On November 11, singer and actress IU's (Lee Ji Eun) management company, EDAM Entertainment, announced details of the legal measures they have taken over the past two years (2023-2024) to protect the artist.
EDAM Entertainment cooperated with a law firm, collected evidence of malicious posts targeting IU and filed a lawsuit accordingly.
The firm focuses on high-profile cases that meet the criteria for criminal prosecution, including insults, defamation, death threats, invasion of privacy, sexual harassment, distribution of pornography and deepfakes, malicious dissemination of false information, etc.
More than 180 individuals have been identified as defendants so far. “We continue to pursue additional legal action,” the company said in a statement, stressing that the process is ongoing.
According to IU representatives, there were 6 cases of fines, 3 cases of conditional exemption from prosecution with compulsory education courses, and 1 case of conditional exemption from prosecution by being entrusted to the monitoring center.
Among them, one person committed acts of defamation, sexual harassment, and death threats against IU online, which are serious crimes. The prosecutor requested a fine of 3 million won, but the defendant did not accept and is currently awaiting the results of the official trial.
In addition, the prosecution agency determined that the case of those who repeatedly harassed IU through various websites was a serious crime, so they did not conduct a simple trial but requested an official trial, which is currently in the process.
The company emphasized that the personal information of the overseas criminals has also been identified. This includes those who targeted IU with baseless plagiarism accusations around April and May last year. Among them, there is one person who is said to be a high school classmate of IU.
EDAM Entertainment added: “In this lawsuit, we have selected serious violations and carried out criminal proceedings according to the principle of strong handling, without forgiveness for any reason.
In addition, our company has collected thousands of articles and comments containing defamatory and abusive content towards artists, meeting all the elements of the crime of insult, and has stored them in the database for management.
In the future, if we discover repeated malicious behavior by the same individual, we plan to use the collected documents to request increased penalties.”
The company stated that they will continue to monitor and collect evidence from various online communities such as Nate Pann, Named, The Qoo, DC Inside…
Meanwhile, the person leading the accusations against IU did not appear at the first hearing of the damage lawsuit held on July 24 at the Seoul Central District Court. The second hearing is scheduled for December 4.
