ADOR To Take Legal Actions Against HYBE & Dispatch After Claims That It Took NewJeans Members From Source Music

On July 23, NewJeans’ agency, ADOR issued an official statement calling Dispatch and HYBE “immoral beyond pitiful” in response to the two agency’s recent article demeaning ADOR. 

In the official statement, ADOR said, “Hello, this is ADOR. Here is ADOR’s stance on today’s Dispatch report.

The content of the report is based on speculative and reconstructed falsehoods, and we intend to take strong legal action against it.

The information in the report, including internal meeting minutes, job assignments, and personal KakaoTalk messages, could not have been covered without cooperation from HYBE and Source Music and the provision of false information.

Particularly, exposing personal information of trainees and artists who have already ended their contracts without permission, including medical records and demo data, is a severe crime and breach of confidentiality.

The trainee contracts between Source Music and NewJeans members have already ended, and the contracts did not permit the use of trainees’ likenesses or voices. Therefore, Source Music’s public release of trainee videos is a severe violation of NewJeans members’ portrait rights, and we request immediate action to protect our artists.

Furthermore, we condemn HYBE for providing personal messenger conversations obtained illegally and for Dispatch’s immoral behavior in disseminating false and edited information to defame the subsidiary’s CEO. We will pursue strong legal actions against such actions.

Contrary to the Dispatch report, the delay in the debut of the ‘N Team’ (NewJeans) was not due to Min Hee-jin’s negligence.

To correct the fabricated content, we are releasing an email from 2021.

The group in the CBO office’s PT data in this e-mail was called the “N team”/“21 team” in 2020, and the PT was created by Min Hee-jin, CEO of the CBO office at the time. The email was made when there were many differences in opinions on the concept of the new girl group, which was a three-way collaboration at the time.

The timeline is like this.
1) In March 2020, the Big Hit marketing team proposed a strategy for launching the ’21 Team’
→ However, CEO Min Hee-jin, who was the creative general manager at the time, judged that the direction of the content was not correct, so CEO Min Hee-jin prepared her own launching strategy separately
2) Announcement of Min Hee-jin’s launching strategy in May 2020 (Bang Si-hyuk, So Sung-jin, Source Music representative, etc. attended as it was a three-way joint venture)
→ Chairman Bang Si-hyuk: “Hee-jin’s PT plan is quite good, but it is unconventional” (We described it as it was expressed at the time.) It seems difficult to realize with Source Music’s infrastructure, so it would be better to proceed with Min Hee-jin’s own label
3) Source Music re-proposed a prior plan in August, 2020
→ It copied a large part of CEO Min Hee-jin’s launching strategy in May
→ Min complained to Source Music and it acknowledged the issue.

As in the e-mail, NewJeans’ launch strategy, which was difficult to implement at Source Music, was copied by Source Music and discussed again, and each company’s R&R discussion and production timeline were inevitably difficult to implement.

The CBO office at the time did not receive a reply to this email.

Instead of the squeezing data provided by HYBE who makes false claims, we disclose this official mail that everyone shared at the time as it is much more accurate to understand the context and decide disputes.

ADOR can prove more content with additional data such as Slack conversations or KakaoTalk conversations between people involved, but we believe it may be inappropriate to disclose personal conversations, so we only disclose e-mails first.

As such, we simply don’t understand why HYBE are making false and fabricated claims despite the fact that there are a lot of existing data and witnesses at the time, and the parents and members who have gone through it are also witnesses.”

It added, “CEO Min Hee-jin reset her laptop three years ago and returned it to HYBE. We strongly believe HYBE have forensically restored her personal conversations. This is a serious crime and illegal activity that corresponds to content detection, such as electronic records.

But HYBE is making an excuse that her KakaoTalk conversations were stored on her cloud server, saying it did not forensics. But this is even more serious. It constantly collects and stores personal conversations on her server, and even leaks them, which is a serious crime and illegal act, specifically a violation of the Communications Secret Protection Act and the Information and Communication Network Act.”

“For a transparent investigation, CEO Min Hee-jin asked the police to retrieve the laptop owned by HYBE and investigate it. However, HYBE has not submitted the data to the police, saying it is stored on the company’s server/cloud, not laptop forensics. Forensics without membership is also a felony, but having personal conversations stored on a company’s server is a bigger crime. Separately, if there is truly data on the server, it will have to faithfully respond to the police’s request for cooperation.

ADOR and NewJeans’ legal representatives are seriously angry and seeking action over the numerous unconventional media plays and responses that HYBE is currently committing.”