Baek Ji Young Sex Tape

Who? South Korean pop singer (aka Baek Ji-Yeong).

Real? The tape exists, it really shows Baek Ji Young, and it circulates widely.

Baek Ji Young became a major Korean pop star in 1999-2000 with the albums Sorrow and Rouge and the hit single “Choice”. She was one of the first Korean pop stars to incorporate Latin rhythms.

The Baek Ji Young sex tape leaked in November 2000. It showed her having sex with her manager, Kim Si Won, who shot the video without Baek Ji Young’s knowledge in October 1998. An excellent Time Asia article covered the scandal and aftermath.

[...] a raunchy videotape of Baek in a bedroom romp with her former manager turned up on an Internet pay-per-view porn site on Nov. 19. Radio stations scrambled to pull her songs off the air and television stations canceled appearances. The shoe company put its Baek ads on hold. If the singer follows Korea’s unspoken rule for disgraced celebrities, especially women, she will quietly walk off stage with her head bowed.

[...] At a press conference held Nov. 29, she cried uncontrollably and apologized for arousing public criticism. Then she got feisty, denouncing her former manager and denying she knew he had the camera rolling. Instead of playing the role of the fallen woman, the singer made it clear she sees herself as the victim in this drama. Said Baek: “I decided to come forward to tell the truth to prevent other women from becoming victims like me.”

That spunky attitude has turned the young entertainer into an unlikely cause célèbre for South Korea’s growing women’s rights movement. [...]

The male star in this saga certainly is not facing much heat so far. Baek’s former manager, Kim Si Won, phoned a live entertainment program on SBS to say the video was genuine and that he was the guy in it (throughout the 25-minute clip, he repeatedly pulls down the sheets to make sure the camera gets a clear shot of Baek). Claiming he had planned to marry her, he said he shot the footage in his office in October 1998. He did not say why. He concedes Baek may not have known that he was filming their tryst. He told SBS viewers he had not put the graphic footage onto the Net. But he failed to explain who did, and prosecutors are still seeking the culprit.

Kim’s appearance on the show turned Korea’s Pamela-and-Tommy tape into a must-see item. A student at a high-technology institute soon hacked the security code at the pay-per-view site where the video first turned up. In a matter of days, the footage was posted on private home pages and shareware sites and Koreans were downloading hundreds of thousands of copies.

The Baek Ji Young sex tape starts with several minutes of footage in which Baek is fully clothed and aware of Kim holding the camera. The sex portion is filmed from a stationary position with low lighting, making it plausible that the camera was hidden or not obviously turned on. Kim repeatedly clears the bedsheets to make the sex more visible to the camera. There’s a long version running 39 minutes, but the tape more commonly circulates in a 9-minute excerpt.