SM To Take Legal Action To Protect Girls' Generation's Taeyeon Against Malicious Posts

SM Entertainment will be taking legal action in response to malicious posts about Girls’ Generation’s Taeyeon.

On November 9, SM Entertainment released the following statement:

This is SM Entertainment.

In order to protect our artist, we have been continuously gathering data regarding illegal activity taking place online, and we are currently in the process of filing a legal complaint through an attorney.

There have been instances in the past where we took the same kind of legal action in response to groundless malicious posts about our artist Taeyeon, and the court ordered [the guilty parties] to pay fines due to crimes such as violating the Act on Promotion of Information and Communications Network Utilization and Information Protection, etc. (defamation of character).

However, in spite of these kinds of measures, falsehoods and malicious posts written with libelous intent about Taeyeon are still being spread on online communities, YouTube, social media platforms, and portal sites.

We remind you once again that these kinds of posts are clearly criminal acts, as they defame our artist’s character and cause her mental distress.

Therefore, in order to respond to these kinds of criminal acts that have recently been proliferating, we plan to file a separate legal complaint after intensive monitoring and gathering reports [from fans]. Accordingly, we ask that fans send any evidence of the kind of criminal activity described above to our agency’s email account for such reports until November 17.

We are aware that fans have personally gathered and organized such evidence, and including this evidence, we will carefully gather and review the materials you send us; and we will use it together with the evidence our agency has already obtained as we move forward with legal action. Additionally, we will inform fans once the suit is underway or if there any decisions made on the case.

We plan to receive all material that fans have already received on their own, so to avoid overlap, we ask that you please exclude such material and send only additional evidence to our email account for reports.

Our agency will continue to actively monitor and take legal action to protect our artists, and we will respond forcefully to these sorts of illegal acts with a no-tolerance policy, while also conveying such information to fans.

Thank you.

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