South Korean superstar Kim Soo Hyun tearfully denies controversial claims about relationship with late actress
Embattled South Korean superstar Kim Soo Hyun has personally addressed a growing scandal about the nature of his relationship with late actress Kim Sae-ron for the first time, in a closely watched saga that has roiled the country's entertainment industry.
Speaking at a press conference Monday, a tearful Kim Soo Hyun, 37, said accusations made by a YouTube channel in March that he had entered into a relationship with his fellow performer when she was still a minor were untrue. He has repeatedly denied the allegations.
'I did not date her when she was a minor,' Kim said at the emotional news conference, where he declined to take questions. 'Apart from the fact that we were both actors, we were just an ordinary couple like anyone else. We had feelings for each other, and as time passed, we eventually parted ways. After that, we rarely kept in touch.'
After the press conference, a lawyer for the actor and his agency, Goldmedalist, announced a lawsuit against multiple parties, including the YouTube channel and the family of Kim Sae-ron, accusing them of defamation and violation of information protection. CNN has reached out to the family for comment.
Kim Sae-ron was found dead at home in February at 24 years old, nearly two years after she retreated from public view following a drunk-driving conviction that prompted heavy public backlash and reputational damage.
The allegations made by the YouTube channel, known for covering political news, started an online firestorm against Kim Soo Hyun despite his denials. His talent agency previously said that while the two actors had been in a relationship, it took place when both were adults, according to the Chosun Ilbo, one of South Korea's newspapers of record.
The fallout for the actor has been swift, with luxury fashion house Prada and popular Korean cosmetics brand Dinto both ending their collaborations with Kim Soo Hyun in the weeks after the scandal broke. A star at home and across Asia, Kim Soo Hyun is best known for the award-winning series 'It's Okay to Not be Okay' and 'My Love from the Star.'
On Monday, he also apologized for staying quiet for the first few days after the allegations emerged last month, saying he was worried about the consequences for his recently aired Netflix series 'Queen of Tears.'
'If you want to criticize me for being cowardly or selfish, I will accept that,' he said.
Kim Sae-ron was a prolific actor who shot to stardom as a child, but her career stalled after she crashed her car in the South Korean capital in 2022. In April 2023, a Seoul court found her guilty of driving under the influence. She avoided jail but was fined about $14,000.
Kim Soo Hyun also claimed that many text messages that had been distributed online, purportedly between him and Kim Sae-ron, were false.
There were no signs of foul play and officers are investigating the circumstances of her death, a police official told CNN last month.
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Los Angeles Times
39 minutes ago
- Los Angeles Times
There's more to Korean music than K-Pop. Young composers show how in L.A. Phil's Seoul Festival
K-pop. Oscar-celebrated cinema. Samsung in the living room. Political urgency in the press. However prominent Korean culture seems to be, there is surprising lack of coverage of the classical scene at large. Already at 21, Yunchan Lim, winner of the 2018 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, has reached superstar status. Myung-Whun Chung, whose conducting career began as an assistant to Carlo Maria Giulini at the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 1977, was just selected, over a veteran Italian conductor, to head La Scala in Milan with the blessing of Italy's nationalist president, Giorgia Meloni. And now the L.A. Phil has turned to the South Korean capital for an eight-day Seoul Festival as a follow-up to its revelatory Reykjavik and Mexico City festivals. Unsuk Chin, today's best-known Korean composer, is the curator. She is, in fact, today's only Korean composer who's well known internationally. 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Though famed for having been the first major video artist, Paik was a classically trained pianist and composer who began his career following in Schoenberg's footsteps by writing 12-tone music. His route to video was an erratic one that began when he fell under the spell of John Cage and became one of the more outrageous members of the anarchic Fluxus art and performance movement. I once asked Paik, who taught briefly at CalArts when it opened, about whether he always considered himself a composer. He said only a yuppie — 'you know, those people who work in a bank during the day and only go to concerts at night' — would think he wasn't. The Yun and Paik zeitgeist of going your own original and expressive sonic way while always being aware of tradition, whether embraced or rejected, pervades Chin, 63, and the generation of Korean composers who came after her and whom she has invited to the festival. Chin herself left Seoul to study with Ligeti in Europe. 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Sun-Young Pahg's austerely formal 'L'autre moitié de Silence' for daegeum and ensemble featured Hong Yoo as soloist bending notes and bending time on the bamboo flute used in Korean folk and traditional music. In Yie-Eun Chun's spritely Violin Concerto, which was commissioned by the L.A. Phil for the festival, scale-like passages got the Paganini treatment from soloist SooBeen Lee. Dongjin Bae's 'reflective — silky and rough' for standard western flute and spacey strings, another L.A. Phil commission, had an ancient feel with its silences and breathy solos played with enthralling focus by Yubeen Kim. Chin's 'Gougalon (Scenes From a Street Theater),' which ended the program, is a riotous evocation of Hong Kong. Rather than musically reproduce street sounds and people sounds, Chin transforms them into spectacular orchestral chatter. The effect is what their joy must sound like, what their meals must sound like, what their walking and talking and laughing and crying must sound like in a language you don't understand because exhilaration isn't language. All of this is music by distinct personalities, each striving for something sonically personal. Musically mixing East and West dispenses with regulations when crossing borders and becomes an an act of individuality and often resistance. Chun's do-re-me scales become cockeyed before you grasp what's happening. Bae's silky flute, when rough underneath, evoke the feeling you might get when taking a break from Bach an instant before the world's most compelling composer overtakes your own senses. The conductor Soo-Yeoul Choi favors transparency and sensuality at the same time with expressive gestures that seem to magically mold sound. Each piece had different instrumental combinations involving both L.A. Phil and TIMF players. Everything worked. 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New York Post
an hour ago
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Yahoo
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