T-ara’s Soyeon spoke out for the first time since the Hwayoung controversy broke out last month. On August 13, Chosun Ilbo released an exclusive video interview with the group’s leader where she shared her honest feelings about the entire Hwayoung controversy.
“We were really upset about our agency’s CEO and Hwayoung after this whole incident. But I’m sure Hwayoung is suffering as much as we are,” Soyeon said to start off the interview.
“We saw the video netizens put up as ‘evidence’ of us bullying Hwayoung. Watching the video, it made us think, ‘If you only saw this video, you would really think like that.’ It is true that the members got really mad at Hwayoung during the Tokyo concert. Hwayoung said she couldn’t do the concert because of her leg injury, but when we found out that she went to the beauty shop instead, the members really got upset. So after the concert, we told our CEO, ‘Please take care of this matter.’ That was the beginning of all the issues, but we didn’t know it would lead to Hwayoung’s departure,” she said.
She was asked if the members specifically asked for Hwayoung’s expulsion from the group, but she responded, “Never. We all found out after reading the news reports. We blamed the agency a lot. All we did was ask our agency to solve the problem. If Hwayoung were to get kicked out like that, we knew all the blame would be put on the members ourselves. But our CEO only said, ‘Let’s solve it this way for Hwayoung.’ We were really upset.”
When asked to address member discord and hazing of Hwayoung, she said, “We have 7 to 8 girls in their late teens and early 20s living together. Each one of us wants to be liked and have the desire to get more attention. So it would be a lie to say there’s no discord. But we fight, solve issues, and become friends again. The Hwayoung controversy was the same type of problem. If you’re asking if we had bad relationships just based on that, then everyone would say we were on bad terms.”
As the interview went on, Soyeon started to shed tears and get emotional over the whole matter. She ended the interview saying, “I thought I got really strong over the last three years since my debut. But after experiencing this whole Hwayoung controversy, I realized I still have a long way to go to grow up.”
You can watch the full video clip below!
