LOONA's Chuu accused of bullying and threatening school girls, K-pop fans say 'kids are jerks everywhere'
After allegations about twin volleyball players, Lee Jae-yeong and Lee Da-yeong's truth about being bullies when they were in school were proven to be fact and the two were dropped by their team, Korea's search engine Naver has been flooded with students across the country confessing about how different idols that they went to school with also happened to be bullies. One of the most recent idols to be accused of bullying is LOONA's Chuu.
The post by an anonymous user claimed that Chuu would, "would invite me to a group chat to curse and threaten me. There were times when she stopped me in front of the school and cursed at me when I was just trying to go home."
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The writer, whose post was translated by allkpop also added, "after that. I couldn't even go to the lunchroom, so I stayed alone in the classroom. When our homeroom teacher asked me what was wrong, I couldn't say anything at that time. I feel pathetic that I didn't gather any evidence of that time because I didn't want to think back to that time."
Why did LOONA's Chuu allegedly bully her schoolmates?
The writer explained further that she had asked Chuu about why she would bully her and recalled, "I asked what was the reason she was bothering me. She said that there were times we used to hang out in front of her house in the parking lot and Kim Ji Woo (Chuu) said that she had to go home early. So I said, 'Your mom must worry about you a lot.' She said those words bothered her."
Many fans of Chuu had also expressed on the Internet that they find the claims hard to believe after having seen Chuu's personality. To them, the writer said, "Chuu didn't hit me or take money from me as the other celebrities, but this is part of school bullying. The people who say Chuu doesn't look like a person that would do that are harming the victims again."
Another accuser also came forward to claim, "I was wondering why there wasn't anything about Chuu being a bully. To be honest, I also graduated from the same middle school as Chuu and was in the same class as her. And I was also bullied...Bullying doesn't only mean the perpetrator hit the victim. Kim Ji Woo is so good at maintaining her image, so the people who don't know about her won't know she was a bully. But there were a lot of kids who she bullied. She's the worse. She uses other people to ostracize the victim and threaten them. I was in the same class as her for two years and I really felt like dying then."
This accuser also stressed, "After I told our homeroom teacher that Chuu bullied me and all I did was write a testimony, but the school didn't do anything. Starting from the second or third year of school, she started to try to change her image, saying she was going to become a singer. There so many other things that can prove that she was a bully. She might be a good friend to her friend, but to her victims, she's horrifying."
Fans of LOONA in a Reddit discussion pointed out that all the claims were made about what happened years ago and that many of them also happened to be mean when they were in school. One fan wrote, "seriously. middle schoolers are assholes as a general rule. if we held every adult to the kind of person they were at 12-14, a lot of improved people would be excluded from polite society." To which another agreed and said, "Agree with this. Kids are jerks everywhere."
Many others' opinions also seemed to reflect the same as well. However, one Korean user tried to explain how pervasive a problem bullying was in Korea and wrote, "I dont expect you to understand because you guys have obviously never been to a Korean school, but you have to accept that school environments are not identical worldwide, and bullying in Korean schools isnt just calling someone names, or taking their lunch money or whatever. There's actually a deeper layer of wanting to prove superiority through the complete degradation of someone elses dignity. You are literally treated like trash, and the worst part is that theres no one there to help you."