Asian Junkie Asian pop. Without discretion.
Back to the Min Hee Jin and HYBE mines, where details from the court’s ruling are being revealed, including evidence and a mess involving BTS‘s V that he already had to try and clean up.
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So as we know by now, Min Hee Jin won her stock options case against HYBE, where the court basically sided with her and said they couldn’t invalidate her contract.
The details of the ruling are essentially that HYBE was responsible for breaking trust between the pair first because the issue was internal from Min Hee Jin’s side until HYBE went public about the audit on April 22 and proceeded to drop hit pieces on her through the media. They say that HYBE demanding her resignation as CEO and beginning the dismissal procedure at the same time the audit was announced showed clear public escalation.
So because of that, the court ruled that her subsequent viral press conference — where shit truly hit the fan — was a legitimate forum to address and rebut the claims. They also said that while MHJ explored scenarios for ADOR’s exit and tried to take NewJeans, they were all conditional on HYBE’s consent and weren’t/couldn’t be executed. Effectively, she could talk all she wanted but the exit strategy was pure fantasy until HYBE made it possible by going public.
Perhaps just as important is that the courts noted that HYBE’s financial loss on the stock market was caused by the dispute going public, which again, they ruled was initiated by HYBE and makes it difficult to blame MHJ for any damages.
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Perhaps the messiest development from this comes regarding her criticism of HYBE being accepted by the court, validating her opinions about pressures to create a similar boy group, album pushing, and subsidiary plagiarism issues.
Specifically, the opinion of BTS’s V was cited and used as evidence in the case of similarity with ILLIT.
In reaching this decision, the court accepted evidence submitted by Min Hee Jin’s side of KakaoTalk messages exchanged between her and BTS’s V. In the submitted messages, V stated in response to the suspicions of ILLIT plagiarizing NewJeans, “Ae-ing, I get it. I saw them and thought.. They are kind of similar.”
Soon after that was revealed, the black vans from HYBE surely pulled up at V’s residence, and he quickly downplayed taking sides on the issue and regretted his privacy being violated.
Because she was an acquaintance of mine, I was sharing empathy, and it was part of a private, everyday conversation. I have no intention of taking sides. However, I am deeply disturbed that this conversation was submitted as evidence without my consent.
HYBE later echoed a near identical sentiment in a statement as well.
I mean, yeah, Min Hee Jin seems like exactly the type of person to use others for her own gain and nothing else. But also it’s court, the whole reason you want to avoid trial is because people will use anything at their disposal to win.
Update: My thoughts on HYBE leaking it. I guess?
Think the assumption that everybody is logically playing 4D chess and carefully weighing every decision is faulty. Throughout the case a bunch of PR and legal missteps have been made just for the sake of being petty. Media incentives are most straightforward, tbh. We'll see?
— Asian Junkie (@asianjunkiecom) February 20, 2026
Also, their stans will hate her guts no matter what, and BTS members being privately sympathetic to her doesn’t move the needle on a comeback, IMO.
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And on that note, since there’s still so many legal decisions ahead, none of this seems to bode well for HYBE. This was always probable from the time of the injunction ruling since courts tend to loathe overturning decisions, but the apparent extent of her legal grounds in this victory makes it seem even more unlikely the future will be much different.
As others have pointed out in the comments, the theme with this case and NewJeans’ case is that contracts are contracts and courts want it to take a lot to break them. After a brief period a few years ago where it seemed like contracts were weakening, the courts/industry/powers-that-be seem to have changed direction, lest those rulings have knock-on effects that could threaten the industry at large.
