Cheska (ex-FIESTAR) opens up about her nightmare experience as a K-pop idol

In the past, former Fiestar member Cheska has been hesitant at times to talk about her time in K-pop in detail. She’s mentioned her issues before on social media, but not in depth. Well, she recently held a couple live streams on her Twitch channel and answered fan questions about her time in the K-pop industry.

I didn’t watch eight hours of video to parse every single detail, but generally speaking from what I have watched, the recaps of it here and here (respectively) are at least relatively accurate.

To even more broadly summarize the videos, Cheska speaks about not getting along in FIESTAR (calling out everybody but Linzy), talks about how her experience as an idol made her suicidal, talks about her company forcing her to get plastic surgery, talks about company contracts (and that all companies are shit), talks about being raped when she first got to Korea, and sexual abuse in the industry. (Also talks about beating her kid if they wanted to be an idol, but I’m gonna give the benefit of the doubt and assume that was for emphasis rather than literal.) All in all, it’s definitely worth a watch if you have the time.

Well, I mean it’s actually all quite terrible, but it provides insight from somebody who is actually willing to discuss the seedier sides of things unfiltered. So yeah, if you’ve read this site, then I don’t think you have the rose-colored glasses on about K-pop at this point and I definitely believe the general gist of everything she says.

On the specific topic of the idols she names, in fairness I do think it should be mentioned some of that is hearsay (since people are running with it as fact) and despite what she says it isn’t shocking that she rubbed some people the wrong way (like when she watches a video by ex-BLADY member Tina). Normally I’d say we should wait to see how they respond, but that’s probably not going to happen, so everybody’s gonna have to make up their own minds, I suppose.

Regardless, I think former idols opening up without a filter cause they have little to no interest in keeping up appearances for K-pop fans is valuable to give a more honest look at the shittier things going on in that world. And even though it’s not a lot different from what most around here have already assumed for a while, it’s a nice reminder to get every now and then about how the product we consume tends to be made.

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