Do we like Yoo Jae-suk?
Our score: 8 out of 10. Decades of low-key giving and a clean public record, held back from the top only because we found nothing on LGBTQ+ issues either way.
Yoo Jae-suk is one of South Korea's biggest television hosts, and he has been at it since his 1991 debut. He wasn't an overnight hit: in a 2013 interview he recalled being handed a grasshopper mask by a producer in the late 1990s to get on TV, and says he hated it at first.
The nearest thing to a scandal is a stoush that isn't really one. After actor Lee Yi-kyung left Yoo's show and then skipped Yoo in an awards speech in December 2025, some viewers read it as a snub. Lee's agency said there was no reason to take aim at Yoo, and Sports Kyunghyang reported no response from Yoo himself.
On the harm check, we came up empty. No sourced remarks from him demeaning LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants or anyone else turned up, and he doesn't run culture-war campaigns. The honest gap is that we found nothing from him on LGBTQ+ issues either way, so this is an absence of harm, not a record of active allyship.
The recent drama is a bit silly. In September he cancelled a same-day shoot, the first time in 35 years, and apologised for the concern. A former member of the group Roo-ra then shared the story with a sneering comment, which drew criticism of the poster, not Yoo.
On the money side he is the rare celeb praised for paying his taxes. A 2024 audit reportedly found no evidence of deliberate underreporting or tax evasion, and in August 2026 the National Tax Service thanked him after cameras caught him paying at a bank. He called it a civic duty.
The giving is the real stuff. Soompi reported a 50 million won donation to G Foundation for hygiene products and washroom renovations for underprivileged women, with its CEO saying he shares his warm heart every year. Other outlets report regular gifts for disaster relief and heating for low-income households.