Belift Lab denies plagiarism and mistreatment by ILLIT of NewJeans

After the South Korean portal Ilgan Sports (via Koreaboo), released this Monday, the 7th, an interview with the mothers of the NewJeans members, where the matriarchs accuse HYBE of having deleted the security camera images where they captured the incident exposed by Hannia member of the girl group, in which she says she was disrespected by the staff of another group within the conglomerate, Belift Lab spoke out on the matter.

It is worth remembering that, at the beginning of September, the South Korean outlet Hankook Kyungjae reported that HYBE had confirmed that the group involved in the event would be ILLIT, a formation of Belift Lab, in a short statement where they inform that, after analyzing the cameras of security, it was found that the girl group members and Hanni they greeted each other, but that the manager had not made the alleged statement.

Now, in the new statement, the company once again denies that the ILLIT manager had instructed the members to ignore Hanniasking the artist and her agency, ADOR, to apologize for the inconvenience. Check out the full statement:

“Hello, this is Belift Lab.

We are revealing our position on the Ilgan Sports article published on October 7th. We are asking them to stop making these allegations, including ridiculous accusations of plagiarism, of which there is no evidence that ever occurred.

ILLIT’s manager Koo Sung Won never instructed the members to ignore NewJeans. The ILLIT members also never ignored the NewJeans member.

This is proven by an investigation that was carried out on June 13 at the behest of the NewJeans parents. The groups were only in the same space on May 27th for 5 minutes and we have footage of the ILLIT member bowing to the NewJeans member at 90 degrees.

On August 14, when we reviewed the video with former CEO Min Hee Jin’s team, they claimed that the lack of greetings occurred after the scene, suggesting that there could be another video. However, according to the security company, this claim is problematic because the 30-day video retention period had already expired, making it impossible to secure any additional footage. The former CEO’s side alleges that HYBE intentionally deleted the video. Our protocol team always uses respectful language and titles when interacting with artists, so the very notion that they would say ‘ignore’ is not consistent with objective facts. Although they claim that ‘the video where they said ‘ignore’ has been deleted’, this claim cannot be supported as CCTV [imagens de câmera de segurança] does not record audio. From the moment this issue was raised, we have emphasized the importance of behaving courteously toward artists on other labels and have sincerely committed to the investigation. However, despite providing all requested explanations, new allegations that cannot be proven are being introduced, raising suspicions as to whether there are ulterior motives behind it, especially now that this unverified matter is being discussed in a national assembly audit. To protect our employees, who are inherently in a weaker position compared to famous artists, we refrain from commenting on this matter. However, as attempts continue to solidify false narratives as truth, the affected employee is suffering extreme injustice and mental distress. By bringing an issue that should remain in the goodwill domain of personal issues between record labels into the public arena, it is the vulnerable protocol employee who is truly suffering. After raising this issue, we have already sent two responses and official positions to ADOR in August and September. Despite our demands for the allegations to stop, a NewJeans member raised this issue on a live broadcast, which led us to request an apology from that member and the record label ADOR, but we have not yet received a response. We clearly state that if this issue continues to harm the honor of our company, artists and staff, we will explore all possible means to resolve it.”