Do we like them?

Do we like Shin Jimin?

Our score: 5 out of 10. No harmful words or company turned up, but the unresolved accusations and a thin record keep her in the middle.

Shin Jimin was the leader and main rapper of AOA, the FNC Entertainment girl group that debuted in 2012. She also did solo and collab work and appeared on rap competition shows. For a good while she was a fairly ordinary K-pop success story.

That changed in July 2020, when former AOA member Kwon Mina alleged on Instagram that Jimin had mistreated her for about a decade, starting in their trainee days. Jimin first posted a one-word reply, “novel”, which she later deleted. She then posted an apology saying she had fallen short as a leader, and quit AOA and halted her activities.

Where it stands matters. In the coverage we could read there is no court ruling either way, so these remain Mina's allegations and Jimin's partial apology. Mina has also said she isn't sure the apology was sincere, so the two sides never fully agreed on what happened.

On the harm test, we searched for anything she has said or done about LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants or the climate, and for the company she keeps. Nothing turned up in the pages we read. Some pages wouldn't open for us, so this rests on headlines and summaries, and it's a thin record rather than a clean bill of health.

She returned to entertainment in 2022 after a break, giving interviews about her time away, and a debut solo EP and a fan meeting followed. In June 2026 a Korean outlet ran a piece on her saying she wants to become “someone I can be proud of”. Then Mina's September 2026 post reopened the old wound, so the story isn't finished.

The verdict: she's not a villain in the way the harm test looks for, and we found no real good deeds to weigh up either. We could only confirm a donation in a snippet, with no cause named. An apology is only worth what follows it, and the other side says it fell short. Lean on that when you decide how warm to feel.