Yellow Bee's Agency Responds To Member Ari's Accusations Of Sexual Harassment By Staff

Yellow Bee’s agency has issued a statement regarding member Ari’s allegations of sexual harassment by staff members.

On July 31, Yellow Bee’s agency, Addiction Entertainment, announced that the group has disbanded. The agency wrote, “We had planned to continue Yellow Bee’s activities, but due to promiscuous behavior in member B’s private life, the agency and the members were unable to come to an agreement.”

Warning: discussion of sexual harassment

Member Ari responded by posting on Instagram with a statement in which she first denied that the member had been promiscuous and then outlined times when the members had been sexually harassed and sexually assaulted by the agency’s staff.

She said that a former manager had said things to them like, “I’ll give you a baby so let’s go to a motel,” and she also said a staff member had tried to drag a member to a practice room to have sex with her. She described how they’d been touched on their thighs by the staff and she wrote that the members would be called at dawn to serve alcohol to people called investors. She also described how they were never paid and neglected during promotions, forcing the members to sometimes pay for costumes, shoes, and video editing on their own, and they had to promote in Japan without any staff.

She wrote, “This inappropriate treatment is why we said we would quit the group, not because of a member’s promiscuous behavior.”

On August 4, Addiction Entertainment addressed some of these points in the following statement:

Hello, this is Addiction Entertainment’s official statement.

First, thank you for showing much love and interest in Yellow Bee and Addiction Entertainment. We are issuing this statement to share our official stance regarding the incidents. We met with four Yellow Bee members, excluding member B, and we are issuing the statement that was written with their agreement.

First is the incident that happened about a year ago. It occurred at an event venue. There was a family in the audience who had a child. She said that when she saw the child, she said, ‘I want to have a cute child like that when I get married in the future,’ and the manager standing next to her had heard and said that rude remark.

The manager said that it was a joke, but we could not just move past it as it was a serious issue, so our company severely reprimanded him at the time. However, we did not tell the members when we took care of the issue. That manager left the company a year ago.

Next, we will address the incident of sexual harassment. This case is related to a music video producer named Yoon. Yoon is not an agency staff member. He has never worked as an employee of the agency, and he is also someone who has caused a lot of damage to our company as well.

There were a lot of work-related matters to talk about it and we had a desk empty in the office, so he asked if he could use the desk. We permitted it for the sake of the production of a better music video. That would be why the Yellow Bee members misunderstood and thought he worked for the agency.

Many people who saw the music video said it looked “cheap” and asked, “Did you film it on a rooftop?” but we had no choice. It had been decided that Yoon would film the MV and he had only sent the MV cue sheet. There was no feedback two to three days before the filming was to begin, so our agency directly called the music video director.

However, the director replied that Yoon had said he would pay them a deposit but they hadn’t received anything at all, so they said the filming was cancelled. The members’ debut date had already been announced and there were articles about it, so we ended up filming the MV in a rush.

We want to say more about Yoon, other than the MV, but since the important thing is the sexual harassment incident, we will just talk about the main topic. At the time, the agency director and a female manager were there. They did not see the sexual harassment take place. We did not even imagine that Yoon would do that sort of thing in front of people, and we think it was a large mistake to have not been paying attention to the members.

The members went to stop him when he was bringing her to the practice room, and after that, people including the agency director and manager cursed him out and there was a fight. This happened after the members had gone home, and since it was an unpleasant matter, we did not tell the members that there had been a fight. So it’s possible that the members could have thought that the agency hadn’t taken any measures in response.

Rather than assigning blame in this matter, our agency feels great responsibility over being unprepared for this kind of incident. We express our deep apologies to the Yellow Bee members who experienced mental anguish, the fans, and to everyone who may have experienced discomfort.

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