K-pop stars have been rapidly falling from grace. The scandal started last week when Big Bang’s Seungri was alleged to have run a prostitution ring and have drugged women at a club. Days later, singer-songwriter Jung Joon-young was exposed to have secretly filmed himself having sex with multiple women, sharing the footage with other members of major K-pop acts like, CNBlue, FT Island and Highlight. While some have issued apologies, other have resigned from their respective groups over the scandal. The list of South Korean boy-band members involved in K-pop’s current sex scandal is only growing, but beyond the outrage, resignation and shocked fans lies a larger problem: molka, or spy cam porn that targets unsuspecting women.
“People are concerned this issue may fade away as a celebrity scandal,” Youngmi Kim, Senior Lecturer at the University of Edinburgh’s Asian Studies department tells SLEEK. “The big difference here is that the recent molka issue is related to not just entertaining industry, but also with corruptions with policemen and public administrators at the very high level.”
The molka epidemic is a central issue of the country’s #MeToo movement as tens of thousands of women took to the streets last summer saying, “My life is not your porn.” The problem is a mix of up-skirting and revenge porn as the perpetrators can be strangers or lovers – the main qualifier is that the woman is unaware that she is being photographed or filmed. While some of it takes place with spy cameras on shoes, lighters or key chains, a lot of it happens with regular phones.
Only a fraction of those affected actually find out that they are victims of molka. Still, the number of spy cam cases rose to 6,500 in 2017, according to Yonhap news agency. While the sale of these photos and videos is big business, so is removing them. Women are often forced to turn to digital laundering companies to have them taken offline.
Beyond the invasion of privacy, for a female K-pop star who is outed as a target of molka, the footage can lead to negative repercussions for her career and maker her less marketable. This is why multiple Korean singers have come out in the past week to deny that they were among those filmed. “I have also seen some celebrities with such scandal disappear on screen for a while and then come back to public successfully,” Kim says.
While different forms of sexual harassment and assault — including molka — are tragically common, South Korea, like the rest of the world, needs to hold its entertainment industry accountable. “There are some problematic cases as we see with molka issues or sexually abused cases not only among singers but also among actresses,” Kim says, referring to the death of actress Jang Ja-yeon in 2009 over systematic sexual abuse by her management company. While we for society to change, bringing famous perpetrators to justice is a good start.