Asian Junkie Asian pop. Without discretion.
Back to the Min Hee Jin and HYBE (and everybody else involved) legal mines, where details from the court’s ruling have been revealed, including evidence that caused 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 sided with her arguments and said the company 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 against her that emerged. They also said that while MHJ explored scenarios for ADOR‘s exit and ways 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. It’s relevant because money is always at the center of these cases and that makes it difficult to blame MHJ for any damages suffered anyway.
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Perhaps the messiest development from all this comes from MHJ’s criticism of HYBE being accepted by the court as legit, validating her right to opine about pressure to create a similar boy group to NJ, HYBE’s album pushing norm, and subsidiary plagiarism issues.
Specifically, the opinion of BTS’s V was cited and used as evidence in the case of ILLIT‘s similarity with NewJeans.
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, “Yeah, 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 or something, and he quickly downplayed taking sides on the issue and expressed regret about his privacy being violated.
“This was part of a private, everyday conversation I shared out of empathy because she was an acquaintance of mine.
I had absolutely no intention of taking either side.
However, I feel very taken aback 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. But also it’s court, the whole reason you want to avoid trial is because everybody involved will use anything at their disposal to win. That’s how it works if the lawyers are doing their jobs.
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Update
The possibility of HYBE leaking it has been brought up, and I gave my thoughts in a reply on social media:
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 their comeback anyway, IMO.
Guess we’ll see if she denies being the one to put it out to the media.
Update Again
After a follow-up press conference, her lawyer did effectively deny they had anything to do with the leak.
Question: “In the lawsuit related to the put option dispute, a conversation between BTS’s V and CEO Min Hee Jin was submitted as evidence. The contents were later leaked, sparking controversy.”
Attorney: “There is nothing for us to comment on. When the evidence was submitted, we requested that the court keep it private. We do not know through what route the sealed evidence was reported by the media. We believe this is an issue that should be addressed by the media outlet involved and the court.”
If HYBE did indeed do the leaking, that’s even more interesting, as it would essentially be them manipulating their own artist.
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There’s still so many legal decisions ahead involving these parties, and none of this seems to bode well for HYBE in the broader picture with regards to Min Hee Jin. This was always probable from the time of the injunction ruling, since courts tend to loathe overturning decisions, but the apparent extent of the legal grounds for her actions 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.
