On October 7, Ilgan Sports published an article with interviews with parents of NewJeans members, regarding Hanni being intentionally ignored and isolated by the manager of another group in HYBE Group.
Hanni talked about this incident in a livestream on September 11. At that time, Hanni greeted a group of musicians when they accidentally met at HYBE headquarters. But the group's manager told the members: "Let it go." Hanni confided this to the new CEO of ADOR Company, Kim Joo Young, but the CEO ignored her.
HYBE later confirmed that the group Hanni mentioned was ILLIT.
According to Ilgan Sports, the mothers of NewJeans members expressed deep concern about HYBE's cursory investigation, suspecting that the company intentionally erased important evidence.
“How come there is only a video of Hanni greeting other group members left, while the video recording the “abandonment” behavior was deleted?” - NewJeans' parent was upset.
The parent reported the incident to HYBE four months ago, shortly after it happened in late May.
At that time, the conflict between HYBE and former ADOR CEO Min Hee Jin was escalating. ADOR's board of directors had many changes. Min Hee Jin strongly opposed Hanni's abandonment, but Min Hee Jin was also isolated and had difficulty solving the problem.
NewJeans parents contacted the new CEO Kim Joo Young and the new management of ADOR to complain about the incident and ask them to prevent it from happening again. But after a long wait, they only received the answer that no evidence was found because the important video had been deleted.
The parents were suspicious because there were too many irregularities. They reported the management company immediately after the incident happened, even having emails as evidence.
But ADOR responded that CCTV can only be stored for 30 days. When asked to restore, ADOR said that recovering the data is very difficult technically.
Surprisingly, however, not all of the video from the day of the incident was lost. ADOR showed NewJeans' parents an 8-second video of Hanni greeting others at the company, while more important clips, such as when the artist and her manager left, were deleted.
When the parent asked why the important footage was deleted, ADOR said that the person who deleted the CCTV had left the job so they could not know the reason.
“The security department blamed the superiors for ordering and approving the deletion, and the superiors blamed the employee who left. It was all a mess and no one was taking responsibility,” said NewJeans parent.
Another parent was puzzled when ADOR asked Belift Lab (which manages the ILLIT group) to search for CCTV footage from the day of the incident, instead of a specialized department of HYBE.
In a related development, the Environment and Labor Committee of the Korean National Assembly approved a request to summon NewJeans group's Hanni and ADOR CEO Kim Joo Young for an inspection on October 25.
The Committee is expected to question Hanni about the workplace bullying issues she described and will question CEO Kim about his inadequate response to the situation.
