Chapter 38
At the Yuria Entertainment lobby, I wrote the name Cha Do-hyuk and my contact information in the visitor log and received a pass.
As I crossed through the gate, Oh Ye-ji waved at me with a bright, welcoming smile.
“Ye-ji, who’s that?”
“My uncle! Handsome, right?”
“Yeah, he is.”
She was bragging to one of the employees waiting for the elevator.
It was embarrassing.
“Nice to meet you. I’m Cha Do-hyuk.”
“I thought you were a movie star.”
The two of them were exchanging exactly the same knowing look. So, faced with someone I was meeting for the first time, I made a lame joke and said, “Have you perhaps seen the bank transfer record for the prime-grade marbled sirloin I bought?”
The employee covered her mouth.
“Ye-ji really takes after her mother’s side, doesn’t she?”
“Hehe!”
I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry.
I followed the employee into the elevator, but Ye-ji tugged on my coat from the side.
“Uncle, we’re supposed to take the elevator on the other side. This one only runs on odd-numbered floors.”
A little sheepishly, I said goodbye to the employee and took the other elevator.
Ye-ji pressed the button for the tenth floor.
“What do you think of our company? Even on the weekend, everyone looks bright and cheerful, right?”
“It’s definitely different from the articles I read. But is it all right for you to introduce me as your uncle?”
“You were just calling me your niece a second ago, and now you’re saying that?”
Her mother’s name was Lee Kkot-soon, and her mother’s mother had been Lee Soo-young, so unless someone had the specific idea of requesting a family registry copy, there was no reason for it to stand out—but still, I felt uneasy.
“Even your late aunt had the same name, Lee Soo-young. If your lawyer uncle keeps his mouth shut, it’s a perfect crime.”
Ye-ji lifted her chin with smug confidence.
If she didn’t care, then I would match her pace while we were at the company. It would be better for Ye-ji that way.
“By the way, Uncle. Do you also give relationship advice?”
“There are couples who’ve received my advice and are getting married soon.”
“Oh!”
That was on the level of my close friend Min Ho-jun, who had twenty years of experience as a relationship counselor.
Wait a minute.
Could Ye-ji be dating someone? She’s only been an idol for two years!
I tensed up a little.
“Earlier, one of the older staff members said there’s a guy she’s been seeing lately. He says he hates women, but he keeps babbling about wanting a relationship.”
My shoulders loosened.
“That’s a signal not to confess, right?”
“No, it isn’t.”
“…It isn’t?”
“He says he hates women, right? But he wants a relationship. So what does that mean?”
That he wants to meet a man.
The elevator chimed and came to a stop.
* * *
Ye-ji knocked on the door to the CEO’s office.
“Come in.”
“President!”
A middle-aged man rose from his seat.
An exclamation point seemed to hover over his head.
We’ve arrived at the right place. Now all that’s left is to take the case.
“President, this is the lawyer uncle I told you about.”
We exchanged greetings and business cards.
“Nice to meet you. I’m attorney Cha Do-hyuk.”
“I’m Han Yu-chan, from Yuria Entertainment.”
Ye-ji, who had been standing nearby, scratched her head.
“The mood is kind of awkward, and I don’t think I should be here. Uncle, call me when you’re done!” And with that, she hurried out.
She’s quick on the uptake.
A warm smile spread across Han Yu-chan’s face as he watched Ye-ji’s retreating back.
“She’s an artist without a single wrinkle in her heart. Thanks to her, the staff have become brighter too. Please, have a seat here.”
He gestured to the sofa on the right.
“Did you hear about it from Ye-ji?”
“I only checked the newspaper articles.”
It seemed to amount to this: the company’s image had taken a hit because of a variety show, and Twice had gotten tangled up in the fallout.
President Han gave a short reply. “I see.”
“To be honest, I hadn’t planned on meeting a lawyer. Our parent company’s legal counsel also advised us to minimize friction with AB Broadcasting as much as possible.”
He smiled wryly.
“But then, was it last month? Ye-ji asked, in passing, whether our group could renew its contract.”
When an artist he cherished wanted to renew, what kind of representative would answer with anything negative? That, at least, was how Han framed it.
So she’d asked around casually.
