[HanCinema's News] U-Know Unknown to Be Victim Or Perpetrator of Gaslighting

Among the many accusations leveled against Seo Yea-ji over the past week, the claim that she had a romantic relationship with her "The Night Watchman's Journal" co-star U-Know and that the two united to make staff for that drama miserable would seem to be one of the more explosive ones. Yet U-Know's agency has been quiet on the matter, with most publications ignoring the story following its initial release. Ultimately, ambiguity regarding U-Know's actual culpability has put the story on the backburner.

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Part of this is due to the seeming similarity between U-Know's behavior on the set of "The Night Watchman's Journal" and Kim Jung-hyun's behavior on "Time - Drama" in 2018. In both cases, the actors became hostile to the idea of being touched. But where Kim Jung-hyun only expressed this annoyance regarding co-stars, U-Know expressed it to the makeup crew. This made it quite difficult for them to do their job.

The implied motive in both cases was Seo Yea-ji's jealousy, which she has denied with Kim Jung-hyun and not addressed with U-Know which in part explains the latter's silence. There is no need for him to explain or justify his actions if Seo Yea-ji is also not addressing them. Additionally, no concrete proof has been offered that Seo Yea-ji and U-Know were ever in a relationship, let alone abused staff. With Kim Jung-hyun, there were texts and both actors acknowledged the secret relationship.

The final reason why this apparent scandal hasn't been more of an issue for U-Know is that he simply isn't in the right media sphere for it to matter to his career right now. U-Know's last acting project was "Melo Holic" back in 2017. Since then he has focused on his musical career. While drama fans and K-pop fans have some overlap, a complete absence of any improper behavior from U-Know in the better known part of his fandom makes it more difficult to maintain outrage against him.

Written by William Schwartz