Do we like Jung Joon-young?
Our score: 0 out of 10. South Korea's top court upheld his conviction for raping women and he served a five-year sentence, which is serious harm to real people.
Jung Joon-young came up through Mnet's talent show Superstar K 4 in 2012 and built a name on rock records and TV appearances. He was a bright young thing of Korean entertainment before 2019, which makes the fall steeper but doesn't soften it.
In March 2019 he announced his retirement and admitted to secretly recording sex videos and sharing them in a group chat. In his public statement he wrote that he filmed women without their consent and shared it in a social network chat room. The same report notes an earlier 2016 accusation of filming an ex-girlfriend, which was eventually dropped.
The courts went further than the filming. Jung was convicted, along with fellow singer Choi Jong-hoon, of raping drunk, unconscious women in 2016. He was also convicted over secretly filming sex and sharing the videos in mobile chat rooms. He got six years in November 2019, cut to five on appeal.
South Korea's Supreme Court upheld the sentence in September 2020 and rejected the pair's argument that the chat-room messages were illegally collected. That settled it: the conviction stands. Choi's term was roughly halved partly because he reached a financial settlement with a victim.
On the harm check, there are no political rants or conspiracy rabbit holes here. The harm is the criminal record itself, which targeted women directly. Nothing in what we read suggests he has campaigned for anything good since.
He walked out of Mokpo Prison in March 2024 after serving the full term, wearing a mask and hat and saying nothing notable to the press. Later reporting said fans were uneasy about his return to public life after he was photographed at a Lyon nightclub, and a French woman told the press he hadn't changed at all. Critics are split on whether he has a right to a life after prison, but we found no confirmed comeback, so this one's old news.