She had always been like that. Even when she raised her hand on my behalf and then threw herself bodily into protecting her mother, she never once seemed to consider using contract terms or the leverage of being the stronger party. Her momentum was outrageous—reckless, even, in the way only someone completely genuine could be.
So that was why President Han had called me in.
To renew the contract, they’d need to restore Twice’s image first.
“If it means going up against the network, we still have to try. That’s what the artist wants.”
“Since it concerns my niece, I’ll work even harder.”
We traded thanks for taking the case and exchanged the retainer contract.
“President Han, could you tell me first about the February 2 broadcast?”
“Of course. Do you know the program Come On, Let’s Work?”
“A little.”
Come On, Let’s Work, the flagship program of AB Channel, was a show in which celebrities visited companies, experienced the actual work themselves, and listened to the employees’ grievances.
Since all the members of Twice had appeared together after a long time, the viewership rating had been the highest in the program’s history.
“The car company we were originally supposed to film at canceled, so at the last minute Twice ended up working here at Yuria Entertainment.”
They had filmed it with the intention of making it a healing experience for both the staff and the members.
“But the broadcast came out completely different from what we expected. From an entertainment standpoint, it wasn’t terrible, of course—but it damaged Twice’s image.”
There had been a caption under the article photo earlier: ‘a little devil drunk on popularity.’
“What exactly was in it?”
“One of the Yuria Entertainment employees recently got injured while working at a Twice concert. So we filed it as an industrial accident.”
But the show had made the company look like an unscrupulous employer that responded sluggishly to workplace injuries and squeezed its workers dry even when they were in pain.
President Han let out a sigh.
“They even made Twice look like spoiled little emperors who naturally took it for granted that they were doing us some huge favor.”
In other words, it made them seem like they had treated the staff so extravagantly that they’d ended up abusing their power.
President Han pressed a hand to his head, as if a headache had come on.
“On March 6, the solo concert scheduled for Jakarta, Indonesia, was postponed indefinitely. The venue wouldn’t refund anything, and now they’re even threatening to claim damages.”
“...What?”
“The ads we were supposed to shoot after the concert were canceled too. Two of them.”
One was for Lemoni, an organic brand that was rapidly rising in the Indonesian market.
The other was for Crackers, the national snack of the giant conglomerate Garunda Food.
If the damage from a broadcast that wasn’t even based on the truth had run into the hundreds of millions of won, it was only natural that their mental state would be wrecked.
If the damage keeps compounding, of course it gets worse.
“On NewTube Shorts and TikTok, people were editing clips from the show with Twice’s songs, drawing an X on them while shouting ‘GET OUT,’ and so on.”
It was common enough for other girl groups to be elevated by having Twice torn down, and opportunistic anti-fans and trash-collecting channels flooded the internet with hate videos.
“We kept our reaction muted because of our parent company, but one of our PR interns noticed something off, and that’s when we realized we couldn’t leave it alone.”
“What did they notice?”
“The February 2 broadcast was uploaded directly in Indonesian. Illegally downloaded.”
Usually, a program would be translated into other languages after Chinese, Japanese, and English subtitles.
Not the other way around, and certainly not with Indonesian appearing first.
“That segment alone was cut into clips and spread at emergency-alert speed. I heard it even made the morning news in Indonesia.”
This is bad.
“President Han, however you look at it, this reeks of malice.”
“I think so too. There are companies that specialize in negative marketing, after all.”
He handed me a tablet.
“The results I got by mobilizing my own network pointed to the same thing. And disgustingly enough, it was led by a broadcast PD.”
“……!!!”
My heart thudded hard.
It wasn’t the face in the compensation photo.
But the man in the photo had been bowing to the other person with his arms folded in front of his chest.
The posture is exactly the same.
“A strange way to greet someone, isn’t it? It’s his signature move, apparently. He still thinks he’s a top PD, so he does all sorts of things like that.”
“…Are you talking about the AB Channel PD you mentioned earlier?”
“Yes. His name is Jo Ji-han. He’s the PD in charge of Come On, Let’s Work.”
PD Jo Ji-han.
“And the person next to him is Kim Da-al, the head of an advertising agency that’s basically just the arm and leg of Style Entertainment.”
I looked up at Han Yu-chan.
