chul Woo, who all starred in ‘Hitmaker’ during the same year. The report says that the group chat members responded to the photos by laughing about them, that no one tried to stop it, and they went back and forth with a lot of sexual harassing conversations.
To the best of my knowledge, that reporting was never pushed back on or clarified, likely because they hoped it would fade away. And judging by current reporting on this, it mostly has.
As I said at the time, the extent to which one wants to assign levels of blame or shittiness is obviously up to the individual, but that report certainly runs counter to the narrative that their group chat was clean and/or just about work.
