After the alleged victim of bullying Lia ITZY was acquitted of defamation charges, JYP Entertainment plans to conduct a re-investigation. Here's the agency's full statement.
Lia ITZY is one of the idols accused of being the perpetrator of school bullying. The allegation itself has been denied by JYP Entertainment as the agency. The agency also does not hesitate to take legal action against those who are suspected of defaming the artist.
Then on Sunday (13/6), the Incheon Yeonsu Police Station announced that they had acquitted the alleged victim (A) of bullying Lia from charges of defamation. According to the police, there is not enough evidence to prove the claims made by A against Lia are false.
On Tuesday (15/6), JYP Entertainment again released a statement to reveal its plan to request a re-investigation of A. The agency emphasized that although the police have dropped the charges against A, the police have also not acknowledged that A's post is true. Check out the agency's full statement below:
"This is JYP Entertainment. We want to inform you about the company's position in the case related to our artist Lia ITZY as reported by the media recently," JYP Entertainment opened in its official statement.
The agency then detailed several points to emphasize its statement. In the first point, JYP included pictures from various posts and comments accusing Lia of being a school bully. Four of them were later described by JYP, written by the same person but with different online usernames.
JYP explained, "1. When we first filed a lawsuit against (the individual in question), we did not file a lawsuit against victims of school violence, but a lawsuit against posts and comments that we considered malicious, as below."
"The post above was uploaded on the online community for two years, starting from 2018. It is impossible for us to know who posted it, and it is not a real complaint about suffering violence at school," the agency explained.
"Using fan reports and regular monitoring of our posts as a basis, our company currently has a system in place to take regular legal action against malicious online posts. Under that system, we finally took legal action against the above posts in December 2020," said JYP.
The second point reads, "2. During the police investigation, we learned that of the five posts above, four of them were written by the same person when changing nicknames online, while one post was written by a different individual."
The agency continued, "However while the police were still investigating the case, a person who appeared to be the author of the post above wrote on another online community in February that they were being investigated by the police."
"The author complained in his post that they and their acquaintances had been victims of violence at school, but soon after, someone who seemed to be an acquaintance mentioned in the original post uploaded their own post on the same online community," the agency continued.
"He said that they did not consider the school violence incident to be a problem and they thought it was not a big problem. After that, the original post's author repeatedly uploaded the post before deleting it," said JYP.
In the last point, JYP emphasized that the police neither confirmed nor blamed A's accusation of bullying. That's why they insisted on requesting a re-investigation to clear Lia's name.
JYP revealed, "3. After our legal representative filed a complaint on Lia's behalf and responded with legal action, the police decided not to take the case against the two authors of the post to the Procuratorate."
However, the police stated in a press interview that although they decided not to forward this case to the Prosecutor's Office because they did not have evidence that the post was false, they also did not admit that the post was true.
"In other words, the police are saying that their decision not to take the case to the Procuratorate does not mean they are confirming that Lia has participated in school violence," JYP said.
"Therefore, our artist and company plan to appeal and request a re-investigation of the accusation of defamation through lies. This is because we want the truth to be revealed clearly through a deeper investigation," the agency hoped.
"This is because we believe that there should be no victims who are treated unfairly. But at the same time, there should be no victims of untrue or distorted information," concluded JYP Entertainment.
Meanwhile, ITZY has just made a comeback with the song "Mafia in the Morning." The song created by Park Jin Young or also known as producer J.Y. This Park is slowly rising his position on the music charts. (wk/eval)