Former Judge Lee Hyun-gon's thoughts on the recent developments on the HYBE-MHJ legal drama:
Someone needs to be held accountable
Although CEO Min Hee-jin suggested reconciliation and didn’t say much, the reason I got involved in this matter is that I have never seen such severe character assassination against an individual in my life. And the entity behind it was a huge corporation. Deciding a hypothesis lacking evidence as a confirmed fact and using the media to ruin someone’s reputation is something that someone needs to be held accountable for.
Two issues can be pointed out: one is the illegality of the audit conducted on ADOR, and the other is the illegality of the media manipulation. When considering who should be held responsible, HYBE’s CEO Park Ji-won and Chief Communications Officer Park Tae-hee come to mind.
From a criminal liability perspective, charges such as obstruction of business against ADOR, defamation against CEO Min Hee-jin, and invasion of privacy for unauthorizedly viewing private KakaoTalk messages could be considered. In my opinion, these charges seem 100 times more likely to be valid than the embezzlement charge against CEO Min Hee-jin.
Do you remember how many lawyers said from the beginning that embezzlement wouldn't be established based on the KakaoTalk conversations alone? Although they pretended to have more evidence, the evidence HYBE submitted to the court turned out to be just that. This means they must have conducted the media play knowing that embezzlement wouldn’t stand.
I hope a thorough investigation is conducted into the initial audit process and how various materials were distributed to the media. Since they accused CEO Min Hee-jin of embezzlement, shouldn’t their actions also be properly evaluated? Isn’t it a conspiracy to plan from behind without stepping forward and trying to ruin a person?
Rather than talking about embezzlement conspiracies and execution attempts, let’s uncover this conspiracy first.
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