Actor Ji-soo has effectively halted domestic activities amid school violence allegations, and his former agency faces a situation in which it must compensate the drama production company he left 880 million won.
On the 13th, the Seoul High Court Civil Division 38-1 (Presiding Judges Jeong Gyeong-geun, Park Soon-young, Park Seong-yun) delivered a partial verdict in favor of the plaintiff in a damages suit filed by drama production company Victory Contents against Ji-soo's former agency KeyEast, ordering the agency to pay approximately 880 million won and delayed interest.
This amount is about 540 million won less than the 1.42 billion won in damages calculated by the first trial. Victory Contents originally filed a damages suit against KeyEast seeking 3 billion won for additional production costs due to reshooting after its contracted actor Ji-soo left the project.
The lawsuit between Victory Contents and KeyEast was triggered in 2021. In March 2021, when the drama River Where the Moon Rises produced by Victory Contents had aired up to episode 6 as a KBS 2TV Monday-Tuesday drama, allegations of school violence involving Ji-soo, then a KeyEast actor who played the male lead Ondal, emerged.
Ji-soo's side admitted to some of the wrongdoing at the time and he voluntarily left the production. At a time when preproductions were common, River Where the Moon Rises had completed filming up to episode 18 of a total of 20 episodes. As a result, Ji-soo's departure made reshooting unavoidable as well as the worst-case scenario of replacing the male lead midproduction.
Afterward, actor Na In-woo was brought in as Ji-soo's replacement, reshot the latter scenes first and completed the series through to the finale. The production team also reshot episodes 1 through 6, which had been pre-broadcast, with Na In-woo and later supplied them via OTT. Victory Contents therefore filed a claim for damages from KeyEast, Ji-soo's former agency, for the costs of reshooting.
Coincidentally, Ji-soo terminated his exclusive contract with KeyEast in May 2021, shortly after the controversy. Considering that Ji-soo had signed an exclusive contract with KeyEast only in the second half of 2020, it appears he quickly ended the contract due to the school violence controversy, breaking the customary management practice of typically proceeding on a one- or two-year basis.
Moreover, Ji-soo enlisted in the military in October of the same year. He underwent surgery for acute osteomyelitis in 2016 and served as a social service agent as a military alternative service due to his medical history. After leaving the military, he told a domestic news outlet in 2023 that there were unfair aspects to the past school violence controversy, but it did not gain much traction.
Recently, Ji-soo is known to have continued activities abroad, mainly in the Philippines. However, separate from that, legal battles stemming from his school violence controversy continue, leaving a bitter aftertaste.
[Photo] OSEN DB, provided by KBS.
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