“If it’s Style Entertainment…”
“It means Ye-ji’s original agency could be in on it too.”
“......”
“He may have gone through a famous PR company and arranged it by word of mouth through PD Jo Ji-han, so we can’t say for certain yet.”
If Style Entertainment had helped, then this was definitely tied to their next girl group.
Once Twice ended its activities, some fans would leave in search of a new girl group.
If even a quarter of those fans could be absorbed into Style’s next act, they’d have first-tier status practically guaranteed.
But as always, speculation without evidence was a dangerous thing.
“President Han, if you secure any evidence, please contact me. Even in the middle of the night, that’s fine.”
“Understood.”
“But are you sure? Even if it’s cable, if the other side is a network, it could disrupt Twice.”
No matter how much their parent company, C Nine, dominated the entertainment industry, the other side was a broadcast network. Just as the parent company’s own lawyers had said, they ought to keep their heads down.
There’s definitely going to be blowback.
Oddly enough, Han Yu-chan smiled and said it would truly be all right.
“AB Channel doesn’t have a music show, so they won’t be able to hit us directly. Variety appearances might be restricted, though.”
In other words, there was no immediate problem for now.
“In that case, let’s set the criminal angle aside and go after the PD on the civil side.”
“Interesting. Do you have a reason?”
Even if this was a relationship formed through Ye-ji’s personal connection, I needed to demonstrate my competence.
“If we pursue this criminally, the PD could end up in prison.”
That top PD in prison?
That was the kind of thing the press would chew up eagerly.
It would be perfect for the network’s name to keep rising and falling for all the wrong reasons.
“If it’s treated as the PD’s private misconduct instead, we can reduce the friction with the network.”
“...But our parent company’s legal counsel said there was no way.”
“That’s just sticking a hand over one eye and saying all is well. Still, a civil suit will be far less burdensome than a criminal case.”
I also made it clear to President Han that it would be best if he drew a firm line and told them we had no intention of going head-to-head with the network itself.
“I’m the representative in name at least, so I’ll think about whether there’s another way.”
Once I leave, I should tell Ye-ji to cancel the Style Entertainment contract first.
If word got out that Twice was preparing to sue, Style Entertainment would never let the contract end without penalty.
They’d probably expect the project group to renew, and then push for a bigger cut of the settlement going to the original agency. Ye-ji would be desperate enough for them to do it.
“...I’ll meet with the AB Channel head of entertainment programming on Monday.”
“Take your time. It’ll be cleaner if you prepare first and proceed after that.”
“Then could you give me the signal, attorney?”
“I’ll contact you right away.”
We shook hands.
“I look forward to working with you.”
“I’ll do my best. Ah!”
“……?”
“President Han, I’m curious about one thing. The employee was Korean, wasn’t she? So why did this blow up in Indonesia?”
At first, even the tabloid articles had described her as a foreign worker, so I had assumed she was Indonesian.
But she was clearly Korean.
“I wondered if the staged abuse of power was the issue, but from what I heard, the whole mood was different too.”
Even from the standpoint of the majority workforce, there was no reason for such a huge uproar.
“Under Indonesian labor law, if you list the lawful grounds for dismissal, the compensation the worker is entitled to receive, and any other rights granted to the worker being dismissed in the notice of termination, then isn’t the dismissal valid?”
And in principle, as long as it was delivered to the worker fourteen days before the dismissal took effect, that was that. For interns, it was seven days.
“She wasn’t even fired, and she’s Korean, so why did it become such a problem? Is Twice a national idol group in Indonesia?”
President Han smiled.
“Ye-ji didn’t tell you? The Kim Yo-gi who appeared on the broadcast has dual nationality. Korean and Indonesian.”
She had been born to a Korean father and an Indonesian mother, and after spending her entire life in Indonesia, she had come to Korea to attend university and then gotten a job at Yuria Entertainment.
“So she’s a Korean-Indonesian dual national.”
That was it.
“And the reason it exploded, I think, is because she’s a famous NewTuber in Indonesia.”
“...What?”
“She has 19.9 million subscribers. That’s about four times more than Twice’s subscriber count.”
Indonesia has a population of 270 million, and she has 19.9 million subscribers?!
...So this was what people meant by a hidden powerhouse.