Did Beyond the Bar star Lee Jin-wook sexually assault his friend? Allegations resurface as JTBC K-drama climbs Netflix charts
The drama's success is undeniable. According to FlixPatrol, Beyond the Bar broke into Netflix's Top 10 non-English series worldwide, taking the number 10 spot with 3.1 million watch hours across 1.8 million viewers. But while audiences are praising the on-screen story, off-screen controversies tied to Lee Jin-wook have resurfaced.
Old allegations resurface against Lee Jin-wook
The controversy traces back to July 2016, when Lee Jin-wook visited the apartment of a woman identified by the surname Oh. According to court documents, he went there late at night, allegedly to help her install blinds. Oh claimed she offered him a shower and gave him a T-shirt, after which the two had sex.
Later that same month, Oh filed a rape accusation against Lee, stating that the encounter was non-consensual. In response, Lee filed a countersuit for false accusation.
During the police investigation, Oh submitted underwear she said she had worn during the incident. Testing revealed Lee's DNA on the clothing. By 2017, the case reached court. The Seoul Central District Court ultimately ruled in Oh's favour, concluding that her claims were not entirely groundless and that Lee's countersuit could not be upheld.
The Seoul Central District Court delivered its judgment, acquitting Oh of making a false accusation. "The fact that Lee visited Oh's apartment and that she offered him a shower and gave him the shirt suggest that they had agreed on having sex," the court said. "However, there is also a possibility that she acted purely on graciousness," The Korea Times had reported.
The court acknowledged Oh's consistent testimony during questioning, noting she repeatedly described the encounter as non-consensual and expressed the shame she felt afterward.
"Even from Lee's statements, it appeared he neither asked her whether she agreed to have sex with him nor she consented to that," the court said. "It is thus plausible that Lee's false accusation charge does not have any evidence."
Fan backlash: can audiences separate the actor from the drama?
As Beyond the Bar continues to trend on Netflix, fans on Reddit have raised concerns about Lee Jin-wook's involvement. Many expressed disbelief that a drama led by the actor is receiving international acclaim given his controversial past.
Some even pointed out that they avoided watching Squid Game because of his role as Player 246, questioning how his projects continue to receive global recognition despite unresolved allegations.
About Beyond the Bar
So far, only four of the 12 episodes have aired, with the first episode premiering on August 2, 2025. The JTBC drama is scheduled to conclude on September 7, 2025, with new episodes released on Netflix every Saturday and Sunday.
For all the latest K-drama, K-pop, and Hallyuwood updates, keep following our coverage here.
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Published : Aug 17, 2025 10:17 IST - 13 MINS READ Sumana Roy is the author of two works of nonfiction, How I Became a Tree (Aleph Book Company) and Provincials; Plant Thinkers of Twentieth-Century Bengal (Oxford University Press), a work of literary criticism; Missing: A Novel and My Mother's Lover and Other Stories, works of fiction; and two collections of poems, Out of Syllabus and VIP: Very Important Plant. Her poems, essays, and stories have been published in The Paris Review, Orion, Lit Hub, The Point, Granta, Guernica, Prairie Schooner, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Minnesota Review, Emergence Magazine, The Common, The White Review, Berfrois, The Journal of South Asian Studies, American Book Review, among other places. She is now Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Ashoka University, India. 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The few books that my brother and I read over and over again came from Mrs Nora Bansal, our English teacher in the second grade, and Kamalesh Jethu, my father's friend, who, when he visited us from Calcutta, carried books in Bangla and music cassettes for us. Occasionally, during the library period in school, we were allowed to borrow a book. Mrs Bansal's children let us borrow the Famous Five and Nancy Drew from their collection. When the Rabindra Rachanabali became available to buy, my father, who worked at United Bank of India—the bank through which one had to buy them—bought the set for us. I began reading them after my ICSE—alone at home, with nothing to do, I first read the stories, which, at that time, I didn't like very much, then the poems and songs and essays. The Sarat Rachanabali had arrived before that, when I was in middle school. It was a very fat book, impossible for children to hold. 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Tell us about the books and authors from your early years of reading and how they influenced you as an aspiring writer? I must clarify that I had absolutely no ambition to be a writer. Like most things in my life—studying literature, coming to love, growing gardens, teaching—writing too was an accident, a byproduct of the circumstances I found myself in, rather than a roaring ambition that had set me on a path. I read everything as literature—all my school textbooks, including, say, mathematics. I wish I could say—like my students often do—that I read a lot as a child. I didn't, and I'm therefore not a good example for writers who've discovered themselves through reading. Also, reading has taken on a moral life today—it's not just the simplistic arithmetic that feeds our understanding of what makes a 'good reader', the assumption that a 'voracious reader' must be, by some kind of alchemy brought about by the reading experience, transformed into an empathetic citizen. My writing has been influenced by the way people around me spoke, the lives they led, and, more importantly, the way they spoke about their everyday lives, with humour, anger, joy, affection, and distance. You write about the natural environment, plant life, and how we interact with our natural world. What draws you to these ideas? I write about the world I live in or want to live in. In this world, the human—a person such as myself—is not at the centre. I'm a minor figure there—it is populated by plants and animals, not as they are in a fantasy novel, but as I see them. When I watch a film, quite often, my eyes are taking in a tree without leaves or, as they did last night, a nasturtium plant outside a house that hasn't been watered for some time. I am drawn to what has come to be called the 'background'—in art, in manuscripts, in public policy, in the architecture of our houses and cities, in everything. This comes from a natural instinct, by which I mean this manner of experiencing the world, noticing walls, doormats, earthworms, flies, clouds, and the shape of the wind. In writing about them, I'm only following my instinct, my curiosity about them. In a world where everyone must be a 'follower', I am a follower of what you're, in shorthand, calling the natural world. As someone who also teaches literature and creative writing, what advice would you give to aspiring writers, especially from small towns and villages who may not have easy access to quality literature or literary mentors and may not be writing in English? I am uneasy about giving and taking advice, and so I can only share what I have tried to live by. It is this—that we should not be bullied by 'literary trends', by what the market wants us to produce. We should give ourselves the freedom to write what we want to, irrespective of the discouragement and neglect we might receive from publishers. Honesty to one's aesthetic, to write what one likes to read, to remain an artist instead of turning into content creators in the demand-and-supply routine—it might be hard to live by this, to survive as a writer in a culture where one is bullied by marketing teams telling you what to write and sales teams telling you that your books don't sell. But it'll be worth it—for yourself. Which books or writers, Indian or international, do you find yourself returning to? What draws you to their work? I re-read my favourite books and poems often. One book that I've been mesmerised by ever since I was four years old is Sahaj Path. I have a soft copy of the first edition on my phone, and I still look at it in wonder when I'm exhausted—the form of the book, of the page in particular, the distribution of word and image on it, and the rhythm of everyday provincial life caught in it by Rabindranath Tagore and Nandalal Basu. It's a primary school primer, and it would inaugurate a way of thinking about life—and art—in four-year-olds that has now been lost. Who are your comfort reads—books and authors that help at difficult moments? I like to laugh. In the last few years, I've found myself reading two writers who happen to have begun life as provincials. Rajshekhar Basu and Shibram Chakraborty still make me laugh a lot. Could you name a few books you've gifted recently? Two books that I've gifted a few times recently are The Five Senses by Michel Serres and Love's Work by Gillian Rose. I gave a copy of Nandalal Bose's Vision and Creation to my closest friend a few months ago. Have you discovered any lesser-known or overlooked authors or books later in life that you wish you had read earlier? What was unique about their writings? Like many, I did not grow up reading writers around me. In my case, it has been poets writing from northern Bengal. Growing up isolated from any sense of literary culture, pestered by an education system that turned Bangla into a 'second language', I read almost exclusively in the English language. I had no idea about the rich body of literature around me. Only a couple of hundred kilometres away was Amiya Bhushan Majumdar. But I wouldn't begin reading him until my early thirties. There's an elastic intelligence in the experiments he makes as a prose writer. I wish I'd discovered his work before, as I wish I had Manindra Gupta. How does one write such sensuous prose, like he does in Akshay Mulberry? What are you currently reading and enjoying? Are there any contemporary books—fiction, nonfiction, or poetry—you would recommend to others? I've been reading Saswati Sarkar's poetry in Bangla, The World According to David Hockney, and finishing Rob MacFarlane's Is A River Alive? Adil Jussawalla's Soliloquies (Thayil Editions), written when he was eighteen, has just been published. I don't recommend reading lists to anyone, but this book might be of interest to your readers, particularly those who are curious about our literary history—along with Jussawalla's poem/play, there's also an interview with him, and photos I hadn't seen before. Which Indian writers are, in your opinion, brilliantly exploring the inner lives of small towns and provincial life? Any such books recently or previously published that deserve a wider readership and recognition? It's my belief that most of our literature, whether modern or pre-modern, emerged from a provincial temperament. I have not had the opportunity to read literature in languages besides Bangla, Hindi, Nepali, and English. Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, Adwaita Mallabarman, Manik Bandopadhyay, Indra Bahadur Rai, Amiya Bhushan Majumdar, to begin with. Contemporary Bengali poets writing from the provinces, in northern Bengal, Purulia and Midnapore, have been writing some extraordinary poetry. Also Read | I started writing to challenge patriarchy: Banu Mushtaq In the current literary culture of India, what would you like to see change or get more attention, such as more quality translations of literature originally written in regional languages? I would like 'literature' to get more attention. Any kind of literature that comes with an adjective to announce its distinctiveness, from the need to blurb itself, alienates me at the beginning. It is quite wonderful that our literatures are being translated into English. I wish there was more translation between our languages. And even more than that I wish that the characterisation of translation as a kind of religion, an act of purification, with Anglophone Indians often saying 'I only read Indian literature in translation now' would stop. Literature's been hijacked for various agendas, both by the Right and the Left. I wish for us to be able to read for pleasure alone. Where there is joy, conversion will happen easily. We will no longer have to be spoon-fed worldviews. Imagine if you could invite three Indian writers—living or dead—to a dinner or tea party at your home. Who would you choose and why? And what conversations would you like to have with them? No one. I feel nervous and awkward among writers and academics. I have now become used to eating most of my meals by myself. I listen to music or watch baby videos on Instagram while eating. I think that has helped my digestion in a way I imagine eating with writers might not. Majid Maqbool is an independent journalist and writer based in Kashmir. Bookmarks is a fortnightly column where writers reflect on the books that shaped their ideas, work, and ways of seeing the world